The Detransition Wave: What Developmental Psychology Predicted All Along

X posts from EBSWA member @prof_curiosity

The rates of detransition - reversing a gender transition and returning to one's biological sex - are growing rapidly, particularly among young women who transitioned in their teens. Forums for detransitioners now number in the tens of thousands. The phenomenon is not surprising. Five foundational frameworks in developmental psychology effectively predicted it. Their common message: adolescence is characterised by social contagion, conformity pressure, and identity instability. Gender identity ideology both ignored all of this and then exploited it, and young people are paying the price.

Bandura: Social Contagion is Not Self Knowledge 

Bandura showed that adolescents construct identity primarily through observing and imitating others, not through genuine introspection. Online communities have created a near perfect reinforcement loop: transition narratives earn affirmation, community membership, and status. Behaviours adopted through social modelling rather than authentic self knowledge are prone to revision when the individual escapes the modelling environment.

The documented clustering of transgender identification in female peer groups, consistent with Lisa Littman's research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, is a textbook Bandura phenomenon. Gender identity theory, which treats self report as the sole diagnostic criterion, has no framework for distinguishing real distress from socially transmitted identity.

Kohlberg: Conformity Is Not Conviction 

Kohlberg established that adolescents reason at the conventional level, they make decisions to secure peer approval, not from independent reflection. Post conventional reasoning, which involves genuinely autonomous judgement, develops only in late adolescence and adulthood. A teenager immersed in communities that celebrate transition and frame hesitation as bigotry is operating under conditions of maximal conventional pressure. Treating that teenager's self report as a reliable clinical guide is a category error. Gender identity theory conflates conformity with conviction.

Kohlberg's fifty years of empirical research show they are categorically different things.

Vygotsky: Ideological Scaffolding Shapes, Then Traps

Vygotsky showed that development is shaped by the interpretive frameworks - the scaffold - provided by one's social environment. A young person whose every expression of distress is channelled through the single lens of gender incongruence, with all alternative explanations excluded, will construct a self understanding built from those tools. This is not support; it is ideological capture. When detransitioners describe how affirmation only environments made it impossible to consider other explanations for their suffering - trauma, autism, depression, homophobia - they are describing Vygotsky's scaffold failure. The language of gender identity does not merely describe inner experience. It constructs it.

Erikson and Marcia: Foreclosure Has Consequences

Erikson identified adolescence as requiring a protected moratorium, a period of identity experimentation before commitment. Marcia operationalised this: identities adopted without prior exploration (foreclosure) are predictably unstable and prone to crisis in adulthood. The gender medicine pathway abolishes the moratorium entirely, moving distressed teenagers toward hormones and surgery as though these were routine interventions.

The detransition wave is the deferred moratorium asserting itself in adulthood, the identity work that should have occurred at fifteen happening at twenty five instead, with permanent physical consequences already in place.

Conclusion

These five empirical theories converge on the same verdict: the conditions under which a generation of young people has been encouraged to medically transition are precisely the conditions developmental psychology identifies as most likely to produce regret. Gender identity ideology proceeded as though a century of research on adolescent vulnerability did not exist. The detransition wave is the empirical reply. It will grow larger, and the reckoning - clinical, legal, and ethical - is only beginning.

Seeking Transition Following Trauma:

When a child has suffered abuse, and, as a response, takes on a transgender identity, the harm they suffer is compounded. How? There is harm that arises from: - The original abuse not been taken seriously and being regarded as "gender incongruence". The long term impacts of untreated trauma in children are well understood. - Social transitioning, puberty blockers, and cross sex hormones. The harms associated with "gender affirmative care" are likewise also well understood now. Thus, the child is harmed by the decision to affirm what is in effect a protective form of magical thinking rather than dealing with the root cause of the distress, which triggered the desire to "transition". And harmed by the subsequent medical procedures to treat the symptoms. This harmful outcome of transitioning children is so blindingly obvious I can not understand why it is still ignored.