Recently, alarmist talking points used on parents were debunked in a Supreme Court case, which revealed the falsehood of claims routinely made to parents that transgender kids will commit suicide if they don’t transition to a different gender. Even a transgender lawyer who supports gender transitions for kids was forced to admit this claim was false. That lawyer, Chase Strangio, conceded to the Supreme Court that “completed suicide is thankfully and admittedly rare” among transgender youth, even those not given gender-affirming treatment, and that “there is no evidence…that this treatment reduces completed suicide.” “Gender-affirming” treatment for kids includes giving them puberty blockers and/or surgery to change their sex. At least 225 hospitals have provided irreversible transgender procedures to kids, and at least 6,000 kids have had transgender surgeries, according to insurance-claims data unearthed by the medical non-profit Do No Harm.
This fact that gender transitions don’t save lives was a highly publicized concession in a Supreme Court case about whether to strike down a Tennessee law restricting “gender-affirming” treatments for minors. “The most eye raising moment of the Supreme Court hearing was Chase Strangio freely admitting there is not one piece of data supporting the contention that young people will end their lives if they don’t get puberty blockers,” notes the writer Caitlin Flanagan.
But even after this debunking, progressives continued peddling the false, debunked talking point the kids will commit suicide if they are not given such “gender-affirming care.” That included progressives who closely followed the Supreme Court argument at which Strangio made this concession, like Jamelle Bouie, who writes opinion pieces for the New York Times.
For doctors who do sex changes, it is critical to make this alarmist claim about suicides to get parents to approve transitioning their kids, to overcome parents’ natural reluctance to put their kids on puberty blockers and on the road to painful, life-altering surgical sex changes.
Sex-change procedures come with serious side effects than can leave transgender people with lifelong pain and discomfort, as a transgender activist conceded in a New York Times op-ed, “My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy.” That’s because of 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. 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.
A gender transition can result in a lifetime of pain, discomfort, and medications, such as hormone therapy. As Britain’s National Health Service explains, hormones “need to be taken for the rest of your life, even if you have gender surgery.” The FDA notes that puberty blockers can cause brain swelling and vision loss, and an FDA official who supported giving minors puberty blockers conceded that they actually increase suicidality. Indeed, the “FDA knew ‘gender affirming’ puberty blockers increase ‘suicidality’ in 2017,” reported Just the News.
95% of young transgender people on testosterone develop pelvic floor dysfunction; most have bowel issues and sexual dysfunction. As the Telegraph reported, “Around 87 per cent…had urinary symptoms such as incontinence, frequent toilet visits and bed-wetting, while 74 per cent had bowel issues including constipation or being unable to hold stools or wind in. Some 53 per cent suffered from sexual dysfunction…Almost half had an ‘orgasm disorder’, while a quarter suffered from pain during sexual intercourse.”
To overcome parents’ natural reluctance to subject their kids to this suffering, doctors who do sex changes often tell parents that they need to gender transition their kid to keep them from committing suicide, even though this isn’t true. One of America’s most prominent gender doctors, “Dr. Olson-Kennedy disclosed to how she speaks with parents of gender dysphoric patients: ‘We often ask parents, “Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?”‘”
Jazz Jennings is the most famous kid to undergo a gender transition, with a long-running TV show celebrating Jazz’s gender transition. Health providers falsely said that a sex change would make Jazz happy, and falsely told Jazz’s mother that Jazz was at risk for suicide if she didn’t allow Jazz to transition. “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?,” they asked Jazz’s mother, peddling a talking point that is often used on parents of transgender teens.
But by 2023, Jazz was miserable. Jazz’s penis was surgically removed at age 17, after Jazz was put on puberty blockers at age 11. Jazz became depressed, saying “I don’t feel like me, ever.” After Jazz’s sex change, Jazz experienced pain, constant reflux, a lack of sex drive, an inability to orgasm, rapid weight gain, and mental illness.
Other transgender people have also reported being miserable after their gender transition. One study found that sex changes massively increase suicide risks, rather than reducing them. “Gender-affirming surgery is significantly associated with elevated suicide attempt risks,” according to that study in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science.
These realities were completely ignored by progressives like New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie, who denounced Supreme Court justices because they asked the lawyer challenging that law various questions. In a post at Bluesky, he wrote, “the clear sign that they just don’t see these kids as real people is the endless concern over hypotheticals and the indifference to the reality that actual children are more likely to kill themselves because of these bans.”
But at the very oral argument he had been posting about on social media, the lawyer challenging Tennessee’s ban on certain transgender treatments for minors, Chase Strangio, conceded to the Supreme Court that “completed suicide is thankfully and admittedly rare” among transgender youth, even those not given gender-affirming treatment, and that “there is no evidence…that this treatment reduces completed suicide.”
So it is simply not true that “actual children are more likely to kill themselves because of these bans.”
Nevertheless, Bouie’s false suicide claim was reposted by many culture warriors on Bluesky, such as Aaron Ross Powell and Jason Kuznicki, who had also been following the Supreme Court argument. Culture warriors like Powell and Kuznicki are simply indifferent to truth and reality when it conflicts with left-wing social agendas:
