CHANGE (IT BACK): Transgender detransition is a taboo topic, but data shows it’s on the rise.

In 2017, Dr. Kinnon MacKinnon, an assistant professor of social work at York University in Toronto, thought that transgender detransitioning wasn’t really a thing. Sure, a few people who undergo gender-affirming therapy halt or undo their medical interventions and re-identify as their birth sex, but they are so few in number that their experiences don’t even merit study. After all, doing so might provide empirical firepower to anti-trans forces, he reasoned.

Six years later, Mackinnon, a transgender man, has significantly shifted his stance on detransition. In the past few years, research, including his own, has shown that rates of discontinuing or reversing gender-affirming medical or surgical interventions are likely higher than thought. Even worse, some academics still refuse to study or acknowledge the matter at all, as he once did.

To do so would bust a very profitable narrative.

More to the point, there hasn’t been an explosion in young people actually suffering from gender dysphoria. What we have instead are untold numbers of adolescents, usually girls, going through the usual difficulties with puberty. Instead of being told their issues are normal and transitory, they’re being encouraged to make permanent changes to their bodies through hormones and surgery.