[d6e]

Those studies were mostly from the 80s-2000s when things were really different. Kids were often referred just for being gender nonconforming (like boys playing with dolls), not necessarily having serious gender dysphoria. Plus the treatment back then was often trying to make kids more "gender typical" - which obviously might push some kids toward appearing to "desist" even if they still had gender issues. Many of the kids in those studies didn't even meet what we'd now consider the criteria for gender dysphoria. So saying "80% of trans kids desist" might be more like "80% of gender nonconforming kids don't turn out to be trans" - which is pretty different.

[Manuel_D]

The majority of the sample met the criteria for gender dysphoria as listed in the DSM. Gender non-conforming behavior is just one criterion, multiple of which need to be met to categorized as gender dysphoric. This is the same set of criteria that a medical professional would use to approve a patient for puberty blockers.

The predominant approach back then was not to suppress incongruent gender identity. The approach was to take a neutral stance and neither foster not suppress the patient's gender identity, called "watchful waiting".

[d6e]

> The predominant approach back then was not to suppress incongruent gender identity. The approach was to take a neutral stance and neither foster not suppress the patient's gender identity, called "watchful waiting".

The clinic involved in this study actively was known for conversion therapy. Zenneth Zucker is one of the authors and is famous for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Zucker#Therapeutic_int...

The head of the child and adolescent gender identity clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Dr. Kenneth Zucker, has made a career promising the parents of intersexed and transgender children that he can make them “normal”. His method, called reparative therapy, in which children are pushed into assigned gender roles and discouraged from behaving or dressing in a way that’s counter to their ‘assigned’ sex, was once standard practice, but in recent years, has been increasingly scrutinized. A 2003 report in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry called his techniques “something disturbingly close to reparative therapy for homosexuals,” and author Phyllis Burke has questioned the idea that transgendered children should be treated as mentally ill, saying, “The diagnosis of GID in children, as supported by Zucker and [his colleague J. Michael Bailey] Bradley, is simply child abuse.”

https://www.queerty.com/dr-kenneth-zuckers-war-on-transgende...

I imagine a conversion therapy clinic would issue a study that their conversion therapy works. I wonder how long those kids stayed "desisted" or if they were just pressured into the closet again only to transition later in life.