ABSTRACT
The article entitled “A critical commentary on follow-up studies and “desistence” theories about transgender and gender non-conforming children” by Temple Newhook et al. is a plea to abandon longitudinal studies on the development of gender variant children as they do not respect children's autonomy. In this article, a few relatively recent studies are criticized and it is concluded that conducting longitudinal psychosexual outcome studies and acknowledging the children's feelings are contradictory. The authors of this chapter strongly disagree with the authors of the article that studies on gender variant children's development should be abandoned and that our studies do not take children's needs and voices seriously or are unethical. The chapter authors were the first to report in the literature on children with gender dysphoria who, in adolescence, indeed were not gender dysphoric to the extent that they wanted puberty blockers, gender affirming hormones, and surgery as soon as possible, but only came back to our clinic in adulthood.
