participants persisted in their gender dysphoria, and the remaining 122 (87.8%) desisted.
82 (63.6%) of the participants were ascertained to be bisexual or gay and 43 (33.3%) were heterosexual.
The study makes it clear that this dates back a bit.
The authors noted that the boys in the study were seen “during a period of time when treatment recommendations, if such were made, often aimed to reduce the gender dysphoria between the child’s felt gender identity and biological sex.” Recommendations often included “psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, behavior therapy, group therapy, parent-counseling, and interventions in the naturalistic environment, such as encouragement of same-sex peer relations.”
In other words, back to a time when reasonably sensible policies were in place. Nowadays at the first whiff of so-called gender dysphoria the wretched teens are whisked off to a gender clinic, stuffed full of puberty blockers, and before they've even had time to think of their new girl-name they're on life-changing cross-sex hormones and possible surgery. Whereas if they'd just leave well alone the teens would grow up normally, as teens do.
It's a kind of law of medicalisation: give something a scientific-sounding name and a whole medical sub-speciality develops to deal with this new disease. So not feeling comfortable with your sex at puberty – possibly because you're gay, possibly because of the overwhelming pressure to conform to gender stereotypes pushed by social media, or possibly because that's just what it's like to be an adolescent – becomes "gender dysphoria". And medical treatments get developed, in the hands of specialists who are committed to forging a career in this exciting new field, and the treatments they develop tend to be based on powerful drug-based interventions, because that's what the medical model decrees. And off you go.
Put that together with the new pseudo-science of gender identity and you're in business.
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