A popular statistic used by the anti-trans movement for years has been that between 60% and 90% of young people who identify as trans will revert to their gender assigned at birth in later life. That statistic has been used to inform legislation, but a new study from Virginia Commonwealth University shows that those figures lack scientific merit.

“We were particularly interested in examining this idea of the concept of trans identity desistance because it’s a number that has been bandied about for years as if it’s 100% accurate,” the study’s lead author, Catherine Wall, Ph.D., told Phys.org. “And we wanted to take a deeper look, especially because it’s currently being used for things like legislation and bans of best-practice gender-affirming care in 26 states.”

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Bizarrely, that 60-90% desistance rate originally comes from an informal blog post by Dr. James M. Cantor on Sexology Today! After the Canadian Centre for Addiction and Mental Health closed its gender identity clinic in 2016 following a review that revealed they were conducting a form of conversion therapy, Cantor claimed that he received requests to provide the data behind what happens when trans kids grow up.

He provided a very brief summary based on 11 studies and explained that “the exact number varies by study, but roughly 60–90% of trans- kids turn out no longer to be trans by adulthood.”

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However, when researchers from VCU examined those studies alongside five more studies that have been conducted since 2016, they found that the studies didn’t actually provide significant results. The data was unreliable enough that by performing different types of statistical analysis on the data samples, the rate of desistance or persistence with trans gender identities could be made to come out to anything from 0% to 100%.  That meant that it would be easy to twist the data to support whatever conclusion someone might wish to find.

The VCU researchers also found that part of the unreliability came from how and when the studies were conducted. Seven of the original eleven studies were conducted before 1990, at a time when social and medical understanding of diverse gender identities was not what it is today, and when trans identities were still listed as a mental illness in the DSM.

Of those seven studies, three were studying effeminate behavior in young boys and didn’t actually deal directly with gender identity. This means that the subjects of the study weren’t necessarily trans in the first place, so whether they were trans or not as adults says nothing about desistence. The other four were looking at children with gender-nonconforming or gender-atypical behaviors, again not explicitly looking at trans identities.

Some of the original studies were also specifically looking to dissuade the pursuance of trans identities in a form of conversion therapy, with one study removing children from their families for six months. Of those early studies, Wall said, “A lot of those early frameworks were explicitly intending to stop people from expressing their gender identity. It’s this idea of transgender identity as a state of disordered being.”

The studies also often drew on very small sample sizes that weren’t representative of the trans community that they are now being held up as being about. In multiple studies, if the participants refused to answer or chose to leave the study, they were marked as having desisted from their trans identity, even in the later post-2016 studies.

The researchers also noted that the post-2016 studies, which tended to have more rigorous processes and a greater understanding of trans identities, also showed higher rates of persistence.

The debunking of this harmful, inaccurate statistic could have powerful ramifications for every level of society.

For young trans people and their families, that number has been used as a scary statistic to persuade them that trans identities are some sort of fad for young people. That pressure can keep trans kids in the closet, which multiple studies have shown can be exceedingly harmful.

At the other end of the equation, this figure has been used to create legislation and policies that have negatively impacted the community. Most notably, the 60-90% statistic was presented in the U.S. v. Skrmetti Supreme Court case, in which the decision upheld Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban. If the opposition had had this sort of study to refute the data behind that claim, it would have been a powerful rebuttal.

“Understanding the context in which research is done is incredibly important to understanding the results,” Wall said. “Just because a number exists does not mean it’s correct, and does not mean it’s 100% accurate. We should not be making legislation based off a number that might range from 0% to 100%.”

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