Journal Club: A Robust Debunking of Myths About Trans Youth
A 2025 paper studied over eleven years debunks the harmful myths that trans youth don’t know what they want.
by Veronica Esposito
A new research paper puts the lie to one of the most pernicious myths about trans youth—that they are somehow too young and too naive to know what they want. This paper also debunks the research of some of the biggest mythmakers in the field—among them Kenneth Zucker, who claimed that as many as 80% of trans youth desist from their trans identity, and Ray Blanchard, creator of the debunked notion of “autogynephilia”, who also claimed that trans people transitioned in order to avoid the stigma of a homosexual identity.
“Stability and Change in Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Across Childhood and Adolescence” by researcher Benjamin E. deMayo and colleagues is a massive paper well over a decade in the making. Its full findings are well beyond the scope of this article, and readers are encouraged to read it for themselves.
So what are the main findings? To start, looking at over 900 North American transgender and cisgender youth, deMayo et al. found that cisgender kids changed their gender identity about as readily as did trans kids. Overall, about 12% of both the cisgender and transgender youth had changed their gender identity at some point over the study’s 11 years, from 2013 to 2024. (The most common change in gender identity was to or, less often, from a nonbinary identity.)
Notably, the study did not find sizable rates of detransition. Only about 3 - 4% of the youth who entered the study as transgender later changed to cisgender—a roughly equivalent amount of cisgender youth decided they were actually trans over the course of the study. This indicates that, far from the massive wave of detransition predicted by right-wing voices and reactionary centrists, trans kids are well within the norms of their cis peers.
One interesting facet of this study was that it also included siblings of trans youth in the cisgender population—this was done in order to study whether the trans youths’ environment may have led to them identifying as trans. If so, then we would expect that siblings of trans kids would switch their gender identity at a much higher rate than the cisgender control group.
To the contrary, the study found that siblings changed gender identification with almost exactly the same rates as the non-sibling cisgender and trans kids. With these findings, deMayo et al. are helping dispel notions that parents or other authority figures are somehow transing their kids—if such myths of grooming were actually true, those numbers for the siblings would be vastly higher.
So who exactly did this research study? This paper specifically recruited 317 trans kids who had effected a social transition by age 12—between the ages of 3 and 12, they had changed things like their manner of dress, name, and pronouns in order to align with their identity as a different gender from the one they had been assigned at birth. Alongside the trans group, deMayo et al. recruited a group of some 377 cisgender youth aged 12 and under, and some 218 cisgender siblings of the trans kids.
Almost all of the study participants first made contact with the researchers in-person, in order to become acquainted with the study and build rapport with the researchers. Subsequent follow-up was made every 1-3 years, and retention of participants was rather high—89% of participants continued past 2020. Researchers also conducted surveys with at least one parent of each of the minors surveyed, finding numbers that closely matched what the youth reported.
Notably, all trans youth in this study came from affirming homes, which deMayo et al. speculate could partly account for the very low detransition numbers. Past research into the stability of gender identity for trans youth has sometimes found much higher desistance rates—in particular, research by Kenneth Zucker claimed desistance rates as high as 80% at his clinic. But this research largely featured youth who came from unaccepting households—in fact, parents frequently enrolled their children in research studies with the explicit aim of converting them from transgender to cisgender. DeMayo and colleagues write:
The Recruited as Transgender youths in this study generally had families who, at least by the time of enrollment in the study, supported their identities. In contrast, families in past clinic-based work often approached those clinics because of concerns about their child's gender nonconformity, and youths in this work sometimes received therapy with an aim of changing their gender identities or gendered behavior (e.g., Green, 1987; Zucker & Bradley, 1995). The broader cultures of North America and Europe have shifted over time such that while transgender people continue to be subject to discrimination today, they experience generally higher rates of acceptance than they did when many of these studies occurred. Any of these differences, or a combination of them, might help explain why the results of the current study and past clinic‐based studies diverge.
This study also dispelled myths that somehow children are transitioning to avoid having a homosexual identity. To start, a full one-third of youth who identified as trans at the start of the study had never had any sexual feelings for anybody. Furthermore, among the trans youth that did feel sexual attraction, being attracted to the same sex that they were assigned at birth was not the norm:
Our sample does not show any evidence that early identifying transgender children overwhelmingly show exclusive interest in other people of their same assigned sex (e.g., many transgender girls in our sample were interested in girls, rather than only being interested in boys). This was also true if we looked only at transgender girls—only 32.0% of youths recruited as girls in the Recruited as Transgender group showed exclusive interest in boys.
All in all, the research made by deMayo and colleagues is a huge step forward in erasing many of the prevalent myths currently used to deny trans youth autonomy over their identities and access to healthcare. Due to the very sizable group of participants, the decade-plus time frame, and the rigor of analysis, this paper is one whose conclusions are very hard to dismiss—as such, it will hopefully provide a powerful way to refute so much of the misinformation spreading about trans youth. It also expands our knowledge by offering a fascinating glimpse at how trans you are understanding their gender and accessing social and medical transitions. It is a bright spot amid a dismal time for trans people.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.