Dr. Debra Soh on gender: what the evidence says · JRE #1147
SUBJECT: GENDER
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
And so if we look at something like I was saying earlier about if it's a little boy who says he's a girl, he's likely going to grow up to be a gay man. You can't say that now. And so all of the scientific research suggests that, all the studies ever done suggest that.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Older "desistance" follow-up studies of clinic-referred gender-nonconforming boys, including a 2021 study of 139 boys assessed between 1975 and 2009, found that about 88 percent no longer met criteria for gender dysphoria by young adulthood, and among those with data, roughly 47 to 64 percent reported same-sex or bisexual attraction or behavior rather than persisting as transgender. These figures are the empirical basis for claims like Soh's. However, "all the studies ever done" overstates the state of the evidence: the cited study itself cautions that its boys were assessed under an older treatment era, before pre-pubertal social transition or puberty blockers were standard practice, and that its findings reflect one snapshot in time rather than settled adult outcomes. A 2022 systematic literature review of the desistance research found the underlying quantitative studies were uniformly poor quality and concluded the concept of "desistance" should no longer be used in clinical work or research. The evidence is therefore mixed: some historical studies do show elevated rates of later same-sex attraction among gender-nonconforming boys, but this is not the settled, universal scientific consensus Soh describes, and the methodology of the underlying research has been widely disputed by subsequent scholarship.