A detransitioner's story shows gender-affirming care causes harm
Robby Starbuck said:
“I had a girl on who was put on puberty blockers very young. She had a double mastectomy at 13. And when I asked her about, you know, what was the process, right, to get there? What she described as a process where they never delved into the core traumas she had actually experienced.”
A first-person account of a young person who regrets surgery is emotionally powerful and difficult to dismiss. The detail about unaddressed trauma sounds like a plausible clinical failure that any cautious person would want to prevent.
A single story, however painful, is not a safety profile. Double mastectomy at 13 is not what any major clinical guideline recommends, so if that account is accurate, it describes a failure to follow the protocol, not the protocol itself. The research literature, drawn from many thousands of young people over decades, shows that the vast majority of those who access gender-affirming care describe it as beneficial, and that detransition, where it happens, is far more often driven by social pressure than by regret about the care itself. When one atypical case is treated as the whole story, the young people with positive outcomes disappear, and real, guideline-following care becomes harder for everyone who needs it.
What I said at the time:
“In medicine I don't know what you're what you in what world you live in but in medicine we don't base stuff on 1 case. We base stuff on research on many many many cases.”
Trans young people who would benefit from care are denied it because one atypical case is treated as representative of all gender-affirming treatment, and the many people with positive outcomes are rendered invisible.