[...] When it comes to hormone replacement therapy among
young women, research has
shown that testosterone can
lift one’s
mood [...], and so it is plausible that some young women will find the shots of testosterone mood-enhancing (as one female detransitioner said, it made her “
aggressive and horny”), even if those changes are often relatively small and transitory. [...] The
graph below shows how the number of women identifying as FTM (i.e., female-to-male) transgender as a percentage of the overall transgender population has changed from low single digits in the 1990s to over 50% in the past decade, which implies that the share of the new generation of women in the past two decades who identify as transgender would have to be significantly more than the men – and increasing – to flip this overall ratio within these two decades.
As a result, researchers who have combined responses from (natal) young men and women often have samples that over-represent (natal) females (e.g., 61% of the sample in the NEJM (2023) study consists of natal females). Consequently, such research has sometimes indicated
some – albeit very modest – positive psychological outcomes after a few years within the
overall sample, thanks possibly to the effects of testosterone. [...]