Jordan Peterson on gender: what the evidence says · JRE #1769
SUBJECT: GENDER
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
if you look at teenagers, for example, who want to switch genders, 95% of them are unbearably confused.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
No peer-reviewed clinical study establishes that 95% of teenagers who want to transition are 'confused' rather than experiencing genuine gender dysphoria; no such 'confusion rate' statistic exists in the published literature. The frequently cited research on desistance, notably Steensma et al. (2013) in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, examined pre-pubertal children referred to gender clinics, not teenagers, and measured whether childhood gender dysphoria persisted into adolescence, not a rate of 'confusion.' That study found gender dysphoria intensity in childhood was the strongest predictor of persistence, with figures varying widely across studies depending on diagnostic criteria and cohort, but none of the desistance literature reports a 95% figure for confusion among adolescents who currently want to switch genders. Peterson's 95% figure does not correspond to any identifiable dataset and appears to be his own estimate rather than a documented clinical finding. The claim is unsupported by available evidence.