The 1% regret rate in gender medicine is the biggest red flag of all. The strongest possible indicator that research in the field is garbage.
Activists expect us to believe that a man having his penis inverted, which creates an open wound that must be dilated for the rest of his life, has a 1% regret rate.
That women who have appendages made out of their forearms sewn onto their groins — a surgery with astronomically high complication rates — has a 1% regret rate.
That adolescent girls having medically unnecessary bilateral mastectomies at an age when the desire to be a mother and breastfeed is incomprehensible has a 1% regret rate.
Absolutely impossible. Precisely zero chance this could ever be true.
The explanation is multi-fold.
First, no one loses all their friends and gets death threats for saying that they regret knee surgery.
Second, "gender affirming" clinicians do precisely zero follow-up. Just chop off healthy body parts and disfigure genitals and then send the person off on their way. No concern for what comes of them.
Then, there's the psychological factor. The power of irrevocability. When a decision cannot be undone, we are powerfully motivated to keep telling ourselves it was the right one. The self-deception is strong.
The Dutch noted this in their follow-up study of the first wave of men to partake in this experiment. In a 1988 paper, they observed that the men reported being happy even though no actual change in their life situation was observed.
This led the researchers to consider the possibility that in an effort to reduce cognitive dissonance, the participants “simply cannot accept the notion that all has been in vain. The self-reported happiness may have been distorted wishful thinking.”
But this wasn't enough to end the experiment. In fact, the failures noted in this study are what caused the Dutch to turn their attention to children in the hopes of producing more pleasing cosmetic results.