The Debate Over Transgender Care and Detransitioning

To the Editor:

Re “Gender Dysphoric Kids Deserve Better Care,” by Pamela Paul (column, Feb. 4):

I’m an L.G.B.T.Q.+ teenager. Ms. Paul cites stories of detransitioners as if they are damning to the practice of gender-affirming care as a whole. Not all detransitioners regret their transition, and not all transgender people will medically transition. An overwhelming 98 percent of people who started their transition care as youths continue into adulthood, per a 2022 study from the Netherlands published in The Lancet.

Speaking from experience, my peers and friends who have undergone medical transitions have never “regretted” it, and after beginning care, their quality of life greatly improved. If Ms. Paul wants to demonize a procedure with a high rate of regret, she should look toward knee replacement, where one in five people end up dissatisfied.

By writing this article, Ms. Paul further stigmatizes health care for transgender people. Transition care may be good for some people. It may not be for others. This is a basic premise of medicine — people must have the right to make decisions with their doctors on what is right for them.

What we do know is that transgender youth are under attack across the nation. Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, last month demanded records from providers outside his state to single out hospitals or clinics that have treated transgender youth from Texas.

I fear for my future. I fear for my friends and their futures.

By continuing to harbor this dangerous rhetoric in her pieces, Ms. Paul makes it harder and harder for trans people to get the care that they desperately need as lawmakers across the country clamp down on our rights. I understand her concern, but it is misplaced.

Charles Yale
Omaha

To the Editor:

I was a trans child. From 12 to 17, I identified as male and was entrenched in the online world of radical trans activism. And, like many other female detransitioners, I am a lesbian, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and on the autism spectrum.