So, me and a friend (who also has a background in psychology) were discussing how some young children will identify as trans (or sometimes cis) gender, but suddenly flip when they hit puberty. I was reading an article from one Gender researcher who talked about what it was like to identify as a boy until hormones hit and suddenly it was frilly dresses and tea parties. It's estimated that 40 to 60 percent of transgender children will "change their minds" during puberty, and this is the main argument against giving hormone blockers too early.
Here's the problem: 40 to 60 implies we have very poor data on the subject, and leaves us wondering how many of the children who "change their minds" are really trans but not accepting or have been pressured back into the closet, and how many of them would've been fine either way. I'm also wondering, with the high rate of Transgender children being pushed back into the box by their parents, how accurate these numbers can be: wouldn't this primarily be data from parents who let their young children "be free" and all that? How many of the children of non-accepting parents do this? Is there an age where this typically happens by? (I'm prone to believe that, if they're still trans at 16, they're not likely to change, but I have very little data) Where does the high rate of teenage girls who crossdress and the "trans-trender" thing he's obsessed with play into this? Where might intersex conditions like Klienfelters (0.25% of the population) play into this, knowing that they seem to have only a 66% chance of identifying with their assign gender, and may have a hormonal flip at puberty? How would this data affect the shaky estimates that 0.3 to 0.6 percent of the population is trans? How can that number possibly be accurate when 1) gender and sex are these spectrum/grid things, and 2) most of us are in the closet anyway?
If anyone has any more information on this, it's been a major topic of discussion with us lately, and I'd like more data for us to draw on... Anyone know if there's ever been a comprehensive study on this?