"Detransitioner Wave" Fails To Materialize, Trans Regret Rates Remain Low

In a commercial for a special on detransitioners, Seven News featured Chloe Cole prominently. This left many asking: why can they find no one else? The detransition wave has failed to materialize.

"The most controversial story this year," declares a foreboding voiceover as political detransitioner Chloe Cole walks toward the camera. The voice continues, "Thousands of kids are doing it and regretting it." This sets the tone for a Seven News (Australia) documentary on transgender youth, suggesting a widespread trend of individuals regretting their transition. However, recent research contradicts this notion, indicating extremely low rates of regret among transgender individuals. So why do these "groundbreaking specials" repeatedly feature the same handful of people who have detransitioned? The purported "wave of detransitioners" has failed to materialize, raising questions about the motive of continuing this narrative.

In the past three years, as bills targeting gender-affirming care for transgender youth have circulated through state legislatures, some anti-trans activists have thrown around staggering detransition rates—often claiming figures as high as 80% to 90%. These numbers have surfaced everywhere from Montana's legislative hearings on gender-affirming care bans to segments on Fox News. Chloe Cole herself has echoed these claims multiple times. Now, consider this: conservative estimates place the transgender population in the United States at over 1.5 million people. If these extremely high rates were accurate, we'd expect to see around 1.2 million detransitioners. Therapist offices would be slammed with people wanting to “change back,” hearing rooms would be packed to the brim with detransitioners, and prime time news-hour specials would feature… well, people other than Chloe Cole on a regular basis.

So when Seven News releases a special stating that they are going to cover “the most controversial topic ever covered,” featuring the same faces that we have seen in multiple ads across the world, people understandingly become skeptical. If detransitioners are so rare, why is Chloe Cole’s face the one they always use?

See the advertisement for this “groundbreaking special” here:

It's worth noting that Seven News didn't just recycle the same detransitioners commonly featured in other anti-trans specials to suggest a sweeping wave of detransitioning. The network also included images of a transgender individual who has not detransitioned, implicitly suggesting she regretted her transition. That particular segment has since been removed, with a channel spokesperson stating:

“We acknowledge the photo might inadvertently imply that the individual in question regretted their transition. As soon as we were made aware the image was removed and the promo replaced. We sincerely apologise for any confusion this may have caused.”

Efforts to substantiate a large-scale detransition phenomenon have repeatedly fallen flat, eroding the credibility of this argument against gender-affirming care. Earlier this year, Jamie Reed, an employee at a Missouri gender clinic, made several claims that have since been debunked about the treatment provided at the facility. Reed alleged that she maintained a "red flag" list of detransitioners. However, it has since come to light that the clinic has treated nearly 1,200 patients since 2018, and Reed's much-discussed "red flag" list featured only 16 individuals who had detransitioned—roughly 1% of the total patient population. Even Reed, a vocal critic of gender-affirming care for transgender youth willing to go public with a so-called "red flag" list, couldn't muster enough cases to support the claim. As a result, media coverage of Reed's allegations often sidesteps the detransition issue, choosing instead to focus on alleged "harms" of treatment.

The lack of a detransition wave has even played a key role in court cases. Earlier this year, when asked to substantiate the claim that gender affirming care results in youth who will eventually regret their decisions, the state of Florida ran into a problem. They could not find a single detransitioner in the state of Florida to support the claim. As a result, the judge in the case found the facts in favor of the plaintiffs opposing Florida’s gender affirming care ban. Even in a state as populous as Florida, which has over 90,000 transgender people according to expert estimates, detransitioners appear rare.

Florida fails to find a single detransitioner to support their case.

Critics opposed to transgender rights have offered various explanations for the conspicuous absence of detransitioners. One argument suggests that these individuals are too fearful to go public. However, this rationale strains believability. If detransition rates were as elevated as claimed, it's implausible that such a large number of people would go entirely unnoticed. In daily life, individuals would encounter detransitioners frequently—way more often than they would meet transgender people. Yet, there's no evidence to support this assertion.

Another claim often used as evidence is subreddit subscriber numbers. There exists a subreddit known as /r/detrans - the subreddit has roughly 50,000 subscribers. The numbers are often used to suggest a huge number of detransitioners, but in reality, polls of the community there have shown that the vast majority of subscribers are not detrans themselves, but rather people who are interested in the topic (often for political reasons).

See this poll:

Poll of /r/detrans users

In the face of minimal evidence to support widespread detransitioning, a closer look at the available data becomes essential. Surveys consistently report a high degree of consistency in transgender identities—for trans youth who have received gender affirming care, 97.5% continue to identify with their gender identity five years later. Research specifically examining detransition rates often reveals that only about 1-2% of transgender youth actually detransition. Furthermore, a recent study on gender-affirming top surgery found it difficult to locate any individuals who regretted the procedure, recording median satisfaction scores of a perfect 5 out of 5.

Among the limited number of people who do detransition, there's a compelling reason they are rarely featured on television or testifying in courtrooms and legislative sessions—they do not fit the anti-trans detransitioner narrative so often pushed. According to a 2015 survey, most detransitioners didn't revert because they concluded they were "no longer trans." Instead, they most often pointed to factors such as job loss, reduced income, absence of family support, and a worsening political climate as the impetus for their decision. Significantly, 62% of those who did detransition eventually chose to retransition.

Considering this, it's clear why the anticipated wave of detransitioners, as foretold by critics of transgender rights, has not come to fruition—at least not in the manner they predicted. States like Florida and Missouri are forcing detransitioning on transgender youth and even some adults. Unable to find individuals who detransitioned voluntarily, these states have enacted laws to artificially create what didn't occur naturally: a cohort of detransitioners driven not by choice, but by legal mandate. When media coverage discusses detransitioning, these coerced individuals are frequently overlooked, and it's their lives that are most detrimentally affected by the perpetuated narrative.