'Transition regret' is extremely rare, according to study

This story originally appeared on Them.A new study found that most transgender people who started gender-affirming care in their adolescence have no regrets regarding their transition years after the fact, despite widespread claims cited by conservatives to justify gender-affirming care bans for minors.Published in JAMA Pediatrics on November 9 by a group of psychiatric and pediatric researchers, the study analyzed data from a sample of nearly 400 people who started gender-affirming hormone therapy such as estrogen or testosterone as youth, looking at their satisfaction rate in the years that followed. Researchers evaluated self-reported surveys submitted by the cohort between 2023 and 2025, which concluded that “overall decisional regret was very low.” In fact, 96.8% of participants reported that receiving hormone therapy was the right decision, while only 2.7% reported any regret over the decision, and even fewer (1.9%) reported feeling harmed by their decision. While incredibly low overall, the decision regret score — which researchers used to evaluate participants on their feelings about having started hormone therapy — was higher among people who weren’t currently on hormone therapy compared to people who remained on it. Decision regret percentage was also higher among nonbinary people than binary trans people surveyed. The nominal regret reported by a small number of participants did not show a correlation with young age. It’s also important to recognize that having regret over hormone therapy does not inherently mean someone no longer identifies as transgender or nonbinary. “The findings of this cohort study complement the literature documenting mental health benefits of [hormone thera[y], providing further support for existing standards of care for transgender and gender-diverse youth,” the researchers wrote. The findings showed that the vast majority of participants expressed no regret over starting hormone therapy, negating the common conse