Overview

One of the quietest reasons people give for detransitioning is simply growing older. Nothing dramatic has to happen. There may be no complication, no crisis and no single moment of realisation. Instead, someone who took on a trans identity at 14, 17 or 20 reaches their mid-twenties or thirties, looks back, and finds that the person who made those decisions now feels like a stranger.

This page covers developmental psychology on adolescent identity, what neuroscience does and does not say about the "still-developing brain", the theme of "I was a child when I decided", the life milestones people credit, and how trans-identified people answer these arguments.

The ages involved

The detrans.ai statistics are drawn from about 3,094 r/detrans stories of people who transitioned in some form. Ages and dates were extracted by AI from what people wrote about themselves, and only some stories mention them. The sample is self-selected and cannot give rates. It can, however, show the general shape of the timelines people describe.

The figures differ by sex. Among stories with ages, women's median age at transition is 16 (n = 871) and at detransition 21 (n = 600). Men's are 19 (n = 218) and 24 (n = 154). About 62% of the women who gave an age started transition before 18, compared with about 37% of the men. In both groups the median gap between transition and detransition is about four years (detrans.ai stats).

Put simply, the typical story in this sample begins in mid-adolescence and ends in the early twenties. That window, from about 15 to 25, is exactly the period developmental psychologists describe as the most unsettled stretch of identity formation. Published surveys show a similar pattern. In a 2024 survey of 78 young adults who had stopped identifying as trans, participants had first identified as trans at an average age of 17.1 and had done so for 5.4 years (Littman et al. 2024). In a Finnish clinic series of nine adult detransitioners, the average time from diagnosis to regret was seven years (Kettula et al. 2025).

These numbers do not show that age causes detransition. Most people of any identity change a great deal between 15 and 25. They do show that, for people in this sample, the decision to transition and the decision to stop usually happened at two different stages of life.

Identity in adolescence

Erikson: identity versus role confusion

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described human development as a series of eight psychosocial stages, each built around a central tension. For adolescence, he called that tension identity versus role confusion: the young person has to bring childhood identifications, a changing body, new sexual feelings and the expectations of others together into a coherent sense of who they are (Erikson 1968).

Erikson also described a psychosocial moratorium: a protected period in which society allows young people to try on roles, beliefs and styles without being held to them permanently. On this view, experimenting is healthy. The risk lies in closing the experiment too early, or in being unable to settle on anything at all.

Detransitioners sometimes bring up Erikson themselves. One detrans male argued that gender has been added to the list of things adolescents now try to settle at this stage:

Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson's introduced his stages of psychosocial development with #5. Identity vs. Role Confusion being at the ages 12-18 … One of the biggest problems the transgender culture has brought to young people is they added GENDER to this stage of life —Mindless_Low_1047, detrans male

Marcia's identity statuses

The psychologist James Marcia turned Erikson's idea into something researchers could measure. He sorted people along two dimensions, exploration (have they seriously considered the alternatives?) and commitment (have they settled on one?), which gives four identity statuses (Marcia 1966):

• Diffusion: neither exploring nor committed.
• Foreclosure: committed without exploring, often by taking on an identity ready-made from parents, a community or an authority.
• Moratorium: actively exploring, not yet committed.
• Achievement: committed after a real period of exploration.

A meta-analysis of 124 studies found that identity status is far from fixed in the teenage years. In longitudinal studies, about 36% of young people moved towards a more developed status over time, 15% moved backwards and 49% stayed the same. Moratorium peaked around age 19, and identity achievement kept rising through late adolescence and young adulthood (Kroger, Martinussen & Marcia 2010).

Applied carefully, this framework fits many detransition stories. An identity taken on quickly, strongly reinforced by an online community and confirmed by clinicians can look a lot like foreclosure: firm commitment that never went through real exploration. In Marcia's terms, detransition can then be read as a delayed moratorium, the exploring that was skipped the first time round. This is an interpretation, not a finding. Nobody has measured identity status in people before and after transition. But it helps explain why so many detransitioners describe their later years less as "changing my mind" than as "finally thinking it through".

The psychoanalyst Alessandra Lemma makes a related clinical point. In her work with under-18s seeking medical treatment, she describes a "premature embracement" of trans identity that can undermine the painful psychic work of finding out what the identity means for a particular young person (Lemma 2018). The Gender Exploratory Model proposed by the systemic psychotherapist Anastassis Spiliadis rests on the same developmental idea: slow down, and treat a young person's path as uncertain rather than already known (Spiliadis 2019). See gender-exploratory therapy.

Emerging adulthood

The psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett argued that in industrialised societies the years from about 18 to the mid-twenties have become a distinct life stage, which he called emerging adulthood. In this stage, identity exploration in love, work and worldview continues well past the legal age of majority (Arnett 2000). His point was that the end of adolescence has moved later, partly because marriage, parenthood and stable work now come later.

That matters for transition. A system that treats 18, or 16, as the point where identity can safely be called settled is drawing a legal line, not a developmental one. Many detransitioners make this point from their own lives:

It's crazy that point about changing between age 21-25 isn't more well known. Everyone knows that the teenage years are rough and transformative and there's this idea that once you turn 18/21 you are a fully formed adult. It was the years between 21-25 that I really dramatically changed as a person and turned into who I am now, which finally feels stable. —novaskyd, desisted female

The developing brain

What the evidence shows

Brain-imaging studies that followed children into early adulthood found that the cortex matures in a sequence. Areas for basic sensation and movement mature first. Higher-order association areas, including parts of the prefrontal cortex (the region behind the forehead involved in planning, impulse control and weighing consequences), mature last (Gogtay et al. 2004). The US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) summarises the field this way: the brain "finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s", and the prefrontal cortex is "one of the last parts to mature" (NIMH, The Teen Brain).

The best-known model built on this research is the dual systems model. It proposes that a reward-sensitive "socioemotional" system becomes very active around puberty, while the "cognitive control" system that restrains impulses matures more slowly. That gap is used to explain the rise in adolescent risk-taking. Its authors admit the model is "an oversimplification" but defend it as a useful heuristic (Shulman et al. 2016).

The "25" shorthand and its critics

On r/detrans, "your brain isn't fully developed until 25" has become a slogan, often repeated as settled fact. It needs care. Neuroscientists broadly agree that brain development continues into the twenties, but there is no agreed age at which a brain is "finished". In a 2016 commentary, the Harvard neuroscientist Leah Somerville argued that different measures of the brain (structure, function, connectivity) mature on different timetables, so there is no single sign of maturity to look for (Somerville 2016). In a 2022 Slate article, the developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg, whose work is often cited for the "25" figure, said: "I honestly don't know why people picked 25" (Slate 2022).

Trans-identified commenters often point to the same criticism:

Just so you know, the whole "brain is fully developed at 25" thing is bullshit. The study that conclusion was drawn from stopped measuring at 25. The brain absolutely continues to develop beyond that age —doubleheadedarrow, ftm

Some detransitioners say the same thing, and argue that the age-25 idea is really about social experience rather than neurons:

The reason people suggest waiting till age 25 isn't entirely about brain development. It's also about how our social awareness and understanding of ourselves within society changes as we age. Children and teenagers can't know what living like an adult member of their s3x will be like until they do it. —Luck_Unlucky2, desisted female

Cognitive versus psychosocial maturity

The most useful piece of research here separates two kinds of maturity. A study of 5,227 people aged 10 to 30 across 11 countries found that cognitive capacity (logical reasoning, memory, planning in calm conditions) reaches adult levels by about 16. Psychosocial maturity, meaning the ability to hold back in the face of emotional, exciting or risky situations, kept developing into the twenties. The authors concluded that it is reasonable to set different age limits for different legal purposes (Icenogle et al. 2019).

This sharpens the debate. A 16-year-old can understand a consent form, but understanding is not the hard part. In the accounts on this page, the decision was rarely made in calm conditions. It was usually made under intense distress, often alongside depression, trauma, social pressure and the euphoria of finally being accepted. Those are exactly the conditions in which psychosocial maturity matters most. The English High Court made a similar distinction in Bell v Tavistock. It said the problem was not the information given to children, but their ability "to understand and most importantly weigh up that information" (High Court 2020, para 150). The Court of Appeal later overturned that ruling on legal grounds (see Bell v Tavistock).

The 2024 Cass Review, an independent review of England's gender services for young people, also treated the early twenties as part of the same developmental period. It recommended "follow-through" services for 17- to 25-year-olds instead of moving them straight into adult clinics (Cass 2024; The Independent).

The fair conclusion is narrower than the slogan. There is no magic birthday. But the evidence that judgement under emotional pressure keeps developing into the twenties is solid, and decisions with permanent effects on the body are exactly where that matters.

"I was a child when I decided"

A recurring form this theme takes on r/detrans is a reassessment of responsibility. People who began transition as teenagers often come to see the choice as one they were not in a position to make, even when they made it eagerly and fought for it at the time.

no one wants to admit minors haven't developed the capacity to think through their decisions and understand long term consequences, that part of the brain isn't developed yet. neither is your personality until 25-30. sorry 16 year old me couldn't look into the future like I thought I could. —DEPLATFORMED-, detrans female

Turning 18 does not settle it. A detrans male who started oestrogen days after his 18th birthday describes the gap between legal consent and real choice:

What I went through was my decision on paper yes, I signed the forms days after my 18th birthday, but I think what is lost is that I was still an immature child then. I was riding high on the euphoria of the bullying stopping … it was a fast pass out of the pain and trauma I was going through at the time —MythicalDawn, detrans male

Some philosophers describe certain choices as transformative: decisions that change the very preferences you would use to judge them, so the person deciding cannot know how the later self will feel. Adolescence adds a second layer, because the deciding self is still being formed. The common thread in these accounts is not "I was stupid". It is "I did not know how much I did not know":

I'm 25, and I transitioned at 19. I was insanely naive and generally stupid, but obviously I had no way of knowing that at the time... and that's the danger. Young, developing people don't know how much they don't know. I didn't know how much my feelings and thoughts would change as I aged. I didn't know that the pain I felt would go away, and that the only thing remaining would be the damage I did to myself while feeling it. —k33pr_of_, detrans female

This reframing often goes together with anger at the adults who said yes. Many commenters separate their own youthful certainty, which they see as normal, from the clinicians' duty to look past it. See informed consent critique and the pipeline for how quickly some young people moved from questioning to medical treatment.

When dysphoria fades with time

For some people, growing older did not just change how they interpreted their distress. The distress itself faded. Many accounts like this come from desisters, people who stopped identifying as trans before or without medical transition, and they echo older clinical follow-up studies. In those studies most children referred for gender dysphoria no longer had it by adolescence or adulthood: about 88% of 139 boys in a Toronto follow-up (Singh, Bradley & Zucker 2021), and a majority in Dutch samples (Steensma et al. 2013). Those studies looked at childhood-onset cases. The adolescent-onset cases common today may behave differently. See desistance.

I transitioned from 21-23 and shortly after I turned 24 my dysphoria vanished. I already have a hard time understanding why I went through with transition in the first place, I was just so completely in my own head at the time. —875857, detrans female

For men, the change is often described as slow and partial:

by my mid-twenties it was no longer a particular problem for me at all. would i prefer to have been born a female? yes. but... growing beyond childish impossible dreams is just a part of normal human psychological maturation —NeverCrumbling, desisted male

Notice that the wish does not always disappear. What changes is its weight. An adult can hold an unrealisable wish without organising their whole life around it, much as people let go of other childhood fantasies without denying they ever had them.

Life milestones

People rarely credit their birthday alone. They usually point to the things that come with getting older: leaving home, work, relationships, responsibility, and a wider social world than school or online communities.

Leaving home and widening the world

At 20 I left my tiny home town for college in San Francisco. The scene change and culture shock was profound … Just being away from home, the image I had of myself as a small town, high school loner born in the wrong body began to fade away. New experiences and aspirations helped me redirect my energy, from trying to become a man, to simply trying to make my existence the most gratifying one possible. —almostdidbutdidnt

Work and responsibility

Some accounts connect gender distress closely to a sense of being stuck, sometimes called "failure to launch", and describe it easing once adult life got moving:

My dysphoria had roots in my social anxiety, gender nonconformity, and "failure to launch" and just felt like I wasn't a person. The moment I got my license and a job and started making real life connections and feeling like I was doing something of value even if it was small... I was able to stop obsessing —goodbyegodzilla, desisted female

Others describe the reverse: the trans identity itself held back adult development until they let it go. One woman said it "enabled Peter Pan syndrome" and that her career only began at 30, after detransitioning (InformationIguana, detrans female). A detrans male of 31 described detransition as "finally closing that era and maturing" (8bitdont, detrans male).

Relationships and children

Wanting children is one of the clearest ways time changes priorities, and it often arrives years after decisions about fertility have already been made:

I went from "no way do I want kids" in my teens/early 20s to very much wanting kids in my thirties, and that's a pretty common life pattern. At 20, can be so hard to know what yr gonna want long term. —No_Improvement4310, detrans male

See wanting children and fertility.

Midlife

Growing older does not stop at 25. A smaller number of accounts describe a reckoning decades later. One woman who transitioned at 22 began questioning around 45, describing "a values realignment" in midlife in which she realised "there was nothing “wrong“ with being female" (L82Desist, detrans female). In the /stats sample, 96 of the 877 stories with a detransition age (11%) give an age of 30 or older (detrans.ai stats). These later cases matter because they show that maturing is not only something that happens in youth. Each stage of life can raise its own questions.

Needing less validation

A theme that runs through many accounts is a drop in the need for other people's approval. Adolescence is, as several commenters put it, a time of intense social monitoring. One desisted woman described the teenage years as "the absolute peak of being socially obsessed with others", adding that "All that settles around 19 or 20" (kryptokate2, desisted female).

Trans identity, as many detransitioners experienced it, depends heavily on being seen correctly by others: names, pronouns, passing, affirmation. As that need fades with age, the identity can lose much of its force:

I was also very insecure in my identity when transitioning and very jumpy. Since coming to the realization that I'm not trans and detransitioning I get misgendered all the time beacause I don't pass but it doesn't affect me anymore the way it used to. It's like because I know who I am and feel comfortable in my skin I don't need external validation anymore. —Altruistic_7226, detrans male

Seen this way, part of what people outgrow is not a sex or a gender but a way of relating to themselves through other people's eyes. This is where growing older meets gender non-conformity without labels. Many people describe becoming comfortable as a masculine woman or a gentle man once they no longer needed a category to justify themselves.

Looking back at teenage distress

With distance, many people reinterpret their adolescent suffering. What felt like proof of a gendered self at 14 can look, at 25, like ordinary puberty discomfort combined with depression, isolation, trauma or sexual confusion.

I remember being a depressed mentally ill teen and just kind of "owning" it without ever once connecting how my depression was influencing my decisions. It's weird. It's so obvious in retrospect. —Stanky_Bacon, desisted male

Tbh, it took me until about 25 to start realizing I really fucked up. It's like I could feel the moment my brain fully developed/matured … The trauma, the reason behind my wanting to transition, kept me in arrested development. This really clouded my decision making. —Dismal_Exchange1799, detrans female

The Finnish clinic series found something similar. Looking back, its nine detransitioners said their need to transition came not from trans identity but from "reasons related to the maturation process and unresolved psychological stressors" (Kettula et al. 2025). Larger surveys report that many detransitioners came to see their dysphoria as linked to trauma or mental health problems: 38% in Littman's survey of 100 detransitioners (Littman 2021), and 70% in Vandenbussche's survey of 237 (Vandenbussche 2022). These are self-selected samples, but they suggest that "growing up" often works as the condition that makes this reinterpretation possible. See reframing dysphoria and trauma.

The reinterpretation can come with grief. Some describe losing their teenage years or early adulthood, and many, especially those who were medicalised young, have to make peace with permanent changes. Commenters regularly urge each other to show their younger selves compassion. One desisted woman told a 20-year-old, "You were a mentally ill child trying to navigate life" (moonlithesis, desisted female). See healing and recovery.

Trans perspectives

Trans-identified people answer the maturity argument in several ways, and their strongest points deserve a fair hearing.

Many report a consistent sense of self from childhood. On trans forums, people often describe cross-sex wishes from early childhood that lasted through adolescence. For them, waiting would not have changed anything:

For the whole brain development thing, i had these thoughts and feelings as far as i can remember. I'm 32 now, still trans. —FeanixFlame, MTF

The "25" figure is overstated. As noted above, this criticism is largely correct about the slogan, though not about the underlying evidence that psychosocial maturity keeps developing into the twenties.

Society trusts young adults with other serious decisions. Some point out that people under 25 drive, marry, have children and train as surgeons (Neat-Bill-9229, ftm). The reply from detransitioners is that few of those decisions permanently alter healthy organs, and that the comparison actually supports caution where the effects cannot be undone.

Older transitioners. Interestingly, trans people who transitioned later in life often make the maturity argument themselves:

I transitioned at 30: it's fine … For my part: I am GLAD that I wasn't a teenage boy, and I'm relieved that I wasn't a guy in my early 20's. Jesus what a chaotic mess I would have been, then. —stickbeat, ftm

The large US military-health study of hormone continuation is often cited against the maturity argument. Over four years, people who started hormones as minors continued them at a higher rate (74%) than those who started as adults (64%) (Roberts et al. 2022). But that study only tracked prescription refills, not identity or regret. Continuing hormones is not the same as being satisfied with them. For someone who started at 16, a four-year window closes at about 20. The /stats sample, with a median of four years between transition and detransition, suggests that a four-year window can end before many reconsiderations begin.

Assessment

What does "growing older" actually explain? Taken together, the evidence and the accounts support a few careful conclusions:

• It is a condition more than a cause. Very few people detransition because they turned 25. They detransition because, with age, they gained the distance, stability and wider experience to see their distress differently, and often to see what was underneath it.
• The timing matters. In the self-selected /stats sample, transition typically began around 16 to 19 and ended around 21 to 24. That puts many decisions with permanent effects inside the very period when identity is most likely to change.
• The neuroscience supports caution but not a slogan. No brain "switches on" at 25. But evidence that judgement under emotional pressure keeps maturing into the twenties fits closely with how detransitioners describe their decisions.
• It cuts both ways in some accounts. Some people transitioned as adults and still felt too young, while a minority detransitioned in midlife. Maturing is a process across the whole life, not a threshold at 18 or 25.
• It does not invalidate those who are content. Some trans-identified adults describe a stable sense of self over decades, and this page does not question them. The point is narrower: young people are known to change, decisions with permanent effects cannot easily be undone, and "I was sure" is something many detransitioners said too.

For many people on r/detrans, the most reliable thing about adolescence was that it ended. What they wish they had been told is that the person they would become was worth waiting for.

Related pages

• Desistance
• The transition pipeline
• Wanting children
• Informed consent critique
• Reframing dysphoria
• Transition regret
• Gender-exploratory therapy
• Bell v Tavistock

References

• Arnett, J. J. (2000). Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American Psychologist, 55(5), 469–480. ERIC record.
• Cass, H. (2024). Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people: Final report. study page, source; recommendations summarised in The Independent.
• Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton. book record.
• Gogtay, N. et al. (2004). Dynamic mapping of human cortical development during childhood through early adulthood. PNAS, 101(21), 8174–8179. PubMed.
• High Court of England and Wales (2020). R (Bell and A) v Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust [2020] EWHC 3274 (Admin). judgment.
• Icenogle, G. et al. (2019). Adolescents' cognitive capacity reaches adult levels prior to their psychosocial maturity: Evidence for a "maturity gap" in a multinational, cross-sectional sample. Law and Human Behavior. DOI.
• Kettula, K. et al. (2025). Gender Dysphoria and Detransitioning in Adults: An Analysis of Nine Patients from a Gender Identity Clinic from Finland. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page, PubMed.
• Kroger, J., Martinussen, M. & Marcia, J. E. (2010). Identity status change during adolescence and young adulthood: A meta-analysis. Journal of Adolescence, 33(5), 683–698. DOI.
• Lemma, A. (2018). Trans-itory identities: some psychoanalytic reflections on transgender identities. International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 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.
• 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.
• Marcia, J. E. (1966). Development and validation of ego-identity status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3, 551–558. DOI.
• National Institute of Mental Health. The Teen Brain: 7 Things to Know. NIMH.
• Roberts, C. M. et al. (2022). Continuation of Gender-affirming Hormones Among Transgender Adolescents and Adults. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. study page, source.
• Shulman, E. P. et al. (2016). The dual systems model: Review, reappraisal, and reaffirmation. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. source.
• Singh, D., Bradley, S. J. & Zucker, K. J. (2021). A Follow-Up Study of Boys With Gender Identity Disorder. study page.
• Slate (2022). The Myth of the 25-Year-Old Brain. Slate.
• Somerville, L. H. (2016). Searching for Signatures of Brain Maturity: What Are We Searching For? Neuron, 92(6), 1164–1167. DOI.
• Spiliadis, A. (2019). Towards a gender exploratory model: slowing things down, opening things up and exploring identity development. Metalogos. study page.
• Steensma, T. D. et al. (2013). Factors associated with desistence and persistence of childhood gender dysphoria: a quantitative follow-up study. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. study page, PubMed.
• Vandenbussche, E. (2022). Detransition-Related Needs and Support: A Cross-Sectional Online Survey. Journal of Homosexuality. study page, source.
• detrans.ai statistics: journey and timelines panels, r/detrans cohort (n ≈ 3,094; self-selected, AI-extracted). /stats.