Why would there be distress? If you went through a microplastic influenced childhood and puberty you would never know if your masculine traits were as pronounced as they could have been, as you only have your self to compare to.

Also, these sorts of studies generally look at changes at the population level - an individual won't suddenly wake up with a gender crisis from plastic exposure.

“ What’s surprising, in light of all these quotes, is that the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false.”

See https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/researchers-found-puberty...

I don't have the time to dive deep into this article, but I would not be surprised if there were wasn't enough evidence at 12 months. It's a process which takes years, as with puberty itself.

The TLDR is that there are several issues with the study methods which are apparent from available materials (and probably even more apparent from the actual study data which has been withheld by the authors). The cohort that received gender affirming care over the twelve months showed no improvement over baseline, while the control cohort deteriorated into even higher levels of depression/anxiety/suicidality. Instead of looking at the treatment group and saying "there has been no improvement", they compared it to the control and said "they haven't deteriorated like these people have."

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the control cohort simply stopped responding to the survey over 12 months, so there is no end to potential confounding factors causing children (who for all we know elected not to receive gender affirming care to begin with) to stop responding to a survey issued by a gender clinic, or the confounding factors that caused the others not receiving treatment to remain in the study.

I've seen this argument many times and these same sets of studies referenced, yet never is it mentioned that the recorded results are absolutely not single variable measurable items. There are nearly infinite alternative explanations for both sides of the argument, if you are clever enough to break free of the desired outcome bias.

The article touches a little bit about how responses to a 0-27 point depression questionnaire are coded as 0 or 1, 1 being "has moderate to severe depression" and 0 being "does not have moderate to severe depression" at a threshold of 10 points or higher. Similar situation for suicidality. Instead of tracking the actual point changes across the 12 months, they just tracked the pooled percentages of 0 vs. 1.

I looked at a few of the surveys cited, and they all questioned transgendered people, which automatically omits those who detransitioned and stay detransitioned:

https://somenuanceplease.substack.com/p/is-detransition-the-...

>>The way this question is written makes it very clear that they were primarily expecting to get answers related to “pressure” and what are sometimes called “external factors.” Of the options given, only one option is clearly an internal factor (“I realized that gender transition was not for me”).

>>However, the primary reason that this survey cannot be used to draw conclusions about the number of people detransitioning and their motives is because the 2015 US Transgender Survey was distributed amongst the trans community. It didn’t seek responses from people who detransitioned and never reidentified as transgender.