All of these studies were conducted when 'watchful waiting' was the standard treatment, as that is still the standard treatment. 'Watchful waiting' does not exclude affirmation and social transition.
No, watchful waiting explicitly delays affirmation (of cross-sex identification), traditionally until puberty. Once affirmation or social transition occur, the 'waiting' is finished. This includes not using puberty blockers before age 12 (although there is a serious lack of evidence base concerning puberty blockers altogether).
The gender affirmation approach requires that the child's stated identity is immediately affirmed without waiting.
Cantor has described this very well in the article linked to before, along with extensive analysis of how the AAP's reasons for rejecting watchful waiting in favour of gender affirmation entirely misrepresented the evidence to fit an ideologically-inspired conclusion.
And that is not a conclusion you can draw from these studies, because there is no group of children with severe genderdysforia who are denied affirmation.
Children under watchful waiting were denied affirmation before puberty. Pre-pubertal social transition is relatively recent. To the extent that some children in the later studies may have received affirmation or transition earlier, this would lead to
underestimating the percentage of children who would desist....as I said before.
Perhaps you should point out where in the study it says that, because all I can find about such a claim is that "future prospective studies ... may shed some light on this question".
In the logistic regression analyses reported on p586 where persistence/desistance was the binary outcome. I did get one thing mixed up - only one of the clinical measures (Gender Identity Questionnaire) became non-significant as a predictor of persistence in the multivariate regression (for the combined group and for girls). Social role transition but was not a significant predictor for girls in the multivariate analysis but was the strongest predictor for boys and a significant predictor in the combined group. Where transition is a significant predictor in the multivariate analysis it predicts persistence independently of its association with the other predictors.
And specifically mentions that it should not mean children should not transition: "clinical management of children with GD in general should not be aimed to block gender-variant behaviors."
Not blocking gender-variant behaviours is not transitioning.
The key issue is to make sure the child doesn't think that they need to be the other sex in order to engage in gender-variant behaviours. This is complicated because children to not have any sophisticated distinction between sex and gender. If clinicians try to encourage children to accept their biological sex, the child may interpret that as pressure to be gender conforming, and activists will brand it conversion therapy. Hence the watchful waiting approach does not aim to steer the outcome in either direction.
None of the studies you linked to show this, or even attempt to study this.
The fact that virtually all children put on puberty blockers go on to transition (meaning it is not actually 'buying time' but is actually the first stage of medical transition) is not shown in these articles, no. That has been shown elsewhere, including in the data from the Tavistock that mysteriously went missing for years then coincidentally resurfaced days after the recent court case was over.
