No, that is NOT what I'm asking about.
What I'm asking for data on is whether efforts to accommodate teens in their requests is more likely to lead to them being satisfied with what they have received, or more likely to make more extreme requests.
The specific example is whether accommodations such as offering teens a choice of pronouns, along with messages about accepting their transgender nature, whatever that might be, makes the teens more or less likely to seek gender reassignment surgery.
Then I'm a little bit confused at your question. I suppose my prior is that acceptance of trans identity will probably lead to more people coming out and more people seeking gender reassignment surgery. I don't know that for certain (again, we don't really have studies about this in the long term yet), but again, we can look at other situations (gay rights, acceptance of left-handedness, ADHD, etc...) and based on how those movements have gone, it's pretty reasonable to conclude that the more people feel comfortable expressing their gender identity, the more people will decide to express their gender identity, including (sometimes) through surgery.
However, that is a meaningless thing to worry about unless you believe that gender reassignment surgery is inherently bad, which... it's not. We don't care whether gender reassignment surgeries become more common, we care about people making mistakes and regretting their surgeries. So the only statistics worth measuring here are the outcomes of people who choose to have surgery or choose to avoid surgery. We want to know whether as adults they feel they made the right choice.
Lowering the number of surgeries is not a metric we should be optimizing for. Improving outcomes and avoiding post-surgery regret is the metric we care about.
I guess to answer your specific question, I suspect that acceptance of transgender identities will probably lead to more people coming out as trans, and will probably lead to more surgery. But that has nothing to do with the question of whether or not affirmation is good for kids and whether it helps them make more educated decisions about their identity in the future. Having more trans-identifying people isn't a bad outcome unless those people are unhappy with their identity.
> The specific example is whether accommodations such as offering teens a choice of pronouns, along with messages about accepting their transgender nature, whatever that might be, makes the teens more or less likely to seek gender reassignment surgery.
So I don't understand why this is a question that anyone anywhere would care about, unless your insinuation is that your goal is to minimize the number of transgender people overall.
Do you care if your kid has regrets about the decisions they end up making about their body once they reach adulthood? Or do you care whether your kid is trans? Because those two concerns are completely orthogonal to each other.
"That's not really what I was getting at, what I was getting at is that creating an environment where people refuse to use proper pronouns or provide even basic accommodation for trans kids is going to make them more interested in medically transitioning, not less."
I don't know whether that statement is correct. But my strong suspicion is that it is the opposite of the truth. That the more we encourage the idea of transitioning, the more interest we create in all forms of transitioning.
Moving on, you ask:
"Do you care if your kid has regrets about the decisions they end up making about their body once they reach adulthood? Or do you care whether your kid is trans? Because those two concerns are completely orthogonal to each other."
The answer is that I care whether my kid will come to have regrets. I don't actually care whether they are trans. I care about whether they are happy.
It is my belief that medical interventions in teenage years are likely to work out poorly for future happiness. I wish I could say that this is an informed belief, but after attempting to inform myself I concluded that good information is not actually available. Still, since that is my belief, I believe that increased odds of a medical intervention implies increased odds of a bad outcome.
I don't care about legalism and I'm not going to get into gotcha debates about, "well technically you said".
My intent behind that statement would be more accurate to say: non-affirming environments force children and young-adults to make extreme decisions without the benefit of experimentation or counseling over those decisions. In that environment, it is more likely that they will regret the choices they make, because they will never get an opportunity to try out those choices in a limited capacity beforehand. This seems to me to be an obviously logical, reasonable statement: people who have less experience living as a trans person are less equipped to make weighty decisions about their future life. People who have less experience in any area of their life are less equipped to make weighty decisions about that area.
If that seems like a different argument to you than what I said before, then I apologize for being confusing, clumsy, and imprecise, and I'll happily concede one internet-point. But beyond that I'm not really interested in those kinds of fights.
> The answer is that I care whether my kid will come to have regrets. I don't actually care whether they are trans. I care about whether they are happy.
In which case, the only studies that will be helpful are the ones that measure regret, not rate of surgeries. Unfortunately those studies are limited. Bear in mind that post-puberty regret and regret over waiting on transitioning are also possible outcomes here. Both medically transitioning and waiting to transition or avoiding puberty blockers/hormones can have negative outcomes, which is why I emphasize kids being able to get more life experience being trans before they make that choice.
While long-term studies on transitioning are limited, there is at least pretty strong evidence that affirmative care reduces suicide rates in trans youth[0], so it does seem to have some measurable positive outcomes.
[0]: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/2020/01/29/research-brief-g...
Affirmative care does drastically and pretty irrefutably reduce the risk of suicide in trans/gender-questioning youth, but that's not exactly what you're asking about, you're asking specifically about whether affirmation and respect will decrease regrets about future transitioning. With trans kids, that's tricky to get data on today, because we kind of have to wait for them to get older to find out if they have regrets.
However, this philosophy is consistent with how we approach many other topics with kids. There's a reason why psychologists offer guarantees of confidentiality, because we've learned that when people don't feel safe talking about an issue they're having, they don't talk about it. This is also the philosophy behind ending the war on drugs, it's the philosophy behind modern approaches to sex education. We are focused on management and education, not repression.
We can also point back towards the debates about gay conversion therapy and look at some of those stats. Gay identity can follow a similar trajectory to trans identity; not everyone who thinks they're gay as a kid identifies as gay when they're older, and vice-versa. Discovering a sexual orientation can be a deeply confusing process. However, we have generally accepted that affirmative counseling for children who are experiencing distress over their sexual orientation is more helpful than conversion therapy or locking down the conversation. It is likely that trans children will have similar experiences.
Trans kids will not stop questioning their gender identity just because they're told to. But if that questioning is happening in complete isolation, then how are they supposed to make educated decisions about any of this? In particular, a child who is wondering what they would feel like using girl/boy pronouns may simply burn with curiosity, rather than trying out the identity and genuinely discovering whether or not it fits them.
As a somewhat over-simplistic analogy, a child who is convinced that they want to play the piano might take lessons for a while and then decide that they don't like playing the piano. Or they might decide that they love piano, and they might go out and buy their own keyboard. Either outcome is fine. But regardless of what they choose, the early lessons will have better-equipped them to make that decision.