Transgender people’s rights to gender affirming care, and even to just exist, is under attack today more than ever. States such as Tennessee, Florida, and more are making it a felony to transition or to support someone that is transitioning. One of the common narratives backing these decisions is to claim that people receiving gender affirming care come to regret it. That is just not the case!

According to a new study, just 6/1989 (0.30%) of people who received gender affirming surgery (GAS) regretted their decision and wanted to detransition. This is such a minuscule percentage. It feels easy to get disheartened by the wave of laws and cruelty, and I couldn’t find it in myself to write a deep and long-winded post today. However, I can take the opportunity to put GAS regret into perspective. Here are 9 things people regret at a much higher percentage than gender affirming care!

1. Knee replacement surgery

Studies report that between 6-30% of patients are dissatisfied, including 8% of Swedish patients with no complications. That’s a whole lot of regrets from people who opted to receive a fairly risky, completely destigmatized, surgery that was said to improve their quality of life.

2. College Majors

ZipRecruiter reports that 44% of job-seekers regret their college major, including 87% of journalism majors. Considering most people choose a college and major between the ages of 16-18, that’s a whole lot of young people who are being forced into making decisions before they’re ready!

3. Marriage

57% of women regret marrying their husbands! And yet 71% expect to be married to their husband for the rest of their lives. Talk about an irreversable decision leading to regret! A perfect analogy, considering that puberty blockers (the most common form of gender affirming care for minors) is, in fact, incredibly reversible.

4. Divorce

In a study of 460 people in 2016, 27% of women and 32% of men said they regretted getting a divorce. Looks like it’s pretty tough to make a decision regarding who to spend the rest of your life with.

5. Parenting

A whopping 9% of people reported to regret their parenting choices, whether that be to have kids or not have kids. Imagine the regret a parent would feel when their child becomes clinically depressed due to the parent not supporting them for who they say they are!

6. Things You Didn’t Do

Across multiple studies, the things people regretted the most were the things that they didn’t do, not the things they did. Odd, considering gender affirming care is something you opt INTO, making it far less likely to be regrettable.

7. Cosmetic Surgery

65% of people surveyed in the UK were said to regret their cosmetic surgeries. Of these, well over half had nothing go wrong; they simply realized afterwards that they didn’t like it as much as they’d thought.

8. Making Purchases

Over 70% of people regret buying clothing items that they’ve bought, 36% of men regret travel, and 45% of women regret buying beauty products or makeup. Every day, people are going out into the world and buying things that in hindsight, they wish they didn’t. All of this makes a big impact- each year, Americans are spending $74 billion that they regret on on-sale items alone.

9. Quitting Their Job

There’s been a lot of talk about how the number of people identifying as transgender has been on the rise (**insert left handed chart here**) but quitting has been spiking even more! 2022 was a record year for people quitting their jobs, and 80% regret it. If we’re just talking about young people, over 89% of Gen-Z regret quitting their job. This has caused a sharp mental health decline, and yet nobody is encouraging an end to quitting altogether! GAS, on the other hand, is correlated with a marked increase in mental health.

Sources

Advertisement