TO WATCH: Goalpost Moving on Transition Regret?

Sep 30

via the Daily Signal, a right wing news website funded by the Heritage Foundation.

Psychiatrist and conversion therapist Dr. Miriam Grossman on the Daily Signal Podcast is drastically moving the goalposts for when trans people can be considered to have successfully transitioned. In the screenshot below, she explains her belief that it can take 8 to 10 YEARS to start experiencing regret, and even implies the process of coming out and publically detransitioning may add further years on top of that.

We now know that regret with undergoing medical and surgical transition takes a long time. It can take up to eight or 10 years to experience that regret

Dr. Grossman does not mention that studies of regret in transgender people have quite consistently found rates of regret below 5 percent, with many studies finding rates below 1 percent. The unusually low regret for gender confirming surgeries can be contrasted with cosmetic procedures whose regret often comes in at around 30 percent.

Grossman’s belief that it takes 8 to 10 years for regret to manifest has no basis in the medical data, but it does have the effect of removing legitimacy from trans people even a decade or more after they’ve happily transitioned. In Grossman’s view, no number of years post-transition is enough to convince her that a trans person is who they say they are and has no regrets about the medical treatments accessed to improve their quality of life.

Miriam Grossmantransgenderdetransitiontransition regretconversion therapy