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 you'd see all this coverage of young kids who had transitioned to the opposite sex. And their parents were elated. The kids were doing so well, apparently. But from a scientific perspective, that's not what the research shows. As I said, most kids will outgrow their feelings.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Soh's claim reflects a set of older longitudinal "desistance" studies (e.g., Wallien & Cohen-Kettenis, 2008) reporting that a majority of children referred for childhood gender dysphoria no longer identified as trans by adolescence; in that study of 77 children, only 27% were classified as persisting and 43% as desisted, while 30% of the original sample were lost to follow-up or did not respond, a group some critics say was effectively folded into the widely cited approximately 80% "desistance" figure rather than excluded. A 2018 peer-reviewed review confirms the ~80% desistance figure derives from a set of about 10 prospective childhood follow-up studies, but also notes this research base says little about adolescent-onset gender dysphoria, which is common in current treatment-seeking samples and may follow a different course. More recent prospective research applying stricter DSM-5 diagnostic criteria to adolescents finds substantially higher persistence: a 2013-2018 Australian cohort study found that among 66 followed youth formally diagnosed with gender dysphoria, 90.9% had persisted on a transgender-affirming pathway at 4-9 year follow-up. Status: mixed/outdated -- the "most kids outgrow it" claim derives from real but methodologically contested older studies of childhood-onset cases, and does not match persistence rates found in more rigorously diagnosed, largely adolescent-referred recent cohorts.