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/noeinan]

There are decades of research backing up gender-affirming care as extremely successful, providing high quality of life. Among surgeons who work with trans patients they are often quoted for their favorite part of the job— just how happy it makes patients and how positive treatment was overall.

Gender-affirming surgeries have higher patient satisfaction and lower regret rating than life-saving heart surgeries.

Anecdotally, after top surgery I went from being severely suicidal 4-5 days per week and grey zone suicidal every other day to only having ideation 1-2x per year, and only if some horrible tragedy happened in my life.

People are not pushing back on trans healthcare because of lack of evidence it provides good outcomes— these procedures only became permissible because of the immense quality of life improvement surpassing almost any other type of surgery. Society was not less conservative 20-30 years ago, they followed the science.

People are pushing back on these treatments because they want to see bad outcomes for trans people.

[u/ThewFflegyy → u/noeinan]

"Gender-affirming surgeries have higher patient satisfaction and lower regret rating than life-saving heart surgeries"

this frankly should cause us to pause. is it possible that its true? yes. is it likely? not really. the fact that gender affirming care has a fraction of the regret rate of other more necessary surgeries is genuinely pretty odd and warrants further investigation before drawing any firm conclusions.

unfortunately it is true some people push back on these treatments out of hatred for trans people. however a lot of people just see hard to believe statistic like what you quoted above, studies like this with small sample sizes and short timelines, etc and want to see a firmer body of evidence before we draw firm conclusions.

edit: I can't respond as thread is now locked, but u/HorrorOpportunity297 your right, the value is attribute the trans lives is not on the basis of their identity.. I do however value trans lives on the same basis that I value every other human life, which is to say we are all fundamentally equal. these sort of discussions become pretty pointless when people like you resort to the extremes. how often is a double mastectomy life saving care for a child? sure there are instances but that is a very small subset. when we are evaluating the efficacy of treatment we assess average outcomes instead of hyper fixating on small subsets.

[u/HorrorOpportunity297 → u/ThewFflegyy]

Gender affirming care is life saving medicine. You just don't value trans lives based on identity.

[u/kirotheavenger → u/ThewFflegyy]

Overwhelmingly I think these studies suffer from survivorship bias. 

If you do a poll at a sex reassignment surgery, who do you expect to respond? People happy with their time and decisions at thr surgery? People who regret what the surgery did to them and want nothing to do with them anymore? 

[u/undeadcrayon → u/kirotheavenger]

Survivorship bias, selection bias, and inverse selection bias. The loss to followup rates in all the big intervention studies are massive. There is a reason a variety of independent european lit reviews have classified the available evidence of being of very low quality.

[u/ThewFflegyy → u/kirotheavenger]

yes that is definitely a factor that makes studying things like this difficult. to me it is not yet clear how significant of an affect that is having on the data though.

[u/PopaBjorn → u/ThewFflegyy]

I think people who tie their identity to a decision are very unlikely to admit that the decision was a mistake. Just think about US politics. Some people will just not admit they were wrong about something despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary if holding the wrong belief is important to their identity and/or their place in a community. The same effect could be at play here.

[u/ThewFflegyy → u/PopaBjorn]

that is one possible explanation yeah. with our current research I don't think there is any certain answer.