A Response to the Trump White House's Politicization of Trans Healthcare
Nature reports that the Trump White House has directed the NIH to study "regret" after gender transition. After cancelling nearly every legitimate, life-saving NIH project on transgender health. After dismantling research that protects our communities, improves outcomes, and prevents suicide. And now, with the economy in freefall and a trade war of their own making unraveling beneath them this is the distraction they're betting will hide the wreckage?
Let's be clear. This isn't about care. This is about cover.
They want science to serve a narrative, not a community. And the story they're trying to tell has nothing to do with truth. It has everything to do with distraction.
"Bring It Up, Because You Can't Lose"
We don't have to guess what this is really about. Trump said it himself.
"But about a week before the election, bring it up, because you can't lose", Trump gleefully instructed Republicans about trans issues.
This is not strategy. It is scapegoating. A failed trade war, surging inflation, and economic collapse brought on by erratic tariffs and isolationist posturing and his solution is to target trans people.
When the economy fails, the fascists don't admit fault. They manufacture enemies.
This demand for a “study” on regret is not a good faith effort to understand. It is the calculated deployment of pseudoscience in the service of political survival.
The Musk Effect: Misogyny, Misrule, and Malice
Let's not pretend Trump is acting alone. Whispering in the regime's ear is Elon Musk, tech oligarch turned far-right mouthpiece, whose obsession with "wokeness" metastasized the moment his own trans daughter dared to speak the truth about him. Her courage exposed not only his personal failures, but the hollowness of his masculinity.
"I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that, and we're making some progress", Musk boasts to journalists, after his own trans daughter dared to speak the truth about him.
To Musk, "progress" means spreading transphobia, causing confusion in public conversations, and pushing lies into government policy. This isn't about beliefs. It's about his pride. One man couldn't control his estranged daughter, so now he's taking it out on all of us.
When billionaires' wounded pride becomes policy, trans lives become casualties. And make no mistake, they know exactly what they're doing.
The Real Numbers Tell a Very Different Story
Here is what actual, peer-reviewed research has to say:
(We advise downloading these to your local device promptly, as they may be censored at any time.)
- A 2024 study found regret was still low. Overall regret was 1.94%. For trans women, 4.0% regretted it. For trans men, only 0.8%.
- A 2021 study looked at 27 reports with nearly 8,000 transgender people who had surgery. Only 1% said they regretted it. For trans men, regret was under 1%. For trans women, about 1%.
- A review of 15 studies looked at over 7,000 young people and adults. 0.8–7.4% changed their mind before starting treatment. 1–7.6% stopped puberty blockers. 1.6–9.8% stopped hormone therapy.
- As techniques have been perfected, the risk of long-term complications has fallen to less than 1% in male-to-female patients (Perovic 2000, Jarolím 2009, Wu 2009). This follows the pattern of regret rates falling as well.
- A 2021 analysis of data drawn from the U.S. Transgender Survey, encompassing 27,715 transgender individuals, revealed that among those who had experienced detransition, 82.5% cited at least one external factor as a driving influence. Notably, frequently reported pressures included familial coercion and societal stigma, underscoring the profound impact of external forces on such deeply personal decisions.
Compare that to surgeries commonly done on cisgender people, which face no political backlash or public scrutiny:
- 5 to 9 percent regret after breast augmentation.
- 10 to 33 percent in body contouring.
- 30 percent after prostate removal.
- 19.5 percent after bariatric surgery.
- 7 percent of people regret having children.
- 16.2 percent regret getting tattoos.
And yet here they are — singularly obsessed with the least regretted major surgery in modern medicine. Why? Because it's not about medicine. It's about misdirection.
More reading:
What Science Is and What It Isn't
Let's remind ourselves: science is not a religion and it is not a weapon for the powerful. It is not there to affirm your feelings, your fears, or your ideology. Real science exists to challenge your assumptions. It asks hard questions. It tests even the ideas we cling to most tightly. It follows the evidence, even when that evidence is inconvenient to those in charge.
Science isn't supposed to confirm your stereotypes, it's supposed to illuminate what we've ignored. It shines a light into the dark corners of what we think we know and says: let's find the truth, not comfort.
That is why authoritarian regimes fear it, and why they are always trying to bend it into something else. Something obedient.
But truth does not obey.
Real Science Grows in Community
Science was never meant to serve authoritarianism. It was meant to serve people. It thrives when it is collaborative, ethical and guided by those it impacts. Trans researchers, community health workers and affirming providers have been building a better world for decades. Not for profit, not for power, but for survival.
We ask real questions:
How do we protect our youth?
How do we prevent suicide?
How do we heal, live, thrive?
But those aren't the questions this administration wants answered. They're too inconvenient. Too human.
They Fear That We're Free
The Trump administration doesn't fear "regrets."
They fear the autonomy that transition represents.
They fear people who choose to live outside the rigid hierarchies that fuel their power.
Because trans people, by our very existence, defy authoritarian logic.
- We say: identity is not assigned. Gender is not a prison. Bodies are not state property.
- We say: we get to choose what wholeness looks like. What liberation feels like.
And that terrifies them.
You Want to Study Regret?
Then start with your own.
Regret tanking the economy with unhinged tariffs.
Regret canceling life-saving studies to score headlines.
Regret letting tech oligarchs whisper hate into policy.
Regret underestimating our power.
Regret the policies that strained relations with key allies and trading partners. Regret thinking you could turn us into a distraction and we wouldn't push back harder, louder, and together.
We know the truth. We are the truth.
And we don't need your permission to live.