On Nov. 11, The Washington Post published an article titled “Most transgender people have no regrets years after hormone therapy, study says.” According to the Post, nearly 97 percent of individuals who began taking opposite-sex hormones as youths believed they made the right decision. Only about 3 percent reported regret, and fewer than 2 percent reported harm. Sounds pretty convincing, doesn’t it?
Not so much. The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics on Nov. 9, examined satisfaction and regret among individuals who began taking opposite-sex hormones in their youth. Researchers reported that 360 of 372 respondents believed starting on hormones was the “right decision.” That’s the number making headlines. But here’s what the Post conveniently never shared with its readers.
According to the study’s own participant flowchart, 839 young people underwent an initial assessment at the transgender facility. Of those, 729 consented to the research, and ultimately 698 were sent the annual survey.
Of those 698 individuals, 297 never completed it.
That’s approximately 43 percent of the people contacted whose experiences remain unknown. The researchers couldn’t determine whether those individuals had started taking opposite-sex hormones, continued treatment, or regretted their decisions. Of the 401 who responded, 25 had never received hormones, leaving 376 participants in the final sample. Four did not complete the regret scale.
So that impressive 97 percent figure represents the responses of 372 people, not the entire population initially assessed. Whether those results represent the missing participants remains unanswered.
The Post told readers that researchers “surveyed 376” people. They didn’t. They surveyed 698. The 376 are simply the respondents who had taken hormones. The 297 who never answered don’t appear anywhere in the Post’s story. And there’s more.
Of the 376 participants who started opposite-sex hormones, 65 were no longer taking hormones when surveyed. Among those 65, approximately 14 percent reported regret. That’s considerably different from the overall 3 percent figure. Nearly everyone reporting regret or harm had discontinued treatment. In fact, 311 of the 376 participants were still taking hormones when surveyed.
The researchers also acknowledged that they never investigated why these individuals discontinued treatment. To make matters more interesting, eight respondents now identified as their biological sex, and seven of those eight accounted for more than half of the 13 participants who reported regret or harm.
Among the nine participants who provided written descriptions of their regret or harm, seven reported not feeling “adequately prepared to make an informed decision” because of their age, maturity, mental health difficulties, or insufficient support.
Nearly 92 percent of the participants began opposite-sex hormones at 17 or younger. And while the average time since beginning treatment was approximately five years, some had started as recently as 1.2 months before the survey. The Post, meanwhile, described the responses as coming “five years after the initial treatment.” Five years was the average, not the minimum.
