[bletchp]

Gay people don't require any medical interventions to be gay, so it's not really the same thing.

If the transgender identity is innate, why are there so many detransitioners coming out recently? Something has clearly gone very wrong.

[sverona]

This is a base rate error. There are so many more trans people recently because it became socially acceptable to be openly trans somewhere around 2014. The watershed moment was probably Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Time.

Even among those of us who detrans (on the order of magnitude of 1%), at least 95% do so not because they were wrong, but because coming out invited reprisals which made their life too difficult to continue (losing home, family, job, etc.) The first study I was able to find puts that proportion at 97.6%. [0] My Fermi estimate puts your "so many" at one in 5000 or so.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8213007/

[theprincess]

> Gay people don't require any medical interventions to be gay, so it's not really the same thing.

Many homophobes have made "medical" arguments about why sodomy should be banned. Aids was seen as a "gay disease" and as proof of how homosexuality caused and spread diseases. A good friend of mine's mother refused to have her hair done by a gay man in our small town because she said she was scared he may cut his hand while cutting her hair and give her hepatitis or aids (what's more, she was a nurse).

Beyond that, pathologization of gender non-conformity is why homosexuality was classed as an illness until relatively recently, and it's been a common source of medicalized discrimination shared by gay and trans people.

> why are there so many detransitioners coming out recently

Because the same few are being trotted about by conservative media outlets and political action committees to stir up hate.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/former-detransitioner-fights-anti-...

good info here too:

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/media-s-detransition...

A study showing the rate of desistance in trans youth, using more recent cohorts, showing that it still hovers around 2% where it has basically always been:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S188898912...

tl;dr 98% of trans youth are well served by receiving medical care and 2% are not. Conservative media blows up coverage on the 2% in order to try to ban treatment for that other 98% instead of doing the sane and humane thing, which would be to try to screen out more of the 2% from getting care and allowing that 98% live happy lives.