The Zombie Study Behind the ‘1% Regret’ Myth for ‘Gender-Affirming’ Surgery

Moreover, many of the studies included in the Bustos review suffered from extraordinarily high loss to follow-up—some exceeding 40 percent! This should be a glaring red flag, since it stands to reason that the very individuals most likely to regret their surgeries might be the ones least likely to return to the same medical providers who facilitated their transition. Many detransitioners report feeling harmed, betrayed, or even traumatized by the gender medicine industry, and therefore want nothing more to do with it. As a result, they vanish from the follow-up pool entirely. Their absence from post-operative data does not mean they are happy—it means they’re gone. If anything, high attrition should lead researchers to assume that regret is being undercounted, not that it is rare.

The science behind pushing gender woo is plain garbage. Sampling bias like that is Stats 101

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Moreover, many of the studies included in the Bustos review suffered from extraordinarily high loss to follow-up—some exceeding 40 percent! This should be a glaring red flag, since it stands to reason that the very individuals most likely to regret their surgeries might be the ones least likely to return to the same medical providers who facilitated their transition. Many detransitioners report feeling harmed, betrayed, or even traumatized by the gender medicine industry, and therefore want nothing more to do with it. As a result, they vanish from the follow-up pool entirely. Their absence from post-operative data does not mean they are happy—it means they’re gone. If anything, high attrition should lead researchers to assume that regret is being undercounted, not that it is rare.
The science behind pushing gender woo is plain garbage. Sampling bias like that is Stats 101
- You can’t draw any conclusions from someone who’s lost to follow-up. This article suggesting the people lost to follow-up have higher regret rates is almost as bad as the original paper assuming that those recruited for the regret study represented the full number of regretters.