Most Transgender Kids Don’t Stay Transgender

From PsyPost, an account of how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation cancelled, under pressure from activists, a documentary with some politically incorrect truths about kids who think they are a gender other than their birth gender.

The National Post recently covered the CBC’s cancellation of a BBC documentary about transgender children (Why CBC cancelled a BBC documentary that activists claimed was ‘transphobic’). In that coverage, the Post shared claims made by some activists criticizing some scientific studies, but did not apparently fact-check those claims, so I thought I would outline the studies here. For reference, in a previous post, I listed the results of every study that ever followed up transgender kids to see how they felt in adulthood (Do trans- kids stay trans- when they grow up?). There are 12 such studies in all, and they all came to the very same conclusion: The majority of kids cease to feel transgender when they get older.

The author, James M. Cantor, then discusses and rebuts the criticisms of some of the studies that show transgender kids “desisting” — eventually deciding they are not transgender and want to remain their birth gender. He concludes:

The state of the science is made clear simply by listing the results of the studies on the topic. Despite coming from a variety of countries and from a variety of labs, using a variety of methods, all spanning four decades, every single study without exception has come to the identical conclusion. This is not a matter of scientists disagreeing with one another over relative strengths and weaknesses across a set of conflicting reports. The disagreement is not even some people advocating for one set of studies with other people advocating for different set of studies: Rather, activists are rejecting the unanimous conclusion of every single study ever conducted on the question in favour of a conclusion supported by not one.

Importantly, these results should not be exaggerated in the other direction either: The correct answer is neither 0% nor 100%. Although the majority of transgender kids desist, it is not a large majority. A very substantial proportion do indeed want to transition as they get older, and we need to ensure they receive the support they will need. Despite loud, confident protestations of extremists, the science shows very clearly and very consistently that we cannot take either outcome for granted.

So why is this controversial? Because a misguided notion of “tolerance” may cause some liberal parents (and other adults) to immediately accept a kid’s claim that he or she feels like a different gender, and even authorize a “transition.” To be skeptical of the kid’s opinion is viewed as “transphobic.”

Planned Parenthood, of course, is fully on board with the politically correct view:

Gender identity — including transgender and gender nonconforming identities — are cemented early in elementary school. Not everyone who defies traditional gender roles is transgender. For example, lots of girls hate dresses. But your kid figures out what their gender is really early on — and they’ll usually tell you. So in preschool and in early elementary school, trans kids are starting to realize that they’re not the gender everyone said they were when they were born. They may want to be treated like a different gender.

But the science says that what kids believe about their gender may or may not persist into adulthood.

A columnist in the (left-leaning) New Statesman discusses the harm possible by being too “gender affirming.”

The costs of putting a child on the wrong path can be huge. We hear a lot about the dangers of suicide for trans children who don’t receive affirming treatment (although [Ken] Zucker points out that his research has found suicidality among trans children is no higher than among children with depression, anxiety or ADHD), but inappropriate affirmation is no less damaging. A young woman called Lou, who started hormone treatment and had a double mastectomy before realising she didn’t want to be a man, tells the documentary that she now feels “grotesque.” The female body that had horrified her so much during puberty now seems normal to her. The flat-chested, bearded self she has now appears to her as grotesque.

The problem, of course, is identity politics. Politically correct liberals and leftists reflexively side with any “marginalized group,” and this involves always accepting any claims made by or (more frequently) on behalf of that group. Saying to kids “you might be wrong in thinking you are not your birth gender” or even “chill, and see how you feel in a year or five or when you are 18” is not politically correct.

“Affirming” a gender notion that might turn out to be false is child abuse. On the other hand, draconian demands that the child conform to normal gender behavior are likely to be harmful or counterproductive. Messing with the endocrine system (hormone therapy) or sex reassignment surgery should be reserved for adults who are confident about their gender preference.

Palestinian TV: Teaching Kids to Kill Jews

New Study: Gay Parenting Not Good For Kids

It’s been a matter of politically correct dogma: kids of gay and lesbian parents do just was well as kids of straight married couples. So anybody with any reservations about gays having children must be some sort of evil homophobe.

But now comes a scholarly study (in Review of Economics of the Household) that shows that kids with gay and lesbian parents are at a disadvantage.

But first, note that the politically correct orthodoxy has been driven by bad social science. How good are the studies that purport to show that gay parenting is just fine? The author of the current study comments:

Unfortunately, the literature on child development in same-sex households is lacking on several grounds. First, the research is characterized by levels of advocacy, policy endorsement, and awareness of political consequences, that is disproportionate with the strength and substance of the preliminary empirical findings. Second, the literature generally utilizes measures of child and family performance that are not easily verifiable by third party replication, which vary from one study to another in ways that make comparisons difficult, and which differ substantially from measures standardly used in other family studies. But most important, almost all of the literature on same-sex parenting (which almost always means lesbian parenting) is based on some combination of weak empirical designs, small biased convenience samples, “snowballing,” and low powered tests.

The typical sample, in other words, is very small. And it typically consists of people who volunteered to be in the sample, approached through a gay community center, gay discussion board on the web, or some such.

Which leads us to a dirty little secret of the social sciences. Social scientists often study a particular issue because they have strong political opinions about the issue. Studying the gay family, in other words, has been a little cottage industry engaged in by academics who want to promote a gay political agenda. Strict canons of social science methodology, and peer review, should mitigate personal bias. But where the methodology is sloppy (as it is here) and the people doing the peer review are part of the same little cottage industry, there is little check on an ideological agenda.

The author of the new study uses a sample from the Canadian census. It is a very large “probability sample” known to be an unbiased representation of the entire Canadian population. That makes it better than any study done so far.

What does it find?

From the abstract of the article:

Here, a 20 % sample of the 2006 Canada census is used to identify self-reported children living with same-sex parents, and to examine the association of household type with children’s high school graduation rates. This large random sample allows for control of parental marital status, distinguishes between gay and lesbian families, and is large enough to evaluate differences in gender between parents and children. Children living with gay and lesbian families in 2006 were about 65 % as likely to graduate compared to children living in opposite sex marriage families. Daughters of same-sex parents do considerably worse than sons.

These results, we might add, hold up in the presence of an impressive array of statistical controls.

Of course, any statistical results can be interpreted in different ways. As the author notes of gay parent households:

. . . avenues through which these households are formed are many and complicated. . . these families often have experienced a prior divorce, previous heterosexual marriages, intentional pregnancies, co-parenting, donor insemination, adoption, and surragacy.

So it’s always possible to argue that something correlated with gay parenting, and not gay parenting itself, harms children’s chances.

And the author further observes:

An economist may be inclined to think that fathers and mothers are not perfect substitutes and that there must be some gains from a sexual division of labor in parenting. Others may suspect that children of same-sex parents are more likely to be harassed at school, and therefore, less likely to graduate. In any event, it is time to investigate the difference and reject the conventional wisdom of “no difference.”

But rejecting conventional wisdom that it so deeply ingrained in the rather narrow, politically correct worlds of academia, the educational establishment and the elite media is not easy. Especially when anybody who breathes the slightest word of dissent is going to be demonized, attacked, bullied and harassed.