The study comes amid increasing public skepticism of offering teenagers ‘gender affirming care.’
While proponents of “gender-affirming” treatment for adolescents claim that the confusion surrounding gender isn’t just a phase that one can grow out of, a long-term, large-scale study from the Netherlands seems to suggest otherwise.
For their study, researchers at the University of Groningen looked at data collected from 2,772 individuals through a survey spanning 15 years. Beginning at age 11, the participants were periodically asked about how they felt about their own gender, until they reached their mid-twenties.
The survey contained a prompt, “I wish to be of the opposite sex.” The participants were asked to respond to that same statement every two to three years over the course of the 15-year study, and each time, they were given a multiple choice: “Not True,” “Somewhat or Sometimes True,” and “Very True or Often True.”
According to the findings, 11 percent of participants reported at least some degree of “non-contentedness” with their gender at some point during the study. But by the age of 25, the dissatisfaction rate had dropped to 4 percent.
Overall, 78 percent of participants retained the same feelings about their gender over the course of 15 years. Around 19 percent became more content with their gender, while about 2 percent became less comfortable.
To evaluate the participants’ well-being and mental health, researchers asked them to rate how they felt about their physical appearance and self-esteem. The results, they said, showed associations between experiencing discontent with their gender and a poorer self-image and mental health.
The researchers pointed out some limitations of the study. For instance, the participants were taken from the general population, meaning that the study didn’t primarily focus on children who had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
With that said, they still concluded that the findings seem to support the idea that discontentment with one’s gender was more common among teens than with adults. “In summary, having the wish to be of the opposite sex is relatively common in this combined general population and clinical sample,” the authors wrote.
By Bill Pan
