World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Files

Obviously I can't discuss your friends' child specifically. But at that age, my own nephew (a hyperactive child) used to insist that he could fly, if only he could get a Batman cape. My sister was genuinely quite worried that he would actually jump out of an upstairs window to test that. This is a child who was climbing before he could walk, so it was far from impossible.

Another child (not his brother) was a puppy, on and off, for weeks or months. Did he believe it? Who knows. He loved (still does love) dogs and wanted to be one. I'm sure the desire to be a puppy was real.

The point being that nobody took that to be literally true, and that role playing/testing the limits of reality eventually wore off. Little girls who won't wear dresses, or won't wear pink, or little boys who clop around the house in their mother's shoes are only doing the same thing. That wasn't an issue for most parents until recently, and again it generally wore off.

But there is no theory of child psychology which contains the notion of an inherent gender in a child. It's a recent invention by trans activists.

In all the work done by actual child psychologists like Piaget or Montessori etc, they never observed a transgender child. If these have always existed, then presumably all theories of child psychology are now for the bin, since all those groundbreaking child psychologists were all so wrong?

This isn't just about them failing to see something - their theories are about how the child gradually develops a sense of self, including gender. They all say that it is not until adolescence that a child "breaks away" from its parents (or mother, depending on the theory) to develop its own idea of itself, again including gender. That doesn't mean a child can't suffer from gender dysphoria - there are lots of reasons why they may be unhappy with their body. But they aren't actually the opposite sex, and they can't become that sex.

Do you have any quantitative data? What is the percentage of children who wanted to transition that changed their mind at puberty?

Well I don't have it all to hand, and don't really have the time to start looking just now. But you could look up information about the Dutch protocol if you're interested, and how/why they started giving puberty blockers experimentally. There's plenty online. But here are a couple that discuss that point:

Reconsidering Informed Consent for Trans-Identified Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults

There have been eleven research studies to date indicating a high rate of resolution of gender incongruence in children by late adolescence or young adulthood without medical interventions (Cantor, Citation2020; Ristori & Steensma, Citation2016; Singh et al., Citation2021). An attempt has been made to discount the applicability of this research, suggesting that the studies were based on merely gender non-conforming, rather than truly gender-dysphoric, children (Temple Newhook et al., Citation2018). However, a reanalysis of the data prompted by this critique confirmed the initial finding: Among children meeting the diagnostic criteria for “Gender Identity Disorder” in DSM-IV (currently “Gender Dysphoria in DSM-5), 67% were no longer gender-dysphoric as adults; the rate of natural resolution for gender dysphoria was 93% for children whose gender dysphoria was significant but subthreshold for the DSM diagnosis (Zucker, et al., Citation2018). It should be noted that high resolution of childhood-onset gender dysphoria had been recorded before the practice of social transition of young children was endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics (Rafferty et al., Citation2018). It is possible that social transition will predispose a young person to persistence of transgender identity long-term (Zucker, Citation2020).

(I'm pretty sure that last sentence is not a good thing, by the way - it means it becomes much harder for children who have been allowed to think they were the opposite sex before puberty to then desist during puberty, as would normally happen.)

I've bolded Thomas Steensma who was the lead researcher who set up the Dutch protocol in case you're interested in looking up the original protocol. He is on record since then as decrying the way other gender clinics have all blindly adopted their experimental protocol without doing their own testing, which is what should normally happen in such a situation:

The Cass report found that the Tavistock's own data showed that over 90% of children prescribed puberty blockers go on to cross sex hormones - even if we take the lowest rate possible for those who weren't given puberty blockers, which is around 2/3 desist and 1/3 don't, that means we go from 33% to 90% - for a treatment that was only intended to give "time to think" - not to identify and treat children diagnosed as needing cross sex hormones. That wasn't the basis on which the treatment was developed in the Netherlands.

And that's 11 years old, so not a lot better, especially in a domain where things are changing very rapidly, especially the profile of children consulting for gender dysphoria. Maybe more recent studies are available?

(The Dutch protocol was developed for mainly male children without other mental health issues, expressing gender dysphoria from a young age, but very rapidly was being used elsewhere for a mainly female population with multiple mental health issues,whose gender dysphoria had often appeared at adolescence. So in 2014 - which population were they looking at?)

Ans: the study I linked to above (Reconsidering informed consent) goes into that in some detail, and shows that the 2014 results were misleading for a number of reasons, including that the scales used to measure improvement in mood were not really applicable. The actual results are far less positive than your abstract suggests.

In 2014, the Dutch research team published a key longitudinal study of mental health outcomes of 55 youths who completed medical and surgical transition (de Vries et al., Citation2014). The 2014 paper (sometimes referred to as the “Dutch study”) reported that for youth with severe gender dysphoria that started in early childhood and persisted into mid-adolescence, a sequence of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and breast and genital surgeries (including a mandatory removal of the ovaries, uterus and testes), with ongoing extensive psychological support, was associated with positive mental health and overall function 1.5 years post-surgery.

While the Dutch reported resolution of gender dysphoria post-surgery in study subjects, the reported psychological improvements were quite modest (de Vries et al., Citation2014). Of the 30 psychological measurements reported, nearly half showed no statistically significant improvements, while the changes in the other half were marginally clinically significant at best (Malone, D’Angelo, et al., Citation2021). The scores in anxiety, depression, and anger did not improve. The change in the Children’s Global Assessment Scale, which measures overall function, was one of the most impressive changes—however it too remained in the same range before and after treatment (de Vries et al., Citation2014).

Problematic discordance between reduced gender dysphoria and lack of meaningful improvements in psychological measures

The discordance between the marked reduction in gender dysphoria, as measured by the UGDS (Utrecht Gender Dysphoria Scale), and the lack of meaningful changes in psychological function using standard measures, warrants further examination. There are three plausible explanations for this lack of agreement. Any one of these three explanations calls into question the widely assumed notion that the medical interventions significantly improve mental health or lessen or eradicate gender dysphoria.

I gave a link that explained in great detail why the 2014 study was not nearly as clearly positive as you claimed. And your 2023 link doesn't say so either:

Conclusion: 

Trajectories in diagnostic evaluation and medical treatment in children and adolescents referred for gender dysphoria are diverse. Initiating medical treatment and need for surgical procedures depends on not only personal characteristics but societal and legal factors as well.

That's a "nothing" conclusion there. Even less positive than the 2014 one.

I wonder why.

Inherent gender identity in children. As I said.

If you think that concept is not a recent invention, which of the accepted theories of child psychology describe it please? Just one will do.

You wanted numbers on rates of desistance with and without puberty blockers. I gave you some. Any comment on those?

The first part describes exactly the problem that I've already raised: the Dutch protocol was developed for one cohort but in practice was being used on a very different cohort, hence its results are not reliable. The link I gave explains in some detail why they are not reliable. You haven't read it apparently, or if you have, are ignoring it.

Those are not results by the way, they're mostly a description of the criteria for treatment and a summary of the treatments.