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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

> This is a contradiction in terms. Supporting trans people means believing that transition is not some sort of "regrettable outcome".

No one is saying transition is a "regrettable outcome".

What people are saying is that some people may think they are trans and then change their minds later. In these cases a watchful-waiting approach is better because it may allow the person to avoid life-altering decisions like surgery or hormone replacement. This is not a hypothetical, there are recorded examples of young adults who, having undergone these therapies, came to regret it later.

> You are the company you keep.

If we extend this logic (which we should under no circumstances do) we could say that Aimee Challenor is guilty of the rape and torture of a 10 year old child.

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> No one is saying transition is a "regrettable outcome".

Actually a lot of people say that, cf rhetoric about "a lifetime of hormones and surgery". As someone who has had surgeries and expects to be on hormones for the rest of their life, I think what I did to my body was good, not bad.

You are universalizing your lived experience. This invalidates the lived experiences of other people, who differ from you.

Ironically, misapplication of moral universalizing is what leads people to be bigoted against trans people in the first place.

You are still incorrect about no one calling transition a regrettable outcome.

When they say:

> No one is saying transition is a "regrettable outcome".

It's safe to assume it's meant in the context of the ongoing thread. Not as in "No on in the world is ever saying that", but "No one here has said such thing". It's better to direct your arguments to an individual in the thread, not an official representative of the collective internet.

But wouldn't the experiences of an actual trans person be much more relevant to this discussion than our cis asses?

We're never going to have experiences of our own that can inform our judgement on this, so shouldn't we just listen to and trust trans people to work out how to best to make their way in the world?

More relevant than the experience of a single cis person? Quite possible. More relevant than actual hard data reflecting the collective experiences of a large plurality of trans folk, with relevant variation in such factors as e.g. age and social milieus? No way.

An important example of where debate and information can be foreclosed upon is that /r/detrans, a vital support community for detransitioners, has been temporarily banned in the past by overzealous admins, and the mods had to appeal and institute much stricter moderation than most subs have to be able to get it back up.

> No one is saying transition is a "regrettable outcome".

Please for the love of christ just spend 10 minutes reading some of the gender critical arguments before trying to represent them here, because you're saying stuff that is 1) untrue and 2) very obviously untrue to anyone who's given even cursory attention to what these people are saying.

Transition currently has very low rates of regret; lower than many other forms of surgery. Hip replacement has higher rates of regret and there's not a mainstream movement trying to prevent access to that.

You interpreted my post as a bizarre absolute. I meant "no one here," not "no one period".

Either way, your post is nit-picking. My point was that being against affirmation in all cases is simple not the same thing as viewing all transitions as a "regrettable outcome".

> Transition currently has very low rates of regret; lower than many other forms of surgery. Hip replacement has higher rates of regret and there's not a mainstream movement trying to prevent access to that.

Wonderful. But hip replacement is not elective surgery based on the subjective feelings of the patient. As long as one person regrets it, it is my opinion that we should prefer a watchful-waiting approach and I can say that without "failing to support trans people".

Something like less than 1% of trans people regret transition, and of those half of them regret it because of social costs, i.e., bigotry from transphobes, and another big chunk regret that they transitioned as binary when they were in fact non-binary or vice versa. Fundamental to your argument is the idea that we should not trust trans people about their lives or their feelings. It’s bigotry.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, your argument is disingenuous, unscientific, gaslighting propaganda pushed by bigots, and it has the direct result of harming trans people.

> Something like less than 1% of trans people regret transition

Sure, but most of the contention by far is around kids and teenagers who are kinda sorta thinking that this "trans" thing they keep hearing about in their social milieu might perhaps apply to them, and statistics align with the (eminently reasonable) expectation of higher regret rates in that restricted subgroup. It's not a simple problem, there are very real issues involved.

> something like less than 1%

Could you ping me to where you see those numbers? I know data is tough to come by but the sorts of numbers I see, as someone who doesn’t follow this topic closely, are much higher:

> Such “desistance” appears to be common. At least half a dozen medical studies show that between 61% and 98% of children presenting with gender-related distress were reconciled to their natal sex before adulthood. However, all these studies looked at children with early-onset dysphoria.

https://www.economist.com/international/2020/12/12/an-englis...

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