Overview

Not everyone who stops a transition has changed their mind about being trans. Some people stop hormones, go back to their birth name or start living as their birth sex again because the people or conditions around them made continuing too hard: a parent who found the hormones, a lost job and the health insurance that came with it, harassment in the street, a clinic that closed, or a new law. Many of these people still think of themselves as trans, and many later resume transition.

This page covers what the research says, why the major studies disagree, the kinds of pressure people describe, detransitioning versus pausing, and what it means to be detransitioned but still trans-identified.

Key terms

A few distinctions run through everything below.

• External factor: a pressure that comes from outside the person, such as family, an employer, money, the law or harassment. The study that made this term familiar defined it as "any forces outside the person that lead to detransition", giving pressure from family, pressure from an employer and loss of insurance cover as examples (Turban et al. 2021).
• Internal factor: a reason that comes from the person themselves, such as doubts about their gender identity, a change in how they understand their distress, or health concerns about the treatment.
• Core and non-core detransition: a typology proposed by the psychologist Pablo Expósito-Campos. In core (primary) detransition, the person stops identifying as trans. In non-core (secondary) detransition, they stop or reverse transition for other reasons but continue to identify as trans. His examples of non-core reasons include discrimination, trouble getting a job, health problems, wanting to become a parent, and feeling content with the changes already made (Expósito-Campos 2021).
• Pausing and retransition: a temporary stop, usually meant to be resumed, and resuming transition after a detransition (see retransition).

The word "detransition" itself is used in two ways, which is the root of much of the argument. A trans man on /r/ftm put it like this:

Detransition as a verb has always included people forced back into the closet, going off HRT for health reasons, etc. As a noun I've seen it used both ways, depending on who is speaking. —noeinan, ftm

A detransitioned woman on /r/detrans made the same point from the other side:

There are two types of detransitioners: 1. People who transitioned, realized it wasn't for them/they were mistake, and then detransitioned. 2. People who are trans and previously used to make that a public fact but due to fear they have to conceal their identity and stop efforts to transition publicly … Both types of people use the word "Detransition" but they are entirely different concepts —PocketGoblix, detrans female

The evidence

Turban et al. 2021: the US Transgender Survey

The most cited study on this question is a secondary analysis, by the psychiatrist Jack Turban and colleagues at the Fenway Institute, of the 2015 US Transgender Survey (USTS). The USTS is a large online survey of trans and non-binary adults run by a trans advocacy organisation (now Advocates for Trans Equality); it is a nonprobability survey, meaning respondents chose to take part rather than being randomly sampled.

Of 27,715 respondents, 17,151 had pursued some form of gender affirmation, defined broadly. Of those, 2,242 (13.1%) said they had ever "detransitioned", meaning they had gone back to living as their birth sex "at least for a while". Among them, 82.5% cited at least one external factor and 15.9% cited at least one internal factor (Turban et al. 2021).

Detransition in this sample was more common among people of male sex, non-binary people, bisexual people, people whose families were unsupportive, and people who had never taken hormones or had surgery. The authors argued that stigma acts as an obstacle to living as trans, and that their findings show detransition and regret are not the same thing.

The study has real strengths: it is very large, and it asked people directly. Its limitations are just as important:

• Everyone in it was trans-identified when surveyed. The authors state that it "does not offer insights" into people who now identify with their sex, so they were excluded by design (Cohn 2023).
• "Detransition" was defined loosely. Living as one's birth sex "for a while" covers a week at a relative's house as well as a permanent change, and many respondents had never taken hormones.
• Classification choices. All but three response options were counted as external, including "It was just too hard for me", the second most common answer, which could be either.
• The authors' own caveat. External pressures can produce internal doubts, and some people "may later come to understand" internal reasons as externally driven. The reverse also happens, as accounts below show.

The 2022 US Trans Survey

The 2022 USTS, with more than 84,000 adult respondents, repeated the question. Of respondents who had transitioned, 9% said they had gone back to living as their birth sex at some point. Among them, the most common reasons were that it was "just too hard to be trans in my community" (41%), pressure from a parent (37%), harassment or discrimination (33%), "I thought my dysphoria would get better, but it did not" (29%), not being able to afford transition-related care (28%), and pressure from other family members (24%). The report concludes that 82% did so because of "social and structural factors", and that 4% said they had realised transition was not for them (USTS 2022 Health and Wellbeing Report, advocacy organisation).

The same limitation applies: the survey only included people who identified as trans or non-binary when they took it. The 4% figure is therefore the share of currently trans people who once thought transition was not for them and then changed their minds again. It says nothing about people who stopped and stayed stopped.

MacKinnon et al. 2022: interviews in Canada

The social work researcher Kinnon MacKinnon and colleagues interviewed 28 people in Canada who had discontinued or reversed a medical transition (MacKinnon et al. 2022). The sample was deliberately broad: it included people who had returned to identifying with their sex and people who still identified as trans or non-binary. Reasons included physical and mental health concerns, surgical complications, "unsupportive parents or romantic partners", employment discrimination, and difficulty getting appointments during COVID-19 lockdowns or in poorly served parts of the country.

Some participants described family forcing them to stop:

So one day [my parents] found my HRT [hormone replacement therapy] and made me stop taking it and quit contact with the doctor I was seeing in the clinic… I was [on hormones] for about four months and then I was caught and I stopped for a year. — a transgender woman interviewed in (MacKinnon et al. 2022)

The authors note that every participant whose family pushed them to stop later sought care again, and that this pattern occurred among younger people living with unsupportive families. A second paper from the same 28 interviews introduced a useful distinction between external regret (regret arising from outside pressure on one's transition, or from failures of the care system) and internal regret (regret arising from within) (MacKinnon et al. 2023, PLOS ONE). Notably, in this framing external pressure can push people into transition as well as out of it.

Studies of detransitioners: Littman and Vandenbussche

Studies that recruit people who have detransitioned, rather than people who are currently trans, find the opposite balance.

• Littman 2021. A survey of 100 people who had medically or surgically transitioned and then detransitioned. The most common reasons were becoming more comfortable identifying as their birth sex (60%), concern about medical complications (49%), and seeing their dysphoria as caused by trauma, abuse or a mental health condition (38%). External factors were present but less common: 23% cited discrimination and 17% the cost of transition care, and a "discrimination and external pressures" narrative appeared in 29% of accounts, such as "I had to detransition in order to get a job" (Littman 2021).
• Vandenbussche 2022. An online survey of 237 detransitioners from detransition communities. Realising that dysphoria was related to other issues (70%), health concerns (62%) and transition not helping (50%) led; lack of support (13%), financial concerns (12%) and discrimination (10%) were far less common (Vandenbussche 2022; figures as summarised in Littman et al. 2024).
• Littman et al. 2024. A survey of 78 young adults who had stopped identifying as trans for at least six months. Their "own thought processes" ranked as most important; discrimination, "pressure from family", religion and "peer pressure" ranked lowest (Littman et al. 2024).

These studies have their own weaknesses. They are small, recruited through online communities that are often critical of transition, and depend on people's retrospective accounts.

Why the findings differ

At first sight, one body of research says detransition is mostly forced and another says it is mostly chosen. The difference is mainly about who was asked.

Each design partly selects its own answer. If you only survey people who are trans today, anyone who left because their identity changed is excluded, and those remaining will mostly be people whose stop was temporary and imposed from outside. If you only survey people in detransition communities, people who paused under pressure and resumed are mostly absent. Statisticians call this selection bias: the way a sample is gathered shapes what it can find.

The likeliest reading is that both findings are true of different populations. There is a group of trans-identified people, possibly a large one, who stop under external pressure, and a group of people who stop because they no longer see themselves as trans. Neither type of survey can say how large each group is, and no population-based study has measured it; overall detransition rates remain unknown (Cohn 2023). A clinic study of 1,050 adolescents in Boston found that reasons for stopping hormones clustered around having reached their goals or difficulty accessing and taking hormones, though it only counted people still in contact with the clinic (Boskey et al. 2024).

The internal/external split is also less clean than the percentages suggest. A detransitioned woman described how one can turn into the other:

There are also trans people who start off quitting HRT due to transphobia or acceptance and then realize as they're detransitioned "temporarily" that their issues go deeper … a discovery of self, and addressing of the past led to realizing they stayed detransition due to internal reasons. —DetransIS, detrans female

Types of pressure

Family and partners

In both USTS surveys, family was the single largest source of pressure. In the 2015 data, more than a third cited a parent and a quarter cited other relatives. In the Littman 2021 sample of detransitioners, seven participants described pressure from partners, parents or other family. One was told they would never see their children again unless they detransitioned immediately (Littman 2021).

For young people, family pressure is often practical rather than argumentative: the parent controls the home, the money and the doctor's appointments. Trans commenters describe stopping while dependent and resuming once independent:

I detransitioned for a year when I was 17 since no one was taking me seriously- When I turned 19 in college I realized it was best to try again, and it's sooo much easier when you're not with an unsupportive family. —Valuable_Bee_8497, ftm

Family influence is not one-directional. On /r/detrans, many people describe parents who supported transition, and some describe partners or friends who pressured them into it. For more on the family side of these stories, see schools and parents.

Employment and money

"Trouble getting a job" was cited by more than a quarter of the 2015 USTS detransition group, and pressure from an employer by about one in six. For some, the calculation is explicitly economic:

I still have the desire to be a woman, yet I think that I'm just happier living as a man who wants to be a woman than to actually try being one. I can't have everything in life, I'm exchanging a socially, financially and romantically happier life with the perk of having to live with my dysphoria. —Upstairs-Habit6124, detrans male

I would have stayed transitioned, but I worry about making women feel unsafe, making others uncomfortable with my presence, or not being able to find employment because I am trans. —dummyidiot50, MTX currently questioning gender

Cost, insurance and access to care

Cross-sex hormones are a lifelong prescription, often with regular blood tests and specialist appointments. Anything that interrupts that chain can force a stop: losing a job and with it health insurance (in the US the two are often tied), a change in what insurance covers, a prescriber moving away, long waiting lists, or a pandemic. In the 2022 USTS, 28% of those who had gone back to living as their birth sex said they could not afford transition-related care.

Now I didn't try to detransition but was forced off of T due to a bill passed in my state making it so insurance didn't cover it anymore. When I was on T, I was so comfortable … When I was forced off T, I suffered so much. —Odd-Wrangler-2855, ftm

A forced stop can also lead somewhere the person did not expect. One woman on /r/detrans who lost her job and insurance just before a planned mastectomy wrote:

I was forced to de-transition hormonally. Once I slogged through that, I realized I didn't want to go through it again. Other stuff led to more questioning -- I was led through the hoops of transitioning like ticking boxes, got a letter for hormones easily, there was no deep-dive into my identity issues. —plaid_seahorse, desisted female

When legal access is cut, some people turn to unregulated sources instead (see DIY hormones). Others stop abruptly with no medical supervision. In the Canadian interviews, family-forced stops typically happened "without medical supports", and clinics rarely followed up with patients who dropped out of care (MacKinnon et al. 2022).

Harassment, visibility and safety

A third of respondents in both USTS surveys cited harassment or discrimination. Not passing as the target sex is often central. People who are visibly trans face stares, comments and sometimes violence that people who pass, or who never transitioned, do not.

If I do. It will be because I cant handle being visibly trans and the hate and stares that come with that. I cant handle feeling like shit everyday. … If I passed this wouldn't even be a question. —CherryPieCandyThighs, questioning own gender transition

A non-binary participant in the Canadian study described the pull of detransition rising and falling with daily experience:

Or if I'm thinking about future jobs or future careers that I'm trying to get into and I'm thinking how hard is this going to be to navigate if I am trans or if I am nonbinary, that's when I start thinking maybe I'll just detransition, maybe that'll be easier. — a non-binary participant in (MacKinnon et al. 2022)

A detransitioned woman acknowledged social pressure as a factor while rejecting the idea that it invalidated her decision:

If society hypothetically treated transgender people literally 100% the same as the sex they attempt to transition to, I may still very well be trans. However, there is a reason society doesn't treat trans people the same, there's a reason they stick out, and I still don't think I did anything wrong by questioning my transition and work out the root cause of my dysphoria. —lumpydumpy22222, detrans female

Law and politics

Legal change is the newest kind of external pressure, and the one the existing surveys cover least, because most of it came after they were run. In the United States, executive orders signed in January 2025 directed federal agencies to recognise only two sexes (Associated Press 2025a) and to withdraw federal support for transition for people under 19 (Associated Press 2025b). In May 2025 the Supreme Court allowed the Defense Department to enforce a policy that presumptively disqualifies trans people from military service while legal challenges continue (Associated Press 2025c). In November 2025 it allowed the State Department to require passports to show sex as recorded at birth (SCOTUSblog 2025). Some states had already restricted care for adults: Florida's 2023 law Senate Bill 254 added new restrictions on how adults can obtain hormones and surgery (Guardian 2023).

In trans communities, these changes prompted open discussion of stopping for safety, and disagreement about whether that would help:

What happened today seriously made me question continuing towards top surgery and other changes. I'm not sure that I want to reverse course, but non-binary is feeling a lot safer right now. —Rosalind_Whirlwind, ftm

For the legal background by country, see sex and gender in law around the world and the United States page.

Pausing, detransition and retransition

In surveys of trans people, much externally driven detransition is temporary. The 2015 USTS report found that most people who had detransitioned did so only temporarily (Irwig 2022). Turban and colleagues describe the internal reasons in their sample as "presumably temporary", since everyone had gone on to identify as trans again. In the Canadian interviews, everyone whose family forced them to stop later returned to care.

This is why many trans people object to the word "detransition" being used for these cases. They see a pause, not a reversal. One trans man summarised a common view in trans spaces:

I've noticed most "de transers" are usually people who have only temporarily stopped their transition. Of course you have people who were never trans to begin with and they realize it later, but I think the vast majority are people simply pausing it for safety reasons. —toasterboythings, ftm

The "vast majority" claim goes beyond what any study has measured. But the underlying point holds: someone who stops because a parent found their hormones and resumes at 19 has a different story from someone who stops after years of reflection, and counting them together distorts both. See retransition for what is known about who resumes transition and why.

Detransitioned but still trans-identified

The hardest case philosophically is someone who has stopped transitioning, lives as their birth sex, and still says they are trans, or still wishes they could be the other sex. What does identity mean when it is no longer expressed?

Several positions are possible. On the gender identity view, held by many trans advocates, identity is an inner fact that persists whatever a person can safely express. On this view, someone forced to stop is still trans, just closeted, and the outward change is a loss imposed on them. On a gender-critical or sex-realist view, common among /r/detrans commenters, what persists is a desire or a distress, not a fact about who one is. Living as one's sex is then not a lie, even if the desire remains (see gender as an explanatory framework). Many people in between avoid both labels and simply describe what they feel and what they have chosen.

Accounts on /r/detrans often sit uneasily between these positions:

I never wanted to be a trans man. I wanted, and honesrly still want, to be something impossible for me to be, a cis man. but I never will be. so I'll play with the cards I'm dealt. —cosmicflamexo, detrans female

For me it wasn't being a man which was the problem, it was being transgender. When I finally had everything else in my life sorted out, it really started to dawn on me how incredibly complicated being trans is - it negatively affects so many aspects of your life from relationships to medical care to career prospects. —DapperDhampir, detrans female

Is the burden DapperDhampir describes an "external pressure"? It comes from medicine, relationships and work, all outside the person, yet she presents the decision as her own. This is the general difficulty with the internal/external distinction: almost every decision responds to circumstances, and whether a person calls it forced or chosen depends partly on the story they come to tell about it. Psychologists call this kind of later reinterpretation meaning-making. It is not dishonest, but it means a survey answer records a person's current interpretation, not a neutral fact about causes.

Ethically, two things matter more than which label wins. People who stop under pressure while still distressed are often suffering, and in several accounts above forced stops go with misery, unsupervised cessation and isolation. People who stop because their understanding changed are also real, and should not have their reasons rewritten as "transphobia" by others. This site does not question trans-identified people who are content with their lives; its concern is that everyone, in either direction, gets honest information and time to decide.

What the r/detrans data show

The detrans.ai statistics are drawn from about 3,094 r/detrans stories of people who transitioned in some form, with features extracted by AI from what people wrote. The sample is self-selected and skews heavily away from the group this page describes. The subreddit is moderated as a space for people who have detransitioned or are questioning their transition, it is widely seen in trans communities as hostile, and someone who paused under pressure and still identifies as trans has little reason to post there. These figures cannot give rates.

Sex splits for the primary-reason rows are probability-weighted. Social pressure is among the least common primary reasons here; trauma (450), accepting one's sexed body (384) and a mental-health realisation (378) are the most common (detrans.ai stats). Men's stories name social pressure or not passing proportionally more often than women's, in line with the USTS finding that detransition was more common among people of male sex.

The low numbers say more about who posts on /r/detrans than about detransition in general. A male detransitioner made exactly this point:

I didn't detransition due to social pressure, but two of the three other detrans people I know irl did. … If you look on the trans subreddit or mtf or similar, you'll find a number of "I'm detransitioning because being trans is too hard" types who apparently never show up here, or at last don't stick around for long if they do. —IsntthatNeet, detrans male

How the debate uses this evidence

The 82.5% figure is often used to argue that detransition is almost always caused by transphobia, and therefore says nothing about whether transition was right for the person. Many detransitioners experience this as erasure (see backlash against detransitioners):

Definitely not true for me. I was happily, successfully trans, passing stealth, not dealing with a ton of personal transphobia directed at me and this was for over 20 years. —L82Desist, detrans female

In the other direction, detransitioners' accounts are sometimes used to suggest that no one who stops under pressure is "really" trans, or that making transition harder would simply produce more happy detransitioners. The evidence above does not support that either. Many people forced off hormones describe distress rather than relief, and in the Canadian study everyone pushed off by family returned to care. Coercing someone out of a transition is no more informed decision-making than pushing someone into one.

What this means for care

The practical lessons are mostly for clinicians. A patient who stops hormones may have changed their mind, run out of money, been pressured, or developed a health problem, and each calls for a different response. Clinicians often never find out which: in Littman 2021 only 24% of respondents had told their clinicians they had detransitioned. MacKinnon and colleagues recommend telling patients from the start that they will still be supported if they stop (MacKinnon et al. 2022). For practical information, see detransition processes, changing legal sex back and the support directory.

References

• Turban, J. L., Loo, S. S., Almazan, A. N., & Keuroghlian, A. S. (2021). Factors Leading to "Detransition" Among Transgender and Gender Diverse People in the United States: A Mixed-Methods Analysis. LGBT Health, 8(4), 273–280. PMC, DOI.
• Advocates for Trans Equality (2025). Health and Wellbeing: Findings from the 2022 U.S. Trans Survey. Advocacy organisation report. PDF.
• MacKinnon, K. R., Kia, H., Salway, T., et al. (2022). Health Care Experiences of Patients Discontinuing or Reversing Prior Gender-Affirming Treatments. JAMA Network Open, 5(7), e2224717. PMC, DOI.
• MacKinnon, K. R., Gould, W. A., Enxuga, G., et al. (2023). Exploring the gender care experiences and perspectives of individuals who discontinued their transition or detransitioned in Canada. PLOS ONE, 18(11), e0293868. DOI.
• Expósito-Campos, P. (2021). A Typology of Gender Detransition and Its Implications for Healthcare Providers. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy. study page, PubMed.
• Littman, L. (2021). Individuals Treated for Gender Dysphoria with Medical and/or Surgical Transition Who Subsequently Detransitioned: A Survey of 100 Detransitioners. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page, PubMed.
• Vandenbussche, E. (2022). Detransition-Related Needs and Support: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey. Journal of Homosexuality. study page, source.
• Littman, L., O'Malley, S., Kerschner, H., & Bailey, J. M. (2024). Detransition and Desistance Among Previously Trans-Identified Young Adults. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page, PMC.
• Cohn, J. (2023). The Detransition Rate Is Unknown. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page, source.
• Boskey, E. R., et al. (2024). A Retrospective Cohort Study of Transgender Adolescents' Gender-Affirming Hormone Discontinuation. Journal of Adolescent Health. study page, source.
• Irwig, M. S. (2022). Detransition Among Transgender and Gender-Diverse People—An Increasing and Increasingly Complex Phenomenon. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 107(10), e4261–e4262. PMC.
• Associated Press (2025a). Trump orders reflect his promises to roll back transgender protections and end DEI programs. AP.
• Associated Press (2025b). Trump signs order aimed at curtailing gender transitions for people under 19. AP.
• Associated Press (2025c). Supreme Court allows Trump's transgender military ban to take effect, for now. PBS NewsHour.
• Howe, A. (2025, November 6). Supreme Court sides with Trump administration on sex designations on passports. SCOTUSblog.
• The Guardian (2023, July 22). Lawsuit seeks to block Florida provision that limits trans treatment for adults. The Guardian.
• detrans.ai (2026). /r/detrans story statistics. stats.