Just a reminder for when you listen to people being presented as trans persons who regret their surgery:
Norma McCorvey - Jane Roe of Roe v Wade - was presented for decades as a devout Christian (evangelical and later Catholic) who regretted her decision. She was used as a prominent voice in the anti-abortion movement and in the attempts to overturn Roe.
She revealed on her deathbed that she was being paid to take that position. The narrative was also complicated by her 35 year relationship with Connie Gonzalez, later claiming that she was no longer a lesbian before confessing that she was paid to say that as well.
Also remember that when they call the child survivors of school shootings “paid actors,” it’s because that’s exactly the tactic they engage in.
It’s always projection. “Accuse your enemies of what you are guilty of.”
Even if they’d been right - it’s not a justification for taking away peoples’ right to choose. I’ve made many decisions in my life that I regretted afterward, some irrevocable. (And at least one that I’m certain has a far greater than average regret rate) That’s NOT basis for making it illegal for me to make those decisions, and it’s for sure not justification for making it illegal for others to make those decisions.
Not to mention the last statistic on regret rates I saw showed that a lower percentage of people regretted transition surgery than regretted things like hip or knee replacement. But of course to them literally anyone who regrets transition is cause to ban it.
Globally, a staggering 310 million major surgeries are performed each year; around 40 to 50 million in USA and 20 million in Europe. It is estimated that 1–4% of these patients will die, up to 15% will have serious postoperative morbidity, and 5–15% will be readmitted within 30 days. Source.
Yeah, when you look at the statistics for all surgeries and see that up to 4% of patients will die, and up to 15% will have serious complications, all of a sudden the regret rate seems pretty average.
I can’t recall where I read this, but I’ve also heard that a big part of it is regret when the surgeon does a bad job too. I think it was mainly top surgery, and surgeons that were trained to do mastectomies for cancer patients, who leave a bunch of loose skin bc that’s desirable when the patient wants breast augmentation. Which obviously isn’t what a trans person would want. Or just not removing all of the breast tissue, more severe scarring than average, etc. I bet these are the people conservatives quote about feeling “disfigured”.
I hear so many horror stories from trans masc people in particular who are just not fucking listened to by surgeons. With traumatic consequences, frequently. It makes me furious - every time it’s a similar story, they explain that they want no breasts and the doctor goes “well that would look odd, I’ll give you a c cup”… Bruh no.
I don’t think it’s so bad for transfemmes, because “top surgery” in that case is the same (I mean, I assume) as a breast augmentation for a cis woman.
I don’t think it’s so bad for transfemmes, because “top surgery” in that case is the same (I mean, I assume) as a breast augmentation for a cis woman.
Bottom surgery is traditionally oriented around male pleasure at the expense of what trans women actually want. The same thing happens to us, and it happens to our genitals
Could you elaborate on this please? I hadn’t heard of that before
For a lot of surgeons that do bottom surgery, they care more about how it looks rather than how it feels. i.e. they don’t care if you can’t orgasm.
Oh god well I guess that’s one more thing to worry about, thanks for the heads up
Actual people regretting it is irrelevant and inconsequential. Remember how, for many years, the same people kept trying (and failing) to find any significant voter fraud? Then they decided to just ignore that detail and tell people it was happening anyway?
The exact same thing applies here.
You’re missing the point. They regret when people choose gender-affirming surgery. That’s the real issue. I know it’s not the argument they’re saying out loud, but it’s the real issue.
I’m not trans, but I wholeheartedly agree with you. As living beings we deserve autonomy, which includes the right to make choices that we may later regret. It isn’t up to anyone else but the individual to decide what’s right for them. It’s no-one else’s business (especially the government)
In fact, one systematic review found that the average prevalence of surgical regret was 14.4% among all research studies analyzed
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.
- lack of peer group, 2. social condemnation and 3. your family now hates you.
Having seen https://reddit.com/r/detrans what you’ve said here seems silly.
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.
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.
“Back in 1997, virtually no one had heard of queergender people. I couldn’t find a support system, and I couldn’t figure out how to tell people what I was.”
That would be a big discrepency. The denizens of /r/detrans generally post about contemporary detransitioning rather than detransitions from 25 years ago.
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.
if you think that there aren’t huge portions of the trans population who have no support system
Huge portions of the trans population having no support system doesn’t imply that reasons for detransitioning will include not having a support system because the lack of a support system alters the likelihood of transitioning in the first place.
if you think that there aren’t huge portions of the trans population who have no support system, it doesn’t really feel possible to have a meaningful discussion about this with you
I don’t think that and it doesn’t make sense to assume or even suspect I do, given anything I’ve said. I’ve no idea why you’ve introduced this idea into the conversation.
And even if I were to think that, what you’ve said doesn’t invalidate what I said, which was that having seen /r/detrans, the reasons given seemed silly.
Clearly it is indeed not possible for us to have a meaningful discussion.
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.
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.
It’s unlikely the people who detransition because of it
Because of what? I don’t understand what you’re trying to communicate.
Because of external pressures, which you originally replied to
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.
I wonder what the regret rate is for getting married? Having kids? Having conservative parents?
old studies say otherwise too
…. see there IS regret!!
/s
Please kill me….
Buyers remorse is a thing too. Better outlaw purchases of anything outside of the essentials to live. Those can also cause buyers remorse. Guess we’re just outlawing all purchases.
Ah to be in that audience and having all the facts… So you’re saying that any elective surgery with a high rate of regret should be banned for the safety of the patients? That’s fantastic, thank you for advocating against the horrors of cosmetic surgery simply in the name of beauty and fashion, I’m sure your followers will appreciate your courage in speaking out against them!
/s means sarcasm
Yes it does… what’s your point? I’m pretty sure I understand the sarcasm of the previous poster, it’s what my comment was based on. And I’m also pretty sure I understand that Chloe Cole and other conservatives have no comprehension of how transgender surgery differs greatly from their own cosmetic surgeries and probably can’t even understand why one is usually bad while the other is usually good.
What conservatives say rarely aligns with reality in any way, so this should come as no surprise.
Reminder that the regret rate for gender reassignment surgery is under 1%. For comparison, the regret rate for knee surgery is 20%.
I was going to say, it’s been known for a long time that it’s around 1%, this isn’t new information, and while we should take seriously the issues of de-trans (not anti-trans) people and what about the process caused them issues, ~1% regret rate is impressively low for something like this.
thats the overall average, iirc things like top surgery (boobs and flattening) is something like .4% regret rate, and highest regret rate is phalloplasty at 2%. i think there were some extra criteria asking about complications which had like a 10% rate in most cases. so not even most people with complications regret it.
Conservatives regret it. Not the people having them. Poorly written headline. /S
Same old intellectually lazy right-wing bullshit: Take an isolated example or two and apply it to an entire population.
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No surprise there; it’s just more of the same self-serving bullshit.
Conservatives rarely tell the truth so…
Of course, because they just made that shit up.
The only one I regret is orchi and thats because I could have made OnlyFans money cosplaying as a femboy for the cishet male simps. sigh
It’s so ironic bc the “regret the surgery” narrative depends on body dysphoria being a thing.
I mean wouldn’t it just be fucking awful if your body didn’t match your gender?
Great to have another study backing trans people. However, I have a feeling that the author of the linked article only read the abstract? At least it seems as if they don’t provide any additional information in the text. Like, how extensive was the search of the study and how many people did it include? I couldn’t access the paper itself, maybe someone knows how?
