The Atlantic Provides a Misleading Picture of Detransition

The authors of the latest article on detransition misled readers about the research and obscured the extreme beliefs of their main anecdotal example, Chris Beck.

by Evan Urquhart

What is it about detransition as a topic that makes it so dificult for the mainstream media to cover it honestly? Is it, perhaps, that anti-trans bias creates an appetite for stories about people who regret transition but the actual facts are lackluster at best? Whatever underlies this propensity, the Atlantic has provided a new entry in the growing canon of bad detransition articles. This time a bad article was written by two researchers, Leo Valdes and Kinnon MacKinnon, who are themselves trans.

To give credit where credit is due, while the article is misleading, it’s not coming from a deeply anti-trans place. The authors believe detransitioners deserve support and compassion from the larger trans and LGBTQ+ community. This is a noble sentiment we should all share. The problem is not that the authors hate trans people or want to delegitimize trans identities (although that may be one result). Instead, it’s that the effort to make detransition seem like a very important topic that deserves coverage in the Atlantic leads them to mislead readers about the facts surrounding their subject in important ways.

The piece is framed using the story of one person who has detransitioned, former Navy Seal Chris Beck. The article opens with Beck’s story and then returns to mention him several times, however key facts about Beck’s views, facts which could well influence how the reader understands his decision to detransition, are obscured. Beck is a far right Christian who believes that white people in America are under threat from anti-racism. This context is completely ommitted from the article, even though the links provided within are the very ones which expose Beck’s extreme views.

Here’s how the Atlantic article begins:

screenshot from the Atlantic

There’s nothing particularly misleading yet, but note the link on “lived in hell for the past 10 years.” That link takes you to a story in the Epoch Times, a fringe site best known for spreading misinformation and far right propaganda.

The Epoch Times link is something of a red flag, but the most egregious passage about Beck comes further down. Here, Beck is presented as being a moderate on trans issues, with links included to back that up:

screenshot from the Atlantic

The last sentence “Never mind that Beck explicitly states that he is not against trans people or gender-related care,” is inaccurate to the point of being false. The link provided goes directly to a 2-hour interview with Beck, conducted by a Christian nationalist YouTuber. While Beck does say he’s not against trans people in that interview, he later explains he’s talking about his desire to show trans people the love of Christianity, to convert them away from being trans by witnessing his own Christian conversion to them. At one point in the interview Beck explicitly contrasts the “beliefs” of LGBTQ+ people with “my beliefs, my Jesus, my God.” This should lead any reasonable person to question whether Beck detransitioned because he is not trans, or because his interpretation of Christianity holds that trans people should not access medical transition. Another quote along those same lines happens in the very first 10 minutes of the interview, when Beck says, about his transition, “I destroyed everything in my life that was holy, the temple of God is our bodies.”

The YouTube interview also contains an extended rant by Beck about the evils of CRT and how anti-racism has led white people to be mistreated in America, and comments by Beck’s fiance that 9/11 was an inside job. Perhaps Beck’s extreme views, his racism, and his proximity to conspiracy theories were why the mainstream media has been hesitant to cover his detransition? That possibility is not alluded to in the Atlantic piece, which presents only the most palatable aspects of Beck’s story, using him as an example of how detransitioners are unfairly overlooked.

In addition to misleading readers about who Chris Beck is and what he believes, the authors also provide a misleading picture of the state of the research (though, to be fair, it’s not nearly as misleading as many articles on detransition have been). This early paragraph sets the tone:

screenshot from the Atlantic

The observed detransition rate has always been 2 percent or lower, but the authors want to speculate that maybe it could be higher now. And sure, it could be higher. Equally possible: It could be lower! The authors cast doubt on the available evidence, but fail to offer anything concrete. This allows the anti-trans prejudices and biases of the reader to fill in the gaps.

This insinuation that detransition might be more common than the evidence shows continues later in the piece.

screenshot from the Atlantic

This is a long paragraph, and it includes a lot of links to outside research. The overall picture it creates tends to cast doubt on a low, evidence based 1 or 2 percent detransition rate, suggesting that the real figure might be higher. In order to judge whether that interpretation is likely, you’d have to read each of the five seperate studies linked to here. So that’s what we attempted to do.

We couldn’t access the full text of the first paper. The authors say it “indicates that some trans people express shifting desires about the kind of care they need.” They’re not making any particular claims about detransition, so let’s just assume that one was characterized accurately and move on.

The second paper is linked in the Atlantic on the word “seven,” referring to a 7 percent rate of detransition found. This is a very strange paper. The paper says that 12 of the 175 patients studied (or 7 percent) met the authors’ criteria for detransition. Of those 12, it says 1 patient continued to use cross-sex hormones, and 3 were re-referred to resume transition later on. If you were to exclude patients who either continued receiving or later returned to cross-sex hormones this would leave 7 patients, and the rate of detransition here would be 4 percent. The authors further note that only 2 patients mentioned experiencing regret.

The third study is linked on the words 10 percent. This one found four out of 41 patients who started hormone therapy in southwest England later stated that they wished to detransition. Normally, when a small study conflicts with numerous larger studies, one would conclude it is an outlier. The possibility for unusual, non-representative results is why larger sample sizes and multiple studies are prefered.

The fourth paper was “a study of 68 trans youth seeking medical gender care in the U.S. found that 29 percent of these patients shifted their treatment requests.” It’s largely as advertised, but what the authors didn’t seem to think merited a mention was the most common pattern was a patient who started out wanting a treatment, withdrew the request, then requested the same treatment again. That’s not exactly a pattern indicative of detransition or regret:

screenshot from the Journal of Adolescent Health study

In discussing the fifth paper the authors claim that “30 percent of patients who [began] gender-related hormone treatment discontinue[d] it within four years.” This is simply false. The paper looksed at patients who recieved treatment through one particular insurance plan. The authors state in the paper itself that anyone who used a different insurance plan or paid for hormones out of pocket would be among those counted as having discontinued treatment (with this insurance).

screenshot from The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism

If the 30 percent figure was close to other findings on detransition rates it would be quite reasonable to conclude that most of the people who stopped getting their hormones reimbursed using this one insurance plan did so because they detransitioned. But 30 percent is not in the ballpark of other findings. The figure is many times higher than the vast majority of studies of detransition have found. This means that the alternate explanation, that many of these patients discontinued using this particular insurance, but did not detransition, is more likely. After all, that interpretation fits all the available evidence without any study being false. In order to meaningfully challenge or complicate the picture of numerous large, well conducted studies, new findings would need to directly conflict with those earlier findings, rather than being easy to explain without any such conflict.

This Atlantic piece was headlined “Take Detransition Seriously.” But in order to take detransition seriously articles about it need to treat the subject seriously themselves. They can’t present white nationalist Christian conspiracy theorists as moderates, and they can’t misrepresent the research on detransition to make it seem like it’s more common than the research suggests. If, one day, new evidence emerges showing that transition regret is more common (or even merely as common) as regret for other medical procedures is, that is when detransition should be taken seriously as an adverse outcome in a medical sense. Until that happens, people who argue that the public should take detransition seriously need to stop cherry picking anecdotes and misrepresenting research, and simply explain why regret over this medical procedure is more important, more worthy of broad-based social concern, than any other medical regret. After all, any medical intervention comes with the risk that it won’t work for you, or will come with negative side effects. Even more broadly, all our decisions in life come with the risk of regret. People who believe that detransition should be taken seriously need to engage with that reality, and explain why detransition is different from other similar situations. That articles on detransition never attempt to do so suggests that they exist to cater to anti-trans bias, and have no honest case to make.