If Tannehill, Serano, and other critics of the desistance literature
like Kristina Olson and Lily Durwood in Slate are correct and the kids at the GIC and the Amsterdam clinic were really just gender nonconforming — if they were little boys who liked to do ballet and play with dolls, for example, but didn’t otherwise express any discomfort with being boys — then these critics would be right to suspect that the desistance literature is misleading. It would be garbage-in, garbage-out thing: If you aren’t studying kids who really had gender dysphoria in the first place, your followup data about them isn’t going to tell you much.
But is that really what was happening? At the time of Singh’s dissertation and her subjects’ treatment at the GIC, gender dysphoria was captured by the
DSM-IV entry for what was then called “gender identity disorder,” which has since been renamed, in the
DSM-5, to the less pathologizing “gender dysphoria.” Singh notes that of the 139 participants she successfully contacted for followup, “88 (63.3%) met diagnostic criteria for GID in childhood and the remaining 51 (36.7%) were subthreshold for the diagnosis,” which is close to the 70 percent figure Zucker and his colleagues
have noted when describing the GID’s patient population overall. (I Twitter DMed Tannehill to ask where she got her “72 percent” and “90 percent” numbers from. She said she was extrapolating from a set of 12 random patient charts examined during the investigation of Zucker’s clinic. But there’s no need to extrapolate like this, since we have the actual percentages for both Singh’s study and the broader patient population. Tannehill has since removed those figures from her article.)
