The youth desistance myth
Anti-transgender activists who attack health care for trans kids love to question the stability of the gender identities of children. The main message is that (1) the kids have no idea what they are talking about, (2) they are influenced by "the transgender cult" and misguided parents and (3) most of the children become cis (non-transgender) in the end.
This is all very strange, given the kind of harassment trans and queer youth face when coming out. If this was all a propaganda-fueled whim, why do their transgender identities persist over so many years?
What about the research documenting that most of them become cis in the end? We hear numbers from 65 to 95 percent, right?
Well, it turns out that those researchers did not study gender dysphoric transgender kids who identified as another gender (compared to the one assigned to them at birth). Instead they looked at kids who expressed any kind of gender variance (as in expressing untypical gendered behavior), which is obviously not the same.
More about that here and here.
As for trans kids following fashions or the transgender ideologies of parents: We have heard this before, right: "Gay parents raise gay kids!" Right wing extremists and leftist TERFs talk about "grooming." It doesn't work that way. Most gay and trans kids have cis/straight parents. In fact, most parents of trans kids go through periods of denial and resistance.
New research shows that 94 percent stick with their trans identity
So the persistence and intensity of the gender identities of transgender kids are clearly based in something more stable and fundamental than transgender propaganda. But do we have the science to back that up?
