The 3 percent regret figure is unreliable because unhappy patients are not counted
Andrew Gold said:
“that 3% figure so Richard Herron is an example of this. He went back and complained time after time after time to doctors and said I didn't expect this, this isn't what I wanted, why did you push me into this, I regret this. But he isn't listed as somebody who regrets their transition.”
The argument that official statistics miss unhappy patients because those patients are turned away or mislabelled is a plausible methodological critique: undercounting in medical follow-up studies is a real phenomenon, and the suggestion that surgeons have an incentive to hide bad outcomes is easy to believe.
The idea that surgeons systematically remove regretters from the count is a serious charge, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a wave of the hand. What the published evidence actually shows is that low regret rates hold even in studies with high follow-up, where researchers tracked people down over years rather than waiting for them to come back: the finding is not explained away by assuming the unhappy ones simply disappeared. Methodological limitations in gender medicine research are real, and researchers are the first to say so, but "limitations exist" is a very different claim from "the figures are fraudulent". Building a case against the whole evidence base on one named person's account, without engaging with how regret is actually measured across multiple long-term studies, is not a methodological critique: it is anecdote dressed as analysis. The people who pay for that conflation are those weighing a decision about their own care, who deserve an honest account of what the research shows rather than the implication that none of it can be trusted.
What I said at the time:
“I think the latest statistic was like 3 percent of people regret their gender affirming care, but that's 97 percent of people who didn't reject it. So why do we have to go with the 3 percent of big voices? What about the 97 percent of people who are, thank you, I am now living my happier life.”
People considering gender-affirming care, who may be deterred by the implication that the evidence base is fraudulent rather than, as researchers acknowledge, limited in some respects.