Does Your Child Becoming Trans Increase or Decrease Their Suicide Risk?

Spoiler: It does increase it… by a lot.

The thinking around trans issues in America is an illogical, nonsensical mess from top-to-bottom. You can’t choose to change your gender any more than you can choose to change your race or species. The idea that women should be fine with a man beating them in a sporting event or sharing a bathroom/prison with them because he says he’s a woman and MAYBE had his testosterone lowered for a while, as if that means much of anything, is lunacy.

“Misgendering” someone is calling them by their correct gender. The idea that the explosion of people identifying as trans is some sort of naturally occurring phenomenon that has, in all of recorded history, only occurred in the United States just coincidentally as the schools, government, therapists, and culture all started pushing this idea on young children, is ludicrous.

It’s obviously social contagion, like the accusations of witchcraft that led to the Salem witch trials. Gender-affirming treatment isn’t “treatment” at all. It’s deliberate non-treatment. It makes about as much sense as saying “anorexia-affirming treatment,” “schizophrenia-affirming treatment,” or “depression-affirming treatment.”

It’s not a surprise that the people that think this makes sense are almost exclusively children, the mentally ill, or most likely of all, mentally ill children. Of course, even those kids often have parents that know better, so how do they strong-arm them into letting their kids embrace this craziness? With the biggest scam of all:

“Would you rather have a dead child or a trans child?”

In fact, Chloe Cole, who is the most famous detransitioner, said this line was used on her parents:

There is also a particular study that tends to get quoted a lot regarding the issue and it’s often falsely used to suggest that allowing kids to go down this nightmarish path makes them less likely to commit suicide. Here’s a write-up:

The first large-scale study of its kind, announced Tuesday by The Trevor Project, provides a strong rebuttal to anti-transgender activists and Republican lawmakers across the country who have tried to ban gender-affirming healthcare for trans and nonbinary youth.

The organization said its peer-reviewed research paper found that gender-affirming hormone therapy, also known as GAHT, is significantly related to lower rates of depression, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts by young people who identify as transgender and/or nonbinary.

“This study emphasizes the potential benefits of gender-affirming hormone therapy as a mechanism to reduce feelings of gender dysphoria and minority stress among transgender and nonbinary youth—thereby working to improve mental health outcomes and prevent suicide,” said Dr. Amy Green, vice president of research at The Trevor Project, the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer & questioning youth. “These data should serve as a call to action to resist blanket bans on gender-affirming medical care and to invest in more research on this topic so that youth and their families can make evidence-informed decisions regarding care.”

First of all, the Trevor Project is the furthest thing from a neutral, unbiased source. The Trevor Project is a far-left-wing group that 100% buys into and promotes trans ideology. In other words, a study they’re involved in on trans issues is about as credible as a Philip-Morris-backed study claiming that smoking cigarettes dramatically reduces your chances of getting cancer. Just having this group involved should be enough to make people deeply suspicious.

Additionally, even if you totally buy into the conclusion, which is that gender-affirming hormone therapy temporarily (1 year) reduces feelings of depression and suicidality in youth, it’s practically meaningless since this isn’t a short-term issue. It’s the equivalent of saying, “Putting kids on a permanent all-Twinkie, cake, and pizza diet makes them happier for a year.” Even if that’s true, life is not one year long. What happens in year five? Year 10? Year twenty? No one should ever suggest that anyone become trans to have a happier life because the evidence that being trans leads to a skyrocketing risk of suicide is overwhelming.

How overwhelming? Well, let’s circle back to the Trevor Project and the Steven Crowder quote above which Newsweek “fact checks” and says “needs context”:

"Transgender people have a 42 percent attempted suicide rate," Steven Crowder, a conservative commentator, wrote on March 28, in a tweet that has been viewed more than 385,000 times and received more than 7,500 likes. "American slaves & Jews in concentration camps didn't commit suicide at 19x more than the general population."

According to a 2004 study, the estimated suicide rate among those in Nazi concentration camps was 25,000 per 100,000 people per year—or about 25 percent. That would be over 1,854 times higher than the 13.48 per 100,000 suicides in the U.S. in 2020, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data.

Academics have noted instances of suicide among slaves brought to America, but they have not been able to make any strong assessments of the suicide rate among slaves as there is limited evidence. From that evidence, though, some have suggested it was very rare and seen as an act of rebellion.

While there are statistics akin to the one stated by Crowder, it is not clear research has shown that there is a 42 percent attempted suicide rate among transgender people.

A 2020 academic study with a sample size of 372 respondents found that 40 percent of transgender people had attempted suicide. It found that interpersonal microaggressions and emotional neglect by family members were the leading contributors to the attempts.

Similarly, in 2016, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that 41 percent of 6,450 respondents said they had previously attempted suicide. By comparison, the CDC found that in 2020, 0.36 percent of the population had attempted suicide.

According to a 2022 survey by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ suicide prevention organization, nearly 1 in 5 young people who identified as transgender or non-binary have attempted suicide.

Meanwhile, a 2018 study of more than 120,000 children age 11 to 19 found that 41.8 percent of non-binary adolescents—those who do not identify as definitively male or female—had attempted suicide.

It might be that Crowder misconstrued various news reports in May 2021 which stated that 42 percent of LGBTQ+ youth had seriously considered attempting suicide in the year prior, based on that year's survey by The Trevor Project, compared to 3.68 percent nationwide. It found that 20 percent of transgender and non-binary youths had attempted suicide.

Newsweek reached out to Crowder's media company via email for comment.

However, according to the latest survey by the organization, the number of LGBTQ+ youths who had seriously considered suicide had risen to 45 percent. It noted that 14 percent of the same group had attempted suicide.

This is a ridiculous fact check in the first place since whether the suicide rate among trans people is 40%, 41%, 41.8% or 42% is a distinction without a difference. Among non-trans people, there is debate about the actual lifetime suicide rate, but according to JAMA:

“Previous epidemiologic studies in the United States have estimated that between 1.1% and 4.3% of the population attempt suicide at some time in their life.”

So, how much more likely are you to kill yourself if you become trans? 9 times? 20 times? 30 times? 37 times? We don’t know for sure, but we do know the increase is staggering – and is that really a surprise?

Imagine you’re a teenage male. You already have some serious issues and you become convinced that the solution to them is changing sexes. Then, you have your penis and scrotum lopped off. A surgical hole is then made in your body that’s supposed to approximate a vagina, but it doesn’t look all that much like the real thing. Let’s even assume that you are extremely lucky and have some kind of feeling down there. It’s still debatable how well it will work for sex and you will still have to use a dilator weekly, maybe for the rest of your life to keep your body from closing that hole.

If you don’t want to look like some kind of weird half-man, half-woman creature, you’re also going to need plenty of other surgeries as well that will cost six figures plus. Even after all that, there are no guarantees that you will look like an attractive member of the opposite sex or even that you’ll pass at all – and if anything, the odds are probably against you. 

Meanwhile, you’re going to be on mood-altering hormones for the rest of your life that may very well have short-term effects on your health and almost certainly will have long-term effects, although no one really knows what they are because you’re one of the guinea pigs for this whole thing.

Even after all of that, you’re still not going to be a woman. You’re not going to be able to have a period. You’re not going to be able to have a baby. Most other people, men, and women, are going to consider you to be a weird man who is pretending to be a woman, not the real thing. If you later conclude that you made a mistake, your penis is going to be gone and all your friends in the trans community will treat you like a pariah if you give up on being trans. That is a brutal, miserable existence that I would hope most people wouldn’t wish on their worst enemies, and guess what? We used a male example, but it’s just as bad for women, if not worse.

This is why although I would try to talk any teenager out of the idea of transitioning, I would go further than that and say that there are very few, if any situations where gender-affirming care is a good idea. Gender-affirming care is another way of saying, “Suicide encouraging care.”

Similarly, no parent should go along with a kid that thinks they’re trans. You don’t help a sick child by making them sicker, you help them by doing everything you can to compassionately nurse them back to health.

---