Summary

In this 2016 blog post, Cantor asked whether children with gender distress stay trans as they grow up. He listed every follow-up study he knew of, 11 in all, from Lebovitz (1972) to Steensma and colleagues (2013). For each, he gave how many children still had gender distress and how many did not. He wrote that despite different countries, decades and methods, the studies agree: only a small minority still want to transition by adulthood, roughly 60% to 90% do not, and most of them turn out gay or lesbian. The post is a handy plain-language list of the older research, and its sources can be checked. But it is not a formal review. It has no search method, no quality rating and no combined figure. The studies used older diagnoses and were mostly of boys. The post also does not discuss published criticism of how 'growing out of it' was defined and counted.

Key findings

• Cantor lists 11 follow-up studies of children seen for gender non-conforming behaviour or gender distress, published from 1972 to 2013, and says three were large.
• The post concludes that roughly 60% to 90% of children seen at such clinics no longer identified as trans by their teens or adulthood.
• In the largest studies listed, gender distress continued in 17 of 139 (Singh, Toronto boys), 47 of 127 (Steensma and colleagues, Amsterdam) and 21 of 54 (Wallien and Cohen-Kettenis), or about 12% to 39%.
• Cantor writes that most children who grew out of gender distress grew up gay or lesbian rather than straight.
• The post was written in January 2016 in response to the closure of the CAMH child gender clinic in Toronto.
• Several of the older studies are very small (5 to 16 children) and most studied only boys; Drummond and colleagues followed 25 girls, and the two Dutch studies included both sexes.
• The Singh (2012) study was then an unpublished PhD thesis; it was later published in 2021 by Singh, Bradley and Zucker in Frontiers in Psychiatry.

Abstract

Following the closure of the CAMH Gender Identity Clinic for children, this blog post reviews what the science says about whether children who identify as transgender remain transgender into adulthood. The post summarizes three large-scale follow-up studies and several smaller ones, all examining the outcomes of children referred to gender identity clinics. The studies span different countries, cultures, decades, and follow-up lengths and methods.

Conclusion

Despite the differences in country, culture, decade, and follow-up length and method, all the studies have come to a remarkably similar conclusion: Only very few trans- kids still want to transition by the time they are adults. Instead, they generally turn out to be regular gay or lesbian folks. The exact number varies by study, but roughly 60 – 90% of trans- kids turn out no longer to be trans by adulthood.