Decades-Long Study Blows Up Narrative That ‘Gender Reassignment’ Prevents Suicide

Authored by Tim O’Brien via PJ Media,

One of the most common talking points from the left is that if you don’t rush confused kids into the gender reassignment pipeline, they will kill themselves. The left tells us that “transgenderism” is not a mental health problem, while at the same time telling us that people, especially minors, will kill themselves at greater rates if steps aren’t quickly taken to get those kids on puberty blockers, and on track to have their bodies permanently mutilated to change their sex. 

More to the point, the narrative goes like this: “Trans kids” are at higher risk of suicide if they don’t receive greater acceptance, supportive environments, and “access” to “gender-affirming care.” 

Did it ever occur to the left that the suicide in these cases may be connected to the increased likelihood that gender-confused children have severe mental health instability? Did it ever occur to the left that a pre-existing mental health issue, not the gender issue, is what may contribute to the risk of suicide? 

I’ve looked at a bunch of studies the left uses to justify this narrative, and one thing goes overlooked, which is the difference between correlation and causation. In other words, if someone doesn’t call a teenager by her trans name, is that the cause of her later suicide? Or was it something else, and the “misgendering” was just a convenient scapegoat? 

And so, when researchers studied the relationship “between chosen name use, as a proxy for youths’ gender affirmation in various contexts, and mental health among transgender youth,” did they just assume that the trigger for later “health risks” was due to how they were addressed by name, or were all possible causes considered? 

Kids who are confused about their gender are likely confused about a lot of things, and it could be that it’s this state of confusion and a general struggle with reality that is the more fundamental problem. But if researchers only key in on how those boys and girls are addressed, they can come to any conclusions that suit them.

Destroying a common myth

Don’t take my word for it. Researchers in Finland published a groundbreaking study in the peer-reviewed pediatric journal Acta Paediatrica, which pretty much destroyed the notion that “gender reassignment” surgeries and treatments help gender-confused kids. 

According to the study, the surgeries and treatments may, in fact, be making things worse. 

“In some individuals, medical GR [gender reassignment] appears to be linked to deterioration in mental health,” the study found. “Subsequent to medical GR, psychiatric treatment needs appear to increase.” 

In other words, the surgeries and puberty blockers may be hurting the children they purport to help, and even then, the kids’ needs for psychiatric treatment for mental health problems only increase. 

Let’s dig deeper: “Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up,” the study found. If that euphemism is sufficiently confusing to you, “psychiatric morbidity” in this context is suicide, eating disorders, depression, and other serious mental health problems.  

The title of the study is “Psychiatric Morbidity Among Adolescents and Young Adults Who Contacted Specialised Gender Identity Services in Finland in 1996–2019,” which itself emphasizes that this is an analysis of real-world data, not just some carefully constructed sample to study. And the time period for the study spanned 25 years. You would think that if you take a deep dive into 25 years of real-world data, you might get a clear picture of the issues at play and what’s really happening. 

During that period, the percentage of males wanting to become female jumped from 9.8% in 1996 to 60.7% in 2019. This stat alone kills the “born this way” assumption. As Finland’s culture has shifted aggressively leftward, more boys want to be girls. This suggests that the “trans kids” dynamic is a social contagion. 

On the female side, the number of girls wanting to become boys from 1996 to 2019 jumped from 21.6% to 54.5%. 

Here’s a look under the hood of the data. The study authors analyzed data from “a total of 2,083 individuals under the age of 23, who received ‘specialized gender identity services’” at hospitals over time. 

Finland has a nationalized, centralized health care system, which means that this data is pretty comprehensive and a reflection of what is actually happening in that country.  

The big news coming out of this research is that adolescents who were referred to specialist transgender services “showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls,” with 45.7% having mental health issues before referral, compared to 15.0% among the control population. This means the mental health problems were a pre-existing condition. 

Two years or more after referral to the system for “gender affirmation,” 61.7% of the gender dysphoric population had mental health issues, compared to only 14.6% of the control population.

At the same time, the data revealed that the proportion of teenagers with mental health problems also rose by 35% after receiving a referral to specialist transgender services. If I’m reading this right, it would seem that any kid in Finland who turned to the healthcare community for help with gender dysphoria issues likely found that his or her mental health problems got worse as a result. 

Here’s the kicker. Because not every kid who entered the system went through with the whole program, the researchers were able to measure how many kids who opted out of puberty blockers and sex change surgeries fared psychologically as a result.  

The study found that teens who decided not to receive hormonal or surgical treatments enjoyed better mental health outcomes. The rate of mental health challenges increased by a much lesser amount. That puts the kibosh on the whole rationale for transing the kids. 

If a kid is confused over his or her gender, and you don’t give them puberty blockers, and you don’t push surgeries on them, you’re more likely to have a kid with better mental health in the end.  

But if you do put them on the hormonal treatment track and the surgery track, the chances of the child having compounded mental health problems increase. 

Common sense wins

The bottom line is that common sense wins every time. Tragically, there are still hospitals, mental health professionals, school counselors, and parents who want to irreversibly change a child’s mental and physical make-up to solve what amounts to a very treatable mental health problem at a key stage of their adolescent growth and maturation process. 

The left likes to lecture the right to “follow the science,” but this science will be buried if the left has anything to do with it. The left wants gender-confused children. The left wants to “trans kids.”

Speaking of “trans kids,” how did that even become a thing? How does a child know he or she is, in fact, the opposite sex in the wrong body? That can only come as part of a very sophisticated, manipulative process that certain segments of society are foisting on the kids to corrupt them. 

It’s time to put an end to this. The more irrefutable data we have that cannot be suppressed, the more likely we’ll be able to look after the most vulnerable among us and protect them from “gender affirming” destruction.