A fifteen-year study found that children claiming a transgender identity eventually grew out of it.
Dutch researchers followed 2,772 children from an average age of 11 to the time they were 26, asking about their gender every three years.
The study comes as there has been a “large increase in referral rates to gender clinics in the last decade in western countries,” the authors explained. “The exact reasons for this increase are not known, but it has been suggested that societal changes with improved recognition of transgender identities and more public awareness about gender services may play a role.”
“In early adolescence, 11% of participants reported gender non-contentedness,” the authors wrote. Those between the ages of 10-12 were most gender non-content.
Only 4% of participants expressed gender non-contentedness by the time they were adults.
“Three developmental trajectories of gender non-contentedness were identifed: no gender non-contentedness (78%), decreasing gender non-contentedness (19%), and increasing gender non-contentedness (2%),” the researchers explained.
Individuals with an increasing gender non-contentedness were more often female and also experienced a “lower global self-worth, more behavioral and emotional problems, and a non-heterosexual sexual orientation.”
“Self-worth and self-esteem are important factors in the well-being and mental health of adolescents,” the authors wrote, noting that an adolescent’s self-worth is not significantly associated with physical appearance.
“The results of the current study might help adolescents to realize that it is normal to have some doubts about one’s identity and one’s gender identity during this age period and that this is also relatively common,” the study concluded. “Furthermore, the insight that gender non-contentedness is relatively common during early adolescence in a general population and youth psychiatric care sample, might provide some perspective to clinicians primarily seeing individuals with intense gender dysphoric feelings and give them a more comprehensive view on the range of developmental patterns of gender identity in the general population and in children receiving youth psychiatric care.”
Last month, a group of French senators released a report warning against children receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgeries.
The 340-page report calls medically transitioning minors “one of the greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine” and claims transgender activists are pushing gender transitions on children through social media campaigns.
The report followed England’s National Health Service (NHS) announcement that it was ending its distribution of puberty blockers for minors.
“NHS England has carefully considered the evidence review conducted by NICE (2020) and has identified and reviewed any further published evidence available to date,” NHS England wrote. “We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of PSH to make the treatment routinely available at this time.”
The withdrawal of puberty blockers comes as an investigation revealed that the drugs are effective treatments for gender dysphoria.
“In January 2020, a Policy Working Group (PWG) was established by NHS England to undertake a review of the published evidence. As part of this process, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) was commissioned to review the published evidence on Gonadotrophin Releasing Hormone Analogues (GnRHa). Nine observational studies were included in the evidence review (NICE 2020),” the report explains. “Overall, there was no statistically significant difference in gender dysphoria, mental health, body image and psychosocial functioning in children and adolescents treated with GnRHa (2020). The quality of evidence for all these outcomes was assessed as very low certainty using modified GRADE. There remains limited short-term and long-term safety data for GnRHa.”
