The Trump Administration wants to study "transition regret." What does that actually mean?
Last week, Max Koslov of Nature’s news team broke the news that the Trump administration has directed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the “regret” associated with medical transition. NIH leadership was informed that this area of study is “very important” to President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
It is common for new administration to have priorities for research funding, such as the Biden-Harris administration’s blueprint to improve maternal mortality. Yet, the specificity of Trump’s command, to study a non-life threatening (and rare) outcome associated with a specific medical approach, is highly unusual.
Essentially, it is the scientific equivalent of confirmation bias. By posing the scientific question themselves, the administration is narrowing the scope of inquiry into trans health. In the long-term, this will create a myopic information environment in which the positive effects of gender affirming care are drowned out by the narrow scope of Trump-sanctioned research.
But, the administration is not interested in the benefits of gender affirming medical care because they have systematically terminated nearly every grant which funded good faith inquiries into the health of trans people.
Consider the $1.9 million terminated from a grant to study the effects of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) on brain development in trans adolescents. This study may have yielded critical insights on the best practices for HRT in trans adolescents, but the administration has thrown the future of this research in doubt by pulling funding. What are they afraid of?
Probably the fact that rates of regret after transition are low. According to the 2022 US Transgender Survey, lower life satisfaction after transition was reported by only 3% of respondents (total respondents: 92,329). Estimates of regret are even lower (~1%) following gender affirming surgery. Any good faith exploration of trans “regret” must first acknowledge these realities.
This is, of course, not to minimize the experiences of those who do regret their transition and ultimately “detransition.” They, too, have bodily autonomy and are entitled to stop affirming care if it is not right for them. We all deserve to feel at peace in our bodies, regardless of whether medical intervention is helpful in achieving that end.
Transfeminist social science suggests that there are three broad “types” of detransition: stopping affirming care but retaining a trans identity, reidentifying with one’s sex assigned at birth, and stopping affirming care due to a negative experience. Of these three outcomes, the last one is most closely linked to “regret” as used by anti-trans right-wing personalities.
Indeed, exploring the narratives of those who have detransitioned reveals a varied landscape of motivations. For many, decisions to stop or reverse a transition are the result of an internal discernment process with the ultimate conclusion that one’s non-medicalized bodymind is ideal for them. That self-knowledge is extraordinarily valuable.
Given that this self-knowledge is by definition personal, the existence of detransitioners does not negate the lived experience of trans folx whose lives are enhanced by transition (social and/or medical). The path of self-discernment is winding and cannot be dictated by external forces. Everyone deserves support on this journey, including if/when someone changes their mind.
A critical practice in the Western science in which I have trained is the generation of hypotheses that can be tested and, ultimately, refuted. The process is quite humbling because often our hypotheses are wrong. Holding onto an incorrect hypothesis in the face of data that clearly refutes it is simply foolish. However, some people in science (predominately cis men, in my experience) refuse to be humbled because of their delusions of grandeur.
Trump and Kennedy are two such men. They are presenting researchers with an irrefutable hypothesis around transition regret. If a researcher takes on this task and accurately reports on the experiences of trans-identifying people, they will immediately lose their funding for attempting to refute a pillar of this delusional regime.
To reiterate, the vast majority of people who have ever identified as trans do not regret their decision. If we assembled a group of 10,000 Americans, 100 people would identify as trans (1% of the total group). Of those, 97 people would see enhanced life satisfaction following their transition. The remaining 3 people would stop or reverse their transition. Likely, only 1 of those 3 would experience true regret for exploring a trans identity.
Any rigorous scientific study into transition-related regret must first start by acknowledging these basic facts. Omitting them is blatant intellectual bias and laziness. With the president-mandated NIH research agenda, the Trump regime and the researchers who will cozy up to them will likely fall into the biased and lazy category of thinkers.
These craven researchers will be happy to take the NIH grant money to be a mouthpiece of the regime. They will trump up some wildly incorrect data which the administration will probably use to justify further restrictions on transition-related care. They have already targeted trans adolescents’ access to this care, and their eventual goal is to ban access for all trans folx. Distorting the information landscape is key to this plan, and that is the ultimate goal of this anti-science edict.
This represents a new tactic in the Trump administration’s attempts to censor science. First, they banned gender-inclusive terminology. Then, they terminated NIH grants studying trans health. Now, they are dictating irrefutable anti-trans hypotheses in search of false data to justify additional cruelty. Soon, they will be releasing a junk science “review” of affirming care. These actions are fundamentally transphobic and anti-science, and they must not succeed.
This is trans genocide. They're only funding the "study" of regret so they could make more trans people like us "regret" our transitions, that is, force us to detransition, or if we refuse to do so, death.
In other words, literal death before detransition.
Thanks for reporting on this. It does seem like they are hoping to study how to get trans people to stop being visibly trans, rather than any medical investigation. I mean, picking this very niche topic of interest feels like a distraction from the fact they don't want to support anyone who is disabled and could benefit from actual medical advances.