Transgender advocates like to play the suicide card when faced with any kind of resistance to their agenda. They emphasize the risks of self-harm when children are denied their wish to transition to the opposite sex. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), warns that serious injury can result from failure to intervene, even while acknowledging that hormonal and surgical interventions pose risks.

The specter of suicide among transgender youth is raised from the White House to the American Academy of Pediatrics to youth-focused therapists, psychologists, and clinicians, including many who partner with public schools. A fall 2018 AAP Policy Statement asserted that “physicians play a role by offering a safe and inclusive place for transgender and gender-diverse youth, who have high rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, self-harm and suicide.”

In the face of so many high-profile individuals and organizations sounding the suicide alarm, supporters of parents’ rights wonder if there is any point in offering actual scientific data. Last summer, The Heritage Foundation released a report that revealed a significant increase in the suicide rate among minors who can more easily obtain “cross-sex treatments without parental consent.”

The report compared “annual youth suicide rates in states that allow minors to access care without parental consent to states that do not allow such access. The data clearly showed “no difference in youth suicide rates between these two groups of states for over a decade before 2010, when the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones begins.” But then “a 14% increase in suicide rates emerged among young people by 2020” in states that allow minors to access care without parental consent compared with states that have no such provision. According to the report: “Easier access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones by minors actually exacerbated suicide rates.”

One critical finding is that no difference in suicide rates was observed between the two groups of states when the youth in question were “unaffected by policies that facilitate cross-sex drugs for minors... The relative increase in suicide rates only occurs after cross-sex treatments are introduced, and the trajectory of the increase matches the prevalence of these interventions.” [Emphasis added.]

The report suggests that, given the elevated suicide risks shown by the data, “state and federal governments should reverse the push to make puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones more widely and readily available to minors. Facilitating access to these treatments without parental consent is particularly dangerous.” A further recommendation is that lawmakers “adopt a parental bill of rights to ensure that parents are informed and involved in these critical decisions about their own children. Despite what left-leaning activists may tell us, science does not demonstrate that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are necessary to prevent suicides. In fact, if anything, it demonstrates the opposite.”

As eminently sensible as this advice is, it’s unlikely to be heeded. The Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Population Affairs (OPA) asserts that “gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.” Claiming to have the supporting “research,” they present subjective statements including:

• 
  Because gender-affirming care encompasses many facets of healthcare needs and support, it has been shown to increase positive outcomes for transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents.
• 
  [The] presence of affirming support networks is critical for facilitating and arranging gender-affirming care for children and adolescents. Lack of such support can result in rejection, depression and suicide, homelessness, and other negative outcomes.

But as senior research fellow with The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, Dr. Jay P. Greene, wrote: “When faced with divisive political arguments, the Left has a bad habit of putting on its figurative lab coat, conducting lousy research, and then declaring that Science has resolved the dispute in its favor. This tendency was on full display during the pandemic: If you didn’t obey faux-scientific orders on masks, social-distancing, or school closures, you must have wanted people to die.”

He added that the oft-cited research is defective because it relies on “surveys of trans-identifying adults recruited from trans support and advocacy groups, so they are not representative of all people who have experienced gender dysphoria as adolescents. In particular, these studies are less likely to include people who resolved these issues without medical intervention and people who had regret about receiving puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.”

The continuing abuse of science for political ideation is evident in the manipulation of gender dysphoric adolescents. Greene writes: “The Biden administration and its allies are declaring that if “gender-affirming” care in the form of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones is not widely and readily available to trans-identifying children, young people trapped in bodies that do not conform with their declared sex will despair and commit suicide.”

But it’s questionable whether those who profess to be one gender trapped in the body of the other gender will ever find true happiness, because their elusive goal flies in the face of true science.

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