It has become a common talking point from the left that so-called “gender-affirming care” is desperately necessary for transgender-identifying individuals, even life-saving.
How many Americans take this emphatic statement at face value without considering the data that exists on the topic?
Does “gender-affirming care” really prevent suicide?
The Activists’ Claims
While suicide ideation rates are inarguably high among individuals who identify as transgender, the left often touts subtly misleading stats to bolster the highly problematic appeal to emotion inherent in the argument that “gender-affirming care” saves lives.
Often mixed with such claims is a spotty array of data pointing to, for example, a reported reduction in suicide rates when states passed laws recognizing same-sex “marriage” or heightened mental distress among LGBT-identifying individuals when socially conservative legislation is passed.
As activists opposed Florida’s bill regulating how teachers may address sexuality and gender identity in public school classrooms — even branding it as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — the media issued dire warnings that such legislation could have “dangerous” consequences.
“Part of a wave of proposed discriminatory anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation popping up throughout the country, experts say this bill will be damaging and dangerous for the overall mental and physical health and well-being of queer, trans, and nonbinary students and their families in the Sunshine State,” Healthline breathlessly reported in 2022 before the bill was signed into law.
The publication went on to cite such “experts” pointing to the aforementioned tangential data to support the claim that Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act posed an abject threat to youth.
President Joe Biden, meanwhile, made transgender issues central to his political platform from the get-go and has appealed directly to the grim statistics of trans youth suicide to emphasize his commitment to “trans rights.”
What’s concerning about these arguments is that they capitalize on a very real and disturbing truth about those who suffer from gender dysphoria. But rather than advocate for more extensive mental health treatment for these individuals, activists seek to normalize and expand what looks increasingly like an unsafe and ineffective medical protocol.
The Scientific Reality
A 2021 study published by The Journal of Urology busts wide open the oft-repeated claim that “gender-affirming care” saves lives by demonstrating that irreversible plastic surgery does not seem to contribute to a lower rate of suicide among transgender people at all.
The study’s authors identified patients in California who underwent vaginoplasty and phalloplasty procedures (which mutilate human genitalia to mimic a vagina or phallus, respectively) between 2012 and 2018, tracking “emergency room and inpatient psychiatric encounters” both before and after surgery.
The rate of attempted suicide did not decline after the “gender-affirming” procedures.
Among phalloplasty recipients, it remained steady at 0.8 percent, while in the case of vaginoplasty recipients, it actually surged from 1.5 percent to 3.3 percent — “more than double that of the general population,” the study says.
What’s more, the overall rate of psychiatric encounters remained high after surgery in both groups.
Of the 869 vaginoplasty patients and 357 phalloplasty patients tracked by the study, 22.2 percent and 20.7 percent, respectively, had at least one encounter.
A Look Behind the Curtain
If this data is representative of post-operative transgender people around the world — and there’s no reason to believe it isn’t — it means that activists and politicians are cynically leveraging the well-being of severely mentally ill individuals to push a so-called cure that is surely worse than the disease.
And their claims about the “life-saving” value of “gender-affirming” surgery are being met with little scrutiny.
The American Medical Association, in a 2021 statement urging state governors not to support legislation that would prevent children from receiving this “life-saving” treatment, cited reduced youth suicide rates when such “care” is available.
However, this data was based on two studies from 2010 and 2005, an era when considerably less data on transgender-identifying youth had been collected.
The American Academy of Pediatrics also argues such treatments prevent youth suicide. But interestingly, a statement on its official stance offers merely the finding that trans-identifying children have suicidal thoughts at a higher rate than so-called “cisgender” children.
That’s hardly revelatory since gender dysphoria is a mental illness with high comorbidity rates of other mental illnesses.
Conclusion
If you’re feeling a little bit gaslit right now, that’s probably because that’s exactly what liberal activists and the medical establishment have intended with their endorsement of a novel and bizarre form of “medicine” that denies the human form as designed by God.
It’s all very grim, but it’s not very complicated.
In a society where families are crumbling, sexual abuse and exploitation are rampant, and our youth are afflicted with a grievous mental health crisis, are we really failing to see the forest for the trees?
It’s not just our children who are ill. Our country is, too. It’s suffering from gender confusion because, having abandoned God, it’s suffering a crisis of meaninglessness. We’ve rejected the Lord in favor of the man-centric religion of self that the book of Proverbs warns can only lead to death and woe.
And rather than address the deep-seated needs of our struggling children, liberals want to encourage the practice of mutilating a physically healthy child’s body to “affirm” a symptom of mental discord.
It’s based on the same cynical atheist premise that plunged us into this mess in the first place: the idea that man can be his own god.
Think how it must feel to have invested so much hope and money into body-destroying surgery that can never, at the end of the day, turn a man into a woman or vice versa. Far from relieving despair and “saving lives,” it’s no wonder such procedures may actually do the opposite.
