In a deeply embarrassing turn of events it appears that the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank dedicated to “reversing the rising tide of polarisation, extremism and disinformation worldwide,” recently propagated some misinformation of its own.
Late last month the ISD was brought in to conduct a training session, “Fighting Fake News,” for the Houses of the Oireachtas. It was a private event, and there was, as far as I have seen, no public notification that the event was happening. The event was recorded, but Gript were told that the recording was edited before being released to members of the Oireachtas. The general layout of the meeting has already been covered by my colleague Matt Treacy, but I wanted to focus on one particular claim that was made by the ISD staff during the event – that only 1-2% of transgender people detransition, which is to say return to their original gender. More specifically, one of the ISD staff at the event, in response to the claim that “high numbers of people regret transitions and end up detransitioning,” stated “these claims are false. Any data that is around on this subject actually shows that the rates of detransition are very low, between 1 and 2%…no evidence that this is happening.”
I want to focus on that statistic because it is not only not true, it’s demonstrably not even close to true.
Whilst detransition is a relatively new subject of research, and research on this area is very much in its infancy, there have been multiple attempts to quantify the percentage of the trans population who will detransition, and multiple studies have put the figure at above 1-2%. This information, by the way, is not difficult to find, even the Wikipedia page on detransition links to at least one study that estimates detransition rates to be as high as 8%.
Moving from Wikipedia to actual research, the 2015 U.S Transgender Survey, a survey conducted by the National Centre for Transgender Equality, which had 27,715 participants, said that 8% of respondents had “de-transitioned temporarily or permanently at some point,” although the survey did note that 62% of detransitioners “reported that they were currently living full time in a gender different than the gender they were thought to be at birth.”
In 2021 academics from Stanford, Boston University, and Harvard, performed a secondary analysis of that 2015 survey before conducting additional qualitative and quantitative work. They found that 13.1% of participants, 2,242 out of a sample size of 17,151, “reported a history of detransition.”
Again, it has historically been quite difficult to accurately measure outcomes amongst both transgender people and detransitioners, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that both groups are very small and relatively new. Another significant difficulty has been due to the reported tendency of detransitioners to break off contact with the clinicians who had overseen their initial transition; many don’t even inform those clinicians that they have reverted to their original gender.
A survey of 100 detransitioners, conducted in 2020, said that only 24% of detransitioners had informed their clinicians that they had detransitioned, which is perhaps not surprising given that 55% of the sample “felt that they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a doctor or mental health professional before starting transition.”
Where the ISD was largely correct was in their claim that much of the research indicates that the majority of detransitioners report at least one external factor, such as social stigma, as driving their detransition. The 2021 study said 82.5% of respondents listed at least one external factor as being a cause for their detransition, with 15.9% of respondents reporting that at least one internal factor, such as uncertainty regarding gender identity, was a driver of their detransition. The study authors said that “to our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically examine reasons for detransition in a large national sample of TGD adults.” The 2015 survey notes that 36% of detransition said they had detransitioned due to “pressure from a parent,” with 33% detransitioning because “transitioning was too hard for them.” The results of the 2020 research differ from the studies in that 60% of participants said “becoming more comfortable identifying as their natal sex” was one of the reasons they detransitioned, and reports of external causes were much lower.
So it appears clear that the ISD spread, presumably accidentally, incorrect information regarding detransition to the Houses of the Oireachtas. Embarrassing certainly, but this situation also nicely highlights one of the biggest concerns we should have with the growing influence of groups like the ISD – Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Ultimately organisations like the ISD are not transparent, they are not subject to FOI, and they are not, in any real sense, answerable to the public for their actions. It is nearly impossible to know what internal biases these organisations or its staff hold, be those political or other, as they are private entities. This is a particularly problematic aspect of these organisations given that the question of what is mis or disinformation is often a political question; some would say it is innately a political question. And yet, there has been an increasing drive to give these organisations an aura of respectability and of expertise far beyond what appears prudent to grant them. Allowing any unelected group to accrue influence, and to brief our politicians on what is, and what is not, true is a dangerous path to go down.
That’s not to imply organisations like the ISD would deliberately present information in a biased fashion, but rather to note that power without oversight tends to lead to sloppiness and an inability to recognise that we, as humans, are wired to find information which affirms our previously held beliefs, particularly our deeply held beliefs, as being far more persuasive than information which goes against those biases. They may simply present information which is wrong, but feels right to them. Should that happen it’s very hard to see how someone would go about telling the people tasked with fighting misinformation that they’re engaging in it themselves – not least because their statements will probably be made privately rather than publicly.
We asked the ISD to explain where the 1-2% stat came from on multiple occasions. I was told at least one of those requests was sent directly to the staff who conducted the training event. Neither the ISD, nor the staff in question, have supplied a source for the figure. After twice requesting to know where the 1-2% statistic had come from we informed the ISD that the figure was incorrect, and asked if they had any comment on the idea that the ISD had spread mis or disinformation at the event with the Houses of the Oireachtas – we had recieved no response at time of print.