It’s Not About Protecting Trans Kids
Content warning: there is a picture of surgery towards the bottom of this article.
You wouldn’t know it from the right-wing media, but a lot of people have a lot of regrets. For example, dog adoption, having kids, buying cars, and going to university, are all life choices that people have a lot of regret about. When it comes to gender-affirming surgery, there’s not a lot of regret.
Life Choice Regret
The targeting of gender-affirming care by the right2 is about a moral panic. It is not about protecting people from regret. The right isn’t calling for the culling of millions of dogs to protect people from adopting them and regretting it. They are trying to force people to have more children (and are successful at this in some places) despite the high levels of parents’ regret. Parental regret is 700% to 2,180% higher than trans regret.
The right is eroding post-secondary education. However, this isn’t to protect people from regretting their personal life choices. It is the consequence of neoliberal cuts, attacks on what they perceive as ideological threats and racist scapegoating. A lot of post-secondary education-related regret is related to debt. There is an easy fix to improve people’s lives (free tuition) – but that isn’t part of the policy platform of folks on the right. Instead, the right consistently makes things harder for students – not easier.
Even in comparison to some other surgeries, levels of gender-affirming surgery regret are low. Where are the bannings of knee replacements? The outcry over the sterilization of cis people? It is sterilization for birth control, not having your gonads removed because you are trans that is most likely (but still very unlikely) to cause regret?
Surgery Regret
Taken out of context, anecdotal accounts of regret, and detransition can be made to sound like they are much more common.
That is what TERFs and the right want – because they are trying to make this moral panic a wedge issue. They often say “we aren’t anti-trans but it is essential regretters and detransers are part of the conversation.” Make no mistake, this is about silencing trans people. It is about giving megaphones to a tiny number of loud people who regret their decisions because their narratives fit the right’s agenda. There is no room in this “inclusion” of detrans people for trans-positive, trans-affirming detransitionners in this “conversation.”
Just how dominant discourse about gender-affirming surgery regret online is was driven home for me when I was doing research for this piece. I was using Bing’s Chat GPT4 to search for statistics on things that people might regret: “What percentage of people regret getting [boats/Costco memberships/credit cards/pets/etc.]?” While there seems to be a lot of overall regret in the world (except, perhaps, for Costco members), exact percentages aren’t easy to come by. I asked: “What is the percentage of people who regret getting a rhytidectomy?” “Rhytidectomy” is the medical term for “face-lift.” I looked the word up after my face-lift question came back with a definition, not an answer. This is what Bing told me:
It wasn’t until point #3 that Bing told me “Unfortunately, I don’t have specific data on the percentage of people who regret getting facelifts.” Rhytidectomies make up 3.6% of all gender-affirming procedures in the US. That is less than 350 people a year.4 That isn’t even the number of face-lifts at a Hollywood red-carpet event. If we assume that the rate of trans rhytidectomy regret is the same as overall surgery regret, we are talking about 3-4, maybe 10, people out of over 330 million.5 Even if every trans person in Canada and the US 15 years old and 13 years old and older, respectively, had a rhytidectomy today based on the available data we are talking about 600 people that would feel some level of regret – out of a combined national population of 370.5 million (or, too small a percent to show on my calculator). And this is a gross over estimation because it is based on the number of people already getting surgeries. Many, maybe most trans people never get surgery – and the certainly aren’t getting them at 13 (despite the sensationalist fear-mongering).6
Nevertheless, this was the focus of the AI’s answer. The right has taken a tiny, near non-existent, issue and made it one of the biggest social problems of the day.
Anti-trans people also use photos of surgeries to scare people to help make the argument that gender-affirming surgeries shouldn’t happen. But photos of surgeries don’t mean anything about how people experience surgeries. Why? Because bodies are gross.
This is a picture of a knee surgery. It is scary and yucky. Conclusion? Ban all knee surgeries? Of course not.
Only pictures of gender-affirming surgeries are being used to support an argument to ban surgeries. Why? Because it isn’t about regret or risk or surgery, it is about the human beings that are getting access to medical care. It is about moral panic, it is about hate.
Parts of this piece were inspired by comments made in the Pisphoria episode of the Trashfuture podcast.
Notes
- Chart notes:
Dog regret: 54% Of Dog Owners Have Regrets About Getting A Dog – Forbes Advisor
Gender-affirming surgery regret: Regret after Gender-affirmation Surgery: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Prevalence – PMC
Having children regret: Post-secondary education-related regret: may involve debt, subject-related, having attended, etc. 81% of Canadians regret taking out a student loan – Finder
Car purchase-related regret: May involve price, model, purchase itself, etc. Nearly Half Who Bought a Car in Past Year Have Regrets – LendingTree - I am saying right here but this doesn’t mean that there isn’t anti-trans sentiment on parts of the Left. This is different, though, than TERFS, or “gender critical” feminists – many of whom have aligned themselves with the right, some of whom have aligned themselves with fascists, celebrate eugenicists and quote Hitler.
- Chart notes:
Tubal ligation regret: Women’s Regret After Sterilization Procedures – AAFP
Vasectomy regret: Regret statistic likely higher. Regret rate only among childless men. Vasectomy Regret Among Childless Men – ScienceDirect; Patient Characteristics Associated With Vasectomy Reversal – Journal Of Urology
Hip and knee replacement regret: Decision regret after primary hip and knee replacement surgery – ScienceDirect
Gender-affirming surgery regret: 19 of 7928 people detransitioned (rate of 0.24%). Regret listed at <1% for transmasculine procedures; represented in chart as 0.8% in the graph Regret after Gender-affirmation Surgery: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Prevalence – PMC - 48,019 patients x surgery rate of 3.6% of all procedures = 1,729 patients. Period = 5 years. 1,749/3=346 patients/year National Estimates of Gender-Affirming Surgery in the US – Obstetrics and Gynecology
- US population 330 million according to the US Census Bureau.
- US trans population 13 yrs+ is estimated at 1.6 million (according to the Williams Institute) – Canadian trans population 15yrs+ is 60,000 (Statistics Canada). 1.66m X 3.6% = 59,760 X 1% regret rate = 598 people. Canadian population is 40.5 million according to Statistics Canada. US population, see note 5.
A. J. Withers 