“Rates of suicide are as high as 40% in transgender youth,” Dr. Simrun Bal of Dartmouth Health testified at the New Hampshire State House. “Imagine that if there are 100 people in this room, 40 of us would have attempted suicide.”
Related:Dartmouth Child Transing Physician Astonishingly Ignorant
Perhaps because of Bal’s credentials – she represented the New Hampshire Medical Society and the NH chapter of the American College of Physicians – no one on the NH House Health Human Services and Elderly Affairs Committee questioned that statistic or asked why she was conflating suicide rates with attempted suicides.
The public testimony against HB 619, which would ban the medical transition of minors, continued along this vein though the March 7 hearing, with the suicide threat repeated at least every five minutes.
Just as therapists ask, “Do you want a transgender kid or a dead kid?,” activists claim that these laws deny children lifesaving care, a claim they support with astronomical suicide figures. A compelling story, but is it true?
In fact, suicide rates among trans-identifying youth are extremely rare. A review of data from the UK’s largest gender clinic, Tavistock, indicated a suicide rate of 0.03%. Four of the 15,032 patients committed suicide, two who were waiting for treatment and two were were receiving treatment.
Although this is higher than the average youth suicide rate, it’s similar to the suicide rates for those with other mental health conditions, which most trans-identifying youth also have, and lower than the rates for autism and anorexia.
Another study of almost 2,800 children concluded that suicidality among trans-identifying youth is only somewhat higher than for those being treated for other mental health issues.
In an interview just last month, Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, Finland’s leading pediatric gender medicine expert, said:
It is not justified to tell the parents of young people experiencing transgenderism that the young person is at risk of suicide without corrective treatment and that the danger can be countered with gender reassignment treatment. It is purposeful disinformation that is irresponsible to spread.
Kaltiala attributed suicidal thought in trans-identifying youth to concurrent psychiatric disorders. She also cited 12 studies that demonstrate that if we allow children to go through natural puberty, 4 of 5 will outgrow their dysphoria. The most recent and largest such study showed that gender dysphoria resolved in 87.8% of the subjects by the time they reached adulthood.
Why the differences between the claims and recommendations of US activists and the health policies of Norway, Sweden, England, and Finland, countries which have dropped the gender affirmation model as dangerous and ineffective, and Italy and France, which have raised serious concerns about the dangers of puberty blockers and hormones?
Dr. Bal’s suicide statistics come from from the Trevor Project’s surveys, which are self-reports from youth “recruited via targeted ads on social media,” not from a randomized study or an objective review of the actual suicide rates.
Self-reports are notoriously inaccurate. For example, according to the Center for Disease Control’s 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 22% of all high school students seriously considered attempting suicide, twice as many males as females. But the actual youth suicide rate was 0.014%, according to the CDC, and males had a suicide rate four times higher than females.
And if suicide rates are so high for trans-identifying youth who don’t received gender affirming care, why didn’t we see much higher suicide rates before it was widely available? Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, calculated that given the Trevor Project’s 41% suicide attempt rate, the total youth suicide rate 10 years ago should have been seven times higher.
Why do activists repeat these colossal suicide numbers? It works. The suicide threat is gender activists’ most effective weapon, and they train children to wield it.
At a February rally at Milford High School to protest a proposed policy to keep boys out of girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, activists asked children to raise their hand if they’d ever been suicidal, and again to show if they’d been helped through gender-affirming medical treatment.
The threat of imminent suicide is the only thing that can justify New Hampshire’s policies of maiming and sterilizing children. But as other countries recognize the dangers of this model and as the medical scandals like those at Tavistock and Washington University Transgender Center in St. Louis continue to mount, will our legislators continue to be coerced by this myth?
As detransitioner Chloe Cole said:
I hear emotional blackmail at these hearings constantly, ‘their blood will be on your hands.’ Gender dysphoric kids are listening. Shoving the idea that it’s trans or suicide will harm the youth. Children are not martyrs for your political ideology.
