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I'm tabula rasa on this one, so here we go...
reads
That article lays out the dispute among researchers about interpreting the history of follow-up studies spanning decades which show that anywhere between 65 to 94% of those who initially identified as transgender eventually ceased identifying as transgender.
Two different schools of thought are summarized, followed by a section discussing various critiques of the methodologies used in the above mentioned studies.
Behold-- there is a handy table showing how much more stringent the guidelines were in 2013 for identifying gender dysphoria than similar guidelines back in 1994[1]. Right off the bat I see the 2013 guidelines a) give a minimum duration for the symptoms (whereas the older guidelines give no duration), b) require more symptoms from the list to be present in the child for a diagnosis, and c) include some bullet points about negative feelings (the older guidelines only mentioned positive ones). Those were just my impressions upon reading the table; the relevance of the discrepancy between the guidelines is discussed in the article.
According to the writer, the researcher whose study showed 63% of participants desisting conceded that the old guidelines probably let through some number of false positives. That researcher then went on to say this about drawing conclusions from his (and others') relevant research:
"The only evidence I have from studies and reports in the literature ... is that not all transgender children will persist in their transgender identity."
There's an ellipsis there, so let's make sure I'm not misinterpreting the researcher or repeating a misquote.
Okay, later in the article:
> Steensma [the same researcher I mentioned above] stands by the study’s methodology. But interestingly, he added that citing these findings as a measure of desistance is wrongheaded, because the study was never designed with that goal in mind.
> “Providing these [desistance] numbers will only lead to wrong conclusions,” he said.
And then goes on two describe two predictors, which are fascinating IMO.
I also see the very same researcher remind the readers not to use those predictors as a litmus test. Will do.
So, we have a researcher who is:
* cautious about starting social transition for patients in his clinic due to documented desistance in his own research (as well as other's research)
* using persistence predictors derived from his same research, and
* decidedly not using the statistics from his or any other research to gauge how many of his patients ought to "grow out of it."
It appears at first glance that your assertion is not supported by the cited article. Additionally, one of the researchers who found evidence of desistance explicitly warned the reader against making such an assertion.
To be fully transparent-- if the article had indeed turned out to support the assertion "most of them grow out of it," my response would have probably just been, "damn, I had no idea the numbers were that high." (Although I'm willing to bet if that were the case there would have been a reply here with a similarly concise counter-retort followed by its own citation worthy of this level of verification.)
1: I only want to point out it's a bona fide HTML table filled with bona fide HTML table data. Nice job, KQED.
Edit: My summary is 1/3 the length of the article! Anyhow, I hope someone out there gets a kick out of that. :)