Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
I get the feeling you’re personally offended by this, and if so, I’ll apologize as it was never my intention.
The above statement is just an observation myself and colleagues I’ve shared my concerns with did. It might be a coincidence, but nearly all our transitioned patients had a prior diagnosis for autism, and without exception all had psychiatric comorbidities.
This also seems to be in line with the (scarce) literature on the subject. (I.e. 1 2)
I hope I’m wrong and my patients are just exceptions, and that we won’t look back at these years with regret.
I’m not personally offended, don’t worry. I’m not part of the LGBT community myself, back when I was studying I looked into the literature around transition and the perceived hot controversy on the issue. You’ve touched on an important issue, which is that a large percentage of people who will end up transitioning have a lot of stressors which will end up severely impacting their mental health, not just the innate stress from gender dysphoria, but the lack of support from friends and family, ostracization, etc.
This helps explain the psychiatric comorbidities, like depressive and anxiety disorders.
It seems to me that the current medical pathway for trans patients is robust, and should weed out the odd patient with transient dysphoria or patients which have serious psychiatric issues that mistakenly led them down this path.
For those that go down the path, regret rates seem to always be between 1 and 2 per cent. At this point, we can accept these rates as statistically accurate, when we have data from thousands of individuals.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01605-w#Abs1
https://journals.lww.com/prsgo/fulltext/2021/03000/regret_after_gender_affirmation_surgery__a.22.aspx