I should mention that I have Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer on my shelf and it’s totally a good read. As mentioned before it’s in comic book format (aka “graphic novel”) so boiled down to the dialog and the characters in situations with body language and all that. It’s well drawn. It’s definitely not remotely raunchy, the main character is a self-questioning teenager figuring stuff out and it’s very relatable.
A study by the Heritage Foundation reports that gender-affirming care is linked to a higher risk of suicide in minors. Of course, it’s the Heritage Foundation, so take it with a grain of salt. Anyone care to debunk this for me, please?
It seems to be making a leap of logic. From the article:
Note that the above says nothing specifically about transgender medical care, nor about young people who are questioning their own gender identity and may be seeking such care.
It tries to tie this increase to the date when “puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones became widely available.” That may be correlation without causation; there may well be other, more important factors in the intervening years which are contributing to the higher suicide rates in those states.
Also, they cite ages 12 to 23 as the age group studied; half of the young people in that age group are not minors, and would be able to seek medical care without parental consent in any state.
Finally, it specifically says that suicide rates are now higher in the states where minors can receive “routine health care without parental consent.” I am not a doctor, so I have no idea if “puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones,” much less gender-reassignment surgery, qualify as “routine health care.”
For instance, one of the more common intersex conditions results in a person with XY chromosomes, but who in all other ways has a female body. That’s the “androgen insensitivity” @Taber mentions.
Heritage Foundation and The Washington Examiner. I’d sooner trust a 3 dollar bill.
(applies full-body condom from The Naked Gun)
I won’t link to the actual “study.” It’s as simple as the Washington Examiner describes it and kenobi_65 summarized it. They took all the states, split them up into “allows minors to get gender-affirming care without parental consent” and those that don’t, and came up with this.
By 2020, there are about 1.6 more suicides per 100,000 people ages 12 to 23 in states that have a policy allowing minors to access health care without parental consent than in states without such a policy. The average state suicide rate in this age group between 1999 and 2020 was 11.1, making an additional 1.6 suicides per 100,000 an increase of 14 percent in the suicide rate.
It says that value is statistically significant, and I don’t know enough about statistics to dispute that part.
Here are the states they claim have and do not have such minor-access provisions. The list of states that have them is so vast and disparate that I can’t imagine there’s much of a useful comparison.
The discussion section says:
The research presented here does not directly examine whether the individuals who receive gender-related medical interventions are at a higher risk of suicide
Which seems like a pretty goddamn big limitation, especially since such data is available and most of the other studies have looked at it. It can make sense to take a high level approach like this when it’s the only data available, to see if further research is needed. In this case, it would seem like further research would be needed, and that’s about the only conclusion a reasonable person could draw.
What conclusions does the Heritage Foundation draw?
The results presented in this Backgrounder demonstrate that efforts to lower legal barriers for minors to receive cross-sex medical interventions do not reduce suicide rates and likely lead to higher rates among young people in states that adopt those changes. States that currently facilitate minors’ access to routine health care without the consent of a parent or legal guardian should consider revising such policies. States should also adopt parental bills of rights that affirm that parents have primary responsibility for their children’s education and health, and that require schools to receive permission from parents before administering health services to students, including medication and gender-related counseling to students under age 18.
This research adds to the well-established wisdom that children are better off if they are not allowed to make major life decisions without their parents’ involvement and permission. In general, parents are better positioned than anyone else, including the children themselves, to understand the needs of their children when making important decisions. State policies that undermine this relationship between parents and children are dangerous and should be repealed. Similarly, those who work with children in professional capacities, including health, education, and counseling, should be careful about substituting their own judgment for that of the parents. The research presented here supports the view that children fare significantly better when their parents have the authority to know about, and help to make, major decisions for their own children.
Lastly, given the danger of cross-sex treatments demonstrated in this Backgrounder, states should tighten the criteria for receiving these interventions, including raising the minimum eligibility age.
It is, as they say, to laugh. I’ll also point out that this is self-published and not peer reviewed.
The press release, incidentally, is also written by the author of the study, and I guess he didn’t feel the need to even pretend to be unbiased there:
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.
This political abuse of science is emerging again on the issue of gender dysphoria in adolescents.
etc, etc. All in all, it’s barely science.
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You have to wonder just how many ways they tried slicing the data, before coming up with this. I mean, obviously, they started by looking at the suicide rate of transgender youths who receive care vs. those who don’t, because that’s the obvious starting point, and those numbers are really easy to get. But those numbers didn’t say what they wanted. So they probably tried comparing states, by as many different metrics as they could think of, before eventually settling on “routine medical care available to minors”. And they tried every age range they could think of, until they eventually found “12-23” (never mind that that’s half adults).
But what sticks with me, here, is they had to have started with the numbers of suicides for youth with and without care. There’s no way they couldn’t have started with that. Which means that they know that they’re lying, and they know that their lies will kill children.
Last I checked, willfully doing things that you know will kill people is a crime. We need to bring charges against these “researchers”.
Summary of smackdowns of that Heritage Foundation study here:
Well, it’s not like suicide rates among trans yourh have anything to do with their being targeted by an organized hate machine that calls them perverts and abominations and wants them to die.
Right?
No, they’re scumbags, but that’s not criminal behavior, sorry,
I’d love it if they got discredited, found that they had no more opportunities in life, became shamed and penniless, and died miserable, alone, and forgotten in agonizing squalor.
But charging them with a crime is fantasy.
Not sure if Matt Walsh is a republican, but he has a movie/book out called What Is a Woman. In it, he says some people who’ve transitioned regretted it and say they may look like a man but theyre not actually. He also claims puberty blockers have given teens osteoporosis. And that people who have transitioned are as likely to commit suicide as those whove been prevented.
Edited to say I do not agree with his conclusions but its an involved read.
Walsh is a far-right bigot. Don’t trust any thing he says on literally any issue.
In this specific case, he’s absolutely lying about suicide statistics. There’s a number of ridiculously flawed studies out there that attempt to show the opposite - one such was picked apart earlier in this thread. Walsh might be referring to one of those, or just making shit up off the top of his head.
Detransitioners are definitely a thing, as no medical diagnosis is every 100% accurate, nor any medical treatment 100% effective, but studies overall show that the vast majority of trans people do not regret transitioning. It’s also worth noting that some percentage of people who detransition do so not because they incorrectly identified as trans, but because they decide that going back in the closet is less painful than the treatment they receive for being visibly gender-nonconforming.
There is a potential issue with puberty blockers causing lower bone density while the blockers are being used, which appears to resolve itself once the blockers aren’t used any more. There’s speculation that this may lead to an increased risk of osteoporosis later in life. The claim that it gives teenagers osteoporosis is a flat-out lie.
Well…
Right now, transitioning is positioned as “what you do” if you experience yourself as having a gender identity other than the one associated with your physiology.
I think it’s the right road for some people to travel, but I’m also absolutely positive that it’s not the right road for everyone in that situation.
There really needs to be room in people’s minds for multiple approaches, instead of having to deem one wrong in order to push a different alternative forward. Transitioning is expensive and difficult; if someone decides, after considering the alternatives, that it’s the correct route for them, I will link arms with them and support them to the best of my ability. It’s a rough road and we should celebrate the people who manage to walk it. At an absolute minimum, we should refrain from throwing stones at them as they walk by, okay?
But yes, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone who was born male but identified with the girls and has that as their identity. Or everyone who was born female and was always one of the boys.
For us to say so should not be taken as a negation of the testimonies of those for whom transition was the correct remedy.
But those people aren’t furries. Heck, I’m not even sure they’re otherkin. They just seem to be into extreme body modification, not actually thinking they are animals. They think they look cool. (Save for number 7 who got some bad plastic surgery.)
I know two people who detransitioned, and neither regrets having transitioned, they just decided it wasn’t the right choice. The first found, after transitioning, that they were really non-binary, but needed that experience of living as a man to realize it. The second, sadly, decided that going back in the closet was less painful than the treatment they received for being visibly gender-nonconforming: they couldn’t pass as female. They realized this before undergoing surgery.
Are there many who don’t transition at all? I was under the impression that transitioning meant any attempt to appear as the gender you identify as, and not the one you were assigned at birth. It need not involve any medical changes—it can just involve clothing and presentation.
I knew that not everyone needs medical transition (hormones or surgery). I’ve known of a few like that (on YouTube). But they all definitely came out and started dressing and otherwise presenting as their gender identity.
I take it you do not consider yourself to have transitioned in any way? Or were you just talking about medical transition?
I have a close friend who came out a few years ago as probably trans and definitely confused and in therapy. He was assigned male at birth, but he’s a very feminine person. After a lot of questioning and research and emotional work, he’s decided that he’s a gender-non-conforming man. He wears feminine clothing and carries a cute purse. He also has chosen to continue using male pronouns (and has a name badge with his given, masculine name and the addendum, “he/his/his”).
He hasn’t really transitioned. He’s just come out.
People who don’t quite fit our standard gender assignments can fail to fit them in a wide variety of ways.
For that matter, I’m a gender non-conforming woman. If i were twenty I’d probably call myself non-binary, but I’ve identified as a woman all my life, and don’t feel a compelling reason to change. It’s much more socially acceptable for a woman to wear men’s clothing than for a man to wear women’s clothing, and my parents didn’t especially pressure me to be “more feminine”, so i didn’t grow up with the stress my friend experienced. i suppose I’m also gender queer by many definitions. But I’ll just have a tailor add deeper pockets to my jeans and buy men’s shirts, and mostly have male friends, and not call it cross-dressing or transitioning.