Revisiting Transgenderism & Suicide

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[Huldah]

A while back, in another thread about various LGBT issues, I wrote something to the effect that transitioning not only doesn't prevent suicide, it may actually increase the risk of suicide. Someone else challenged that remark, but at the time, I couldn't remember my exact source. (Because who keeps notes on everything they hear or read? Not me.) I was then accused of not being accurate, or maybe not being honest, still not sure which.

Since then, I've found multiple sources supporting the idea that transitioning is both unhelpful (at best) and actively harmful (at worst) for some patients. (Some, not all.) What I found specifically applies to the fastest growing segment of the trans community: adolescents who experience late-onset gender dysphoria, especially girls. Some of the material also suggests that many of these girls will eventually "outgrow" (for lack of a better word) their dysphoria and resume their female identities.

For the record, I made a conscious effort to avoid sources with an anti-trans or anti-LGBT bias. As far as I know, the sources here are not Christians or social conservatives, although some of the interviewers lean conservative.

[Huldah]

Source: Transgender Trends, a UK-based group of "parents, professionals, and academics."

Website: https://www.transgendertrend.com/the-suicide-myth/

Ideological affiliation: "Within our group we have different or no religious or political affiliations, we are mostly left-leaning and liberal but we don’t see this as a party political issue." (https://www.transgendertrend.com/about_us/)

Summary: If you only have time to read one article, this is the one to read. It's rather long, and very academic in tone, but well worth the time. It points out serious methodological problems in two of the leading studies on teen trans suicide (the 2015 RaRE study, which is the source of the statistic that 48% of all trans youth allegedly attempt suicide, and the 2017 Stonewall School report, which apparently is widely used to create transgender policy in schools). It also discusses the fact that transgenderism frequently accompanies a cluster of psychological problems, making it difficult to pinpoint what actually puts those children at increased risk of suicide. There's so much information (extensively footnoted) that I can't even begin to do justice to it all in a single paragraph. I can only recommend that if you really want sources and documentation, you need to read the entire thing for yourself.

Quotes:

"A more rigorous study was published in the journal Pediatrics in 2018. Transgender Adolescent Suicide Behaviour (Toomey et al) uses data on 121,000 adolescents aged from 11 to 19, who were surveyed at schools across the United States. In this study all the risk factors for attempted suicide, including sex and gender identity, sexual orientation, age, race, and parental education, are statistically analysed. Michael Biggs analysed the study results and his finding was that, statistically, the group most likely to report a suicide attempt is gender-non-conforming females, irrespective of how they identify or their sexual orientation."

"The critical question is does transition help to reduce suicidal ideation? This is a key question in the treatment of adolescents but the evidence we have is mixed...The problem with studies on the effects of puberty blockers is that there is usually no control group, so we don’t know if a different kind of treatment would have the same result. There is one study (Costa et al 2015) which does compare two groups and found no significant difference between psychological support alone and psychological support + puberty suppression in terms of improved psychosocial functioning."

(Quoting a US study from the National Center for Transgender Equality (2010); it's not clear whether this refers to adolescents or adults.) "Those who have medically transitioned (45%) and surgically transitioned (43%) have higher rates of attempted suicide than those who have not (34% and 39% respectively)."

"A secondary analysis of the Tavistock GIDS Early Intervention trial found that around two thirds of children who had been given puberty blockers either remained the same or reliably deteriorated in terms of psychological outcomes."

As you can see, not all studies come to the exact same conclusion, but they tend to support the idea that transition doesn't necessarily help with mental health, and may actually damage it.

[Huldah]

Article: "Reckless and Irresponsible: The ACLU pushes the potent but misleading 'affirm or suicide' narrative," https://www.city-journal.org/article/reckless-and-irresponsible?wallit_nosession=1 .

Speaker/writer: Leor Sapir

Ideological affiliation: Not sure.

Summary: Trans kids have higher rates of suicide and suicidal ideation than kids in the general population. However,  studies show that trans kids usually have other psychiatric issues in addition to gender dysphoria, and they commit suicide at approximately the same rate as non-trans kids with similar psychiatric issues. The article includes additional links to supporting sources, including an abstract of one of the cited studies.

Quotes:

"Youth with gender-related distress are more or less in the same category of risk as youth without gender issues but with similar psychiatric problems.

"An apples-to-apples study would compare suicidality rates in the first group with suicidality among non-gender-distressed youth with similar mental health comorbidities (e.g., depression). A recent study did exactly that and found that the disparities in suicidality between gender-distressed and non-gender-distressed youth all but disappeared."  (Emphasis added.)

[Huldah]

Source: Jamie Reed, former caseworker at a pediatric transgender clinic in St. Louis.

Video: "Trans Clinic Whistleblower Speaks Out"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbuGMbqjsSw&t=2708s

Article: "I Thought I was Saving Trans Kids. Now I'm Blowing the Whistle," by Jamie Reed, https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kids

Ideological affiliation: "I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders." She's married to a transman.

Summary: Trans identification in young patients is often a form of social contagion (peer pressure), and and is generally part of a cluster of psychological symptoms. Children are allowed to begin a course of serious medical interventions on the basis of their own self-diagnosis. Yet, affirming a child's self-diagnosis may be more harmful than helpful (see quotes below). Her advice to parents of trans-identified youth is to concentrate on their basic mental and physical health, to avoid gender clinics, and to limit their children's access to social media.

Quote: From the article linked above:

"Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).

"The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate."

"Transitioning should not be left to the child's decision. The language in some of the activists is that it's supposed to be child-led...Kids who think that they're the one who's supposed to make the decision are actually in more distress and in more pain because they feel like there's no grown-ups in the room who are in charge."

[Huldah]

Video: Interview by Jordan Peterson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSKQfATa-1I

Speaker/writer: Abigail Shrier

Book: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

Ideological affiliation: Not sure, except that she states she isn't against transitioning per se. In fact, she believes that transitioning can be a positive experience for some adults.

Summary: The largest group of transitioners right now are teen-aged girls, a group which has traditionally not been interested in transitioning but has shown strong susceptibility to social contagion and peer pressure. The book and video both refer to academic studies that show poorer outcomes, including increased suicidality, for girls who transition than for those who don't. (You'll have to see the book for details. I had to return it to the library before I had time to finish taking notes.)

Quotes from the video:

(34:47) "You're seeing among this population, we know that rates of suicide and depression are rising as acceptance of transgender identification is going up. But we would have predicted those things going down with social acceptance."

(57:45) "A lot of these young women, their mental health after the trans identification deteriorated. So they're not able to function." (emphasis added)

[Huldah]

If someone disagrees with the authors and speakers I've cited, that's fine. You're free to form your own opinion. But in the other thread, someone implied that no such studies even existed, so I wanted to set the record straight on that.

At this point, I'm not interested in discussing the topic any further. It's already taken a huge chunk of time and effort to put all this together. Feel free to start your own thread if you disagree (or even if you agree). I've said my piece.

I hope this information will be helpful to someone.

[Huldah]

Although I'm no longer actively reading up on this topic, an important article just came across my feed on another site. According to the article, an email from Shannon Sullivan, clinical team leader at the FDA’s Division of General Endocrinology, states that puberty blockers increase the risk of suicidality. (Suicidality includes suicidal thoughts as well as actual attempts at suicide.) The email was obtained during the discovery process of a lawsuit.

Sullivan wrote in the email, "We did find increased risk of depression and suicidality, as well as increased seizure risk and we issued [safety-related labeling changes].” Yet she goes on to write, "...there is definitely a need for these drugs to be approved for gender transition..."

She doesn't explain why blocking puberty is so important that it's worth placing youngsters at a higher risk of suicidality than they would face without the puberty blockers. Haven't we been told that the whole point of medically transitioning is to prevent suicide?

The article can be found at https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/08/01/exclusive-fda-leader-backed-puberty-blockers-kids-despite-finding-increased-risk-suicidality/ .