“A recent study destroys the left’s claim that indulging so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ helps reduce suicides in youths. According to this study, there is no real evidence at all that these….medical procedures lead to more mental stability in youths who have such [life-altering procedures] visited upon their developing minds and bodies,” reports The Lid. “Stated another way, none of the dangerous and permanent transgender procedures — whether chemical or surgical — are guaranteed to help a young person’s mental troubles at all.”
As it observes,
The left’s favorite argument in favor of these destructive procedures is to fool parents into accepting this medical regime on their kids with the claim that they should allow [doctors] to perform these procedures because it is better to have a “live trans child than a dead one.” … These activists … claim that kids will kill themselves if they don’t get the procedures to “change” their gender. But it isn’t true. No actual evidence proves that wide-spread transgendering helps reduce suicidal tendencies in gender confused kids. This according to a peer-reviewed study published by the quarterly journal BMJ Mental Health.
Finnish researchers wanted to figure out whether adolescents and young adults with “clinically significant” gender dysphoria were less likely to kill themselves if provided so-called “gender affirming” care.
After analyzing all-cause and suicide deaths among a study population of 2,083 of “gender-referred adolescents” and 16,643 of matched controls, the researchers concluded that “medical gender reassignment does not have an impact on suicide risk.”
“All-cause and suicide mortalities did not differ between those gender referred who had and had not proceeded to [sex change surgeries] when psychiatric treatment history was accounted for,” wrote the researchers.
As The Lid observes, “Not only did the suicide rate not go down for those who began indulging ‘gender-affirming care,’ but it was actually higher in those undergoing such procedures, the study found.”
“The all-cause mortality rate among gender-referred individuals was 0.81 per 1000 person-years, while controls had a rate of 0.40 per 1000 person-years. The suicide mortality rate among gender-referred individuals was 0.51 per 1000 person-years, while controls had a rate of 0.12 per 1000 person-years,” the study found.
As The Lid notes about the study:
Worse, the authors even pointed out that suicide also increased in older adults who underwent transgendering care….another part of the transgender mythos … has been debunked by real science.
The left is still pushing the fantasy that hormone therapies and puberty blocking drugs are reversible. But in fact, they are not. You cannot just stop indulging these “therapies” and “go back to normal.” The truth is these dangerous therapies wreck serious damage to a young person’s body the minute they are started.
Society often pays for transgender people’s sex change surgeries, which sometimes cost over $200,000, because Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) often requires insurers to cover sex changes and gender-reassignment surgery.
But sex-change surgeries are frequently a bad investment, because they often have life-threatening complications. “The truth about transgender surgery” is that “Just 16% of gender dysphoria patients go through with the operation, but up to half suffer life-threatening complications,” reports the London Daily Mail. “Up to half of trans men and women suffer post-op issues or pain so severe they need medical attention or additional surgery months later….Patients are often left with infections, pain and difficulty using the toilet or having sex post-surgery….the Women’s College Hospital (WCH) in Ontario, Canada, earlier this year found that more than half of trans women who had ‘bottom’ surgery were in so much pain years later they needed medical attention.”
Even transgender people who demand to receive sex-change surgery admit that the results are not great. A transgender activist conceded that in a New York Times op-ed, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy.” As Andrea Long Chu wrote in that op-ed:
Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to.
She still wants the sex change, but doctors don’t have magical powers, so “sex change” surgery can’t fully give her the body she wants. Hence, Chu’s admission that she won’t be happy, even after her sex change, due to the physical pain and discomfort that result from a sex change, and the artificial, subpar nature of the sex organ that doctors create in sex-change surgery.
The suicide rate of transgender people actually rises after they get sex changes, according to the Heritage Foundation.
The fact that so many transgender people never get a surgical sex change suggests that such procedures are not a great investment, and that taxpayers and insurers should not be forced to pay for them. Being “gender affirming” shouldn’t be an excuse for a doctor to commit medical malpractice. But that may be happening in many cases.
The National Review provided a possible example. Doctors affirmed a man’s false belief that he had a female gender identity, and then mutilated his body by giving him a sex change he came to regret.
Plagued by self-hatred, he “heard about transgenderism” in college, and “seized on it as the solution.” A gender-affirming free clinic “immediately affirmed” his female gender identity. He was then given an “incomplete informed consent document to sign.” Later, his doctor told him that he “should really get surgery.” He was given an orchiectomy, but not told that it was castration. After being castrated, he “developed a drug habit” and began “ejaculating blood.” He said that “the gender clinic kept telling me, ‘Oh, it gets better.’” But it didn’t.
He says he was never given an independent psychological evaluation before getting surgery. After surgery, a different therapist diagnosed him with a different condition than gender dysphoria. But by then, he had already been castrated.
Getting a sex change caused havoc in the lives of thousands of people. The National Review gave an example of a woman who transitioned to being a man, and ended up with negative health consequences, “no hair,” and a “body mutilated.”
It’s not just doctors and psychologists who have made mistakes in their zeal to be “gender affirming.” So have judges.
Jamie Shupe gave an example in “I was America’s first ‘nonbinary person.’ It was all a sham.” Shupe is male, as he noted in the Daily Signal. But he wanted in vain to be a woman, due to a condition known as “autogynephilia.” When his therapist expressed skepticism about whether he would actually benefit from trying to change his sex, he filed a “formal complaint” against her, and found a new therapist, who affirmed his new “identity as a woman.” But eventually he changed his mind and declared he was nonbinary, not female:
When the fantasy of being a woman came to an end, I asked two of my doctors to allow me to become nonbinary instead of female to bail me out. Both readily agreed….To escape the delusion of having become a woman, I did something completely unprecedented in American history. In 2016, I convinced an Oregon judge to declare my sex to be nonbinary—neither male nor female.
As a result of this ruling, a “nonbinary option” now exists in many states, even though Shupe’s “sex change to nonbinary was a medical and scientific fraud.” The judge’s ruling was not based on any evidence. As Shupe observes, “the judge didn’t ask me a single question. Nor did” the judge ask “to see any medical evidence….Within minutes, the judge just signed off on the court order,” even though he did “not have any disorders of sexual development.” But three years later, “unable to advance the fraud for another single day,” he “reclaimed” his “male birth sex.”
