I don’t have it handy, but iirc I saw a study once that actually showed increased rates of suicide post-transition.

Frankly – and I don’t care what people think of this – I think the only responsible option we have for kids who believe they are trans or whose families believe they are trans is therapy. Licensed psychiatrists and talk therapy and finding the actual root of the problem, rather than treating symptoms with dangerous, seriously harmful*, irreversible surgeries and chemicals/pharmaceuticals.

These are kids, for fuck’s sake. If they hate their bodies so much that they would rather commit suicide than live in them for one more second, one more month, one more year, that is a sign of serious mental illness and it needs to be treated as such.

This is especially true when studies show that up to 80% of these kids grow up to not be trans, but rather gender non-conforming gay men and lesbian women.

(* There was a post on my dash a while back about how artificial testosterone treatments given to trans men cause uterine and cervical (iirc, maybe just uterine) cancer, but nobody tells this to trans kids. It has been proven, over and over again, that the puberty blockers trans activists want every kid to be on, Lupron, has dangerous, life-long negative side effects that have destroyed the lives of many of the adults who have taken it. We don’t yet know all of the side effects of these treatments, either.)

As someone on my dash once said, very astutely, you don’t prescribe diet pills to someone who’s anorexic, so why on earth are we prescribing these surgeries and artificial hormones and shit, the majority of which we do not have any data on the potential far-reaching effects of, to literal children to treat what is, at the very root of it, a mental illness?

This isn’t just like giving diet pills to an anorexic. It’s akin to if society decided that the best course of “treatment” for anorexia was diet pills, laxatives, WLS and liposuction.

And this isn’t “transphobia,” by the way, before someone comes along to call me a “terf”. This is called giving a flying fuck about the health and quality of life of trans or potentially trans people.

It’s fucking ridiculous that being against physically healthy kids being chemically and surgically altered is considered bigotry and actively encouraging it is considered advocacy. And trans people who point out how messed up that is, even when they’ve personally experienced transitioning and the problems that come with it, are transmedicalist scum who get harassed by the supposedly progressive. I guess the only people worth supporting are the males using someone else’s condition to justify their creepy invasive misogyny? 

The full text of the study talked about can be found here. 

From the abstract:

RESULTS:  The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 1.8-4.3) than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from suicide (aHR 19.1; 95% CI 5.8-62.9). Sex-reassigned persons also had an increased risk for suicideattempts (aHR 4.9; 95% CI 2.9-8.5) and psychiatric inpatient care (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 2.0-3.9). Comparisons with controls matched on reassigned sex yielded similar results. Female-to-males, but not male-to-females, had a higher risk for criminal convictions than their respective birth sex controls.

This study has the highest population that I have ever seen in a study on transsexuals (324 sex-reassigned individuals, to be exact) and also spans the longest term I’ve ever seen (30 years - 1973-2003). It should be noted that it is a review, which means the authors gathered data from many different studies and followed up as much as possible to present the largest cohort they could. This takes primary data from many, many different studies and compiles it to look at trends. I think the controls would be much better if they were able to use individuals who experience sex dysphoria but do not transition, but we are not allowed to talk about that.

This is extremely important to talk about. The best scientific study of transsexuals available clearly shows that the rates of suicide are much higher in individuals who undergo sex-reassignment than in the general population. 

Dysphoria is the killer. Medical transition is not an absolute cure. Medical transition does not stop a person from suicide if they are suicidal. 

Such a powerful and important post. Deserves to be spread far and wide. Dysphoria is real. But anyone who pushes the narrative that hormones and surgeries are the only cure needs to read every word of this.

That was one study, not a gigantic review of other studies, I’m not sure where that idea came from.

You’re really embarrassing yourself by trying to compare the suicide rate of trans people after surgery to the suicide rate of cis people, as an argument for whether or not surgery helps to alleviate dysphoria.  It does provide reasonable evidence that trans people still are greatly mistreated even after surgery.

Also, I looked up many of those studies that are construed as claiming that most trans children change their minds when they become adults, and what I found was that they didn’t actually base those results on the gender identity of the subjects, instead they based their results on whether or not the subjects met a specific set of criteria which required more than just identifying as transgender and was established by those who believe that being transgender is a mental illness.  Stop quoting those studies.

Dude, they SPECIFICALLY created two control groups in that study:

For each exposed person (N = 324), we randomly selected 10 unexposed controls. A person was defined as unexposed if there were no discrepancies in sex designation across the Censuses, Medical Birth, and Total Population registers and no gender identity disorder diagnosis according to the Hospital Discharge Register. Control persons were matched by sex and birth year and had to be alive and residing in Sweden at the estimated sex reassignment date of the case person. To study possible gender-specific effects on outcomes of interest, we used two different control groups: one with the same sex as the case individual at birth (birth sex matching) and the other with the sex that the case individual had been reassigned to (final sex matching).

You are embarrassing yourself by not reading and still critiquing.

The point is that if depression runs so high in the community, that is a mental disorder. Why wouldn’t we treat all the causes of suicidal ideation? Especially where children are involved?

Do you think trans folks psychologically have it harder that blacks during slavery? Indians during the trail of tears? Culture can create situations that are psychologically unbearable for lots of different groups. Being subjected to unkind remarks, job insecurity, or unwanted violence is not a subject position unique to trans people. How do THOSE groups handle things? What areas for treatment overlap can we examine?