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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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Holy shit that's actually crazy to me. [I actually tracked down that number because I was so curious] (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1007/s00268-017-3895-9) It's over half cancer surgery. I've known that the regret rate for transition surgery was low for a long time, but that piece of context kinda blows my mind. You're more likely to regret a variety of life saving procedures than gender affirming surgery, and it's often by insane orders of magnitude.
And even the rare case of transition regret, it's usually because 1. lack of peer group, 2. social condemnation and 3. your family now hates you.
Not because of the procedure, but because of the assholes around you. (This by one older Swedish study on the subject).
It's a literal miracle cure. Any sane doctor would jump for it.
Even when it is the procedure, it is generally due to poor results, not the decision to have the surgery to begin with.
Worth noting that particular subreddit appears to be pretty heavily astroturfed. To the point where some detransitioners created r/actualdetrans to get away from the TERFs.
It's unlikely the people who detransition because of it would be active on a detrans subreddit, because they would still consider themselves trans, and would instead be in trans subreddits for support.
The three reasons the other commenter mentioned was taken from studies done on the subject.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8213007/
Here's one of the more recent meta analysis papers on it. When people who detransition are asked, the majority of the cite external factors like the ones here.
I'm sorry, but if you think that there aren't huge portions of the trans population who have no support system, then it doesn't really feel possible to have a meaningful discussion about this with you.
I'm not saying it implies that. I'm saying that trans people and established research both say that. Your minimal experience with one of the detrans subreddits is not more substantial of a source than first hand accounts and peer reviewed papers.
Did you spend substantial time in /r/detrans and /r/actualdetrans? Were you aware of drama around when that split happened? Discussed it in the other trans communities on the sites? Because right now, your comments make it seem like you're a passerby who has popped into a trans community and tried to say that your interactions with one community known for astroturfing are more meaningful than decades of research.
Is "regret" here necessarily supposed to be interpreted as "would rather have died"? I have had cancer surgery, it was not necessarily life saving, it was more precautionary (as I understand it, I was quite young). And I have some regrets related to it, but not that surgery itself. I can imagine there are a lot of cases like that for other cancer treatments as well, "I should have gone another round of chemo instead", "another round of radiation". Which may mean higher risk of not making it, but may still not be the same as "I regret having my life saved by this necessary surgery".
I'm not saying this to cast doubt on the relevance for making the comparison to gender affirming surgery. I think the comparison is apt and relevant. For gender affirming surgery there are basically no equivalent to radiation or chemo alternatives to surgery (not that they necessarily are an alternative to surgery for cancer either. Surgery may absolutely be necessary for survival). Since gender affirming surgery does not have an "I should have done treatment X instead, hence I regret my surgery", maybe this explains the discrepency in the regret rates?
Fear of death makes you gullible to accept treatment when it wouldn't have been the best outcome for you. Some cancer treatments prolong your life very little compared to the time you'll spend in a hospital, and instead of living 2 weeks longer after 6 painful months in the hospital, some people could have been in palliative care among their loved ones for 6 months and die. It is easy to regret agreeing to hospitalization at the end of your life.
Don't forget wringing your bank account dry so there's nothing left for your family after you go!
I will always forget some parts of the world are crazy like that.
Yeah, that is also one factor to account for possibly.