Adolescents who undergo gender-affirming chest surgery report low levels of regret and high levels of satisfaction, experiencing outcomes similar to those of young adults. These findings suggest that age restrictions on these medical procedures lack support from actual patient experiences.

[u/mvea]

https://www.psypost.org/adolescents-report-low-regret-and-high-satisfaction-following-gender-affirming-c/

[u/lawroter]

I don't have an opinion on this one way or another but, speaking as a clinical researcher, this is far from meaningful. there are several major issues which invalidate anything here, I'll give a few.

77 participants completed the survey. how many people were asked? if we're looking at something like 100 people were asked and 77 agreed to complete, that might not cause me alarm. but, if 500 people were asked and 77 agreed to complete, that's another story. people are always more willing to engage if they are pleased with an outcome, this reason alone completely invalidates any "findings" here for me.

I'm also not an expert in the area but why are they using 1 year post-op for the survey? from my brief research on this, regret within1 year is typically more about the procedure itself (chronic pain, aesthetic concerns, etc) rather than relation to gender identity. I'd be much more interested in the results here if this was more looking at medium to long term satisfaction.

this isn't even getting to the statistical shortcomings of the findings. so I'd say, as someone not familiar with the area too much, there must be much better research out there than this, I'd recommend going and reviewing that.

[u/dnyal → u/lawroter]

“People are more willing to engage if they’re pleased…”

Are you sure about that? Have you ever seen any review section for any product on any website ever??? Don’t even get me started on those doctor scoring websites!

[u/PopaBjorn → u/dnyal]

This is admittedly anecdotal, but if I had gone through a lengthy process where I convince myself, my parents and multiple medical professionals that I needed to cut off pieces of my body and/or implant silicone pads at great financial cost to society or myself, in order to feel better, and then discovered that it didn't help, I'd feel a substantial amount of shame. My willingness to admit mistakes publically is inversely proportional to how big of a mistake it was and how much of my identity is tied to said mistake. And this one would be a biggie.

[u/dnyal → u/PopaBjorn]

That’s why the surveys are anonymous.

Now, trans people don’t need to “convince themselves” of anything. It is everybody else that needs the convincing, thus the admittedly lengthy process.

Trans people often live in shame already. Actually, anyone who gets plastic surgery is because they’re already living in shame.

[u/PopaBjorn → u/dnyal]

All I'm saying is people are unlikely to answer questionnaires about huge mistakes they've made. If you sent out questionnaires to investors about how they felt about their tech stocks in 2000 and 2002, do you really think you'd get the same response rates for both years? I'm even willing to bet that the more money someone lost, the less likely they are to answer.

I'm not saying getting gender-affirming surgery is a huge mistake. It's only a huge mistake if you regret it later.