Countering trans suicide figures

I think it would be impossible to separate 'they committed suicide because they're trans' from all the other issues which may be running alongside gender confusion. Autism springs to mind.
As does bullying, confusion about sexuality, dissatisfaction with body image in general, spending more time on the internet, OCD, possible trauma...
As a young girl I self harmed, I shiver to think how internet chat rooms with people egging me on to do more significant harm would have affected me. And I feel that this rhetoric is rife in the forums specially aimed at trans teens.
I would NOT put it to your teen that 'these people are damaged which is why they commit suicide (which I do not think is the case)' but that suicidality is impossible to link to one cause. If i think of my friend who killed herself at 21, autism, mental illness, early trauma, substance use and confusion of her sexuality, as well as being bullied relentlessly at school, were all the causes. If one of those factors were not present then would she have still done it? No one would be able to say.

Yes I can see why you are so desperate to ‘move along’.

You didn’t just post the ‘wrong chart’. You posted it twice, the second time challenging me on how it didn’t show what you claimed it did.

Only now that you’ve been rumbled are you doing the whole ‘oh I just posted the wrong thing’ schtick.

And still you double down. If you’d posted the full passage from the bit you’d see that the authors explain that of course lifetime suicide rates are going to be higher than past year or defined period rates. Obviously. That will be the case for any group. You know why? Lifetime is a longer period than one year!

Ask 100 people if they’d attempted suicide in the past year, then ask them if they’d attempted suicide at any point in their life. Of course the latter is going to be higher.

That is why the authors explicitly say that the evidence points towards affirmative treatment as a contributing to lower suicide rates, not higher.

But keep doubling down. This desperate attempt to downplay suicide among trans people to score points, and exposing your own innumeracy in the process, is a sight to behold.

And thanks for apologising for misreading the information I posted about suicide rates, much appreciated.

The point I was (badly) trying to make about the suicide stats Vs referrals is that we don't know. There is zero evidence to suggest higher rates in gender confused children. Or to support the 'better a live son than a dead daughter' mantra.

And I may be shit at maths but at least I'm standing up against sterilising and medicalising a generation of children so I'm okay with that.

Thanks @TeaKlaxon - I've read that article now and it's not great and draws a number of conclusions with pretty weak evidence beucsse there's not a lot of consistency in methodology or in questions across the meta analysis. I think I posted the wrong chart - there is one that specifically looks at before transition Vs lifetime/last year:

For example, as expected, when we compare lifetime to past year suicidality we find that ideation (55% vs. 51%) and especially attempts (29% vs. 11%) decrease. It seems counterintuitive, on the other hand, that suicide attempts are lower before transition (ideation 36.1%; attempt 13.1%) than over most other periods (past year attempts being the exception).

Anyway, moving on, do you have any better data?

Yes; and where's the study you "quoted"?

You’re really just exposing how innumerate the anti-trans crew really are.

Bravo @TeaKlaxon for extrapolating from one person to ‘the anti-trans crew’, and for assuming that someone concerned with women’s rights must be ‘anti-trans’.

I’m not ‘disagreeing’ with other peoples evidence.

Evidence either shows what it is claimed to show, or it doesn’t.

You posted a study that you then admitted you hadn’t read, and posted a chart from it claiming it compared pre-transition and post-transition suicide rates. Brazenly you still haven’t actually acknowledged that your original claim about the study was wrong.

You then claimed that because suicide rates overall are higher among boys, but most referrals to GIDS are biologically female there can’t be any higher incidence of suicide among trans people. But that is just totally innumerate. The number of suicides among trans young people is tiny in the context the number of suicides in young people as a whole, so there would not be any material distortion in overall suicide demographics.

You’re really just exposing how innumerate the anti-trans crew really are.

One sleight of hand trick I've seen used by the TRA lobby is to eliminate destransitioners in a No True Scotsman fallacy. Young adolescents identify as trans. Many grow out of it and stop calling themselves trans. The resultant refined demographic of those that persisted with it are now exclusively looked at. For stats on suicide and transitioning to be meaningful, you really need to stick to the demographic of ALL those who identified as trans and are therefore being claimed to be at a higher risk of suicide. Otherwise you're just selecting out many to leave yourself with a group that has more issues.

Always watch out for that one - the number that goes in is different than the number that comes out.

This (quite a long read) from Fair Play For Women might be useful as it breaks down how the '48% of teenagers attempt suicide' claim was arrived at

https://fairplayforwomen.com/suicide/

I remember talking to a friend about gender ideology impacted and one of the first things she mentioned was the risk of suicide in transgender people. To which I replied 'compared to who?'
Because if you are comparing a group of people who believe themselves to be transgender to a group who are completely happy with every aspect of their life, then I don't doubt the rates are higher.
But if you compare them with a group who have depression, or body dysmorphia, or have suffered trauma or any other group where the members are not totally happy with everything in their life then the numbers are going to tell a different story.

I am mindful of the fact that behind the numbers of suicides are people and don't wish to minimise that at all, but I do think that unfortunately when suicide statistics are used they rarely get challenged because it seems callous to do so.

And the 1,800 number was all young people under the age of 35 @TeaKlaxon. At least bother to read my posts if you're going to criticise them

You said the numbers referred were very small. They are. The numbers of children who kill themselves are also very small. But I appreciate the insult @TeaKlaxon

I'm presuming that as you're just squatting on this thread disagreeing with other people's evidence, you don't have anything that demonstrates any correlation between trans identity and suicide?

One thing not mentioned is the repeated breaches of the Samaritans guidelines on reporting on suicide in the media. They've now produced an excellent resource on youth suicide. It's a reminder of how cynically trans activists openly breach these guidelines, weaponising the mental health of the most vulnerable children - those in care, bereaved, with eating disorders, anxiety, depression, self harm and a range of other mental heath challenges - in order to promote an ideology.

https://media.samaritans.org/documents/Guidance_on_reporting_youth_suicides_and_suicide_clusters_FINAL.pdf

So @TeaKlaxon can you please post the links that demonstrate children who don’t medically transition complete suicide at a greater rate than those that do?

Sorry but you’re really showing yourself up as being incapable of understanding numbers here.

First the mindless posting of a study that said the opposite of what you claimed, and a bar chart that did not do what you claimed.

Now you think the fact that most teenage suicides is among boys is somehow proof that trans kids are not at higher risk of suicide? That’s bonkers.

Let’s look at your figures. 1800 teenage suicides, which you compare with 1600 GIDS admissions. Only problem is that of that 1600 GIDS admissions, only a small proportion would result in suicide.

Even if it was as high as 10%, that would be 160. Not even close to being high enough to upend the wider demographics of suicide among teenagers.

Can I suggest you do some reading about numeracy and stats before wading in like this?

I’m asking for a link to the specific Swedish study you quoted from but haven’t - as far as I can see - linked.

I think we can only really look at longer term studies.

Gender issues is right now the trendy norm in the young teens / angsty teens trying to find their identity age group. In the past it was emo or goth or mental health or same-sex exploration. It changes.

Feeling or being suicidal has now also become a normalized feeling in the adolescent population. With all the mental health awareness campaigns, it is a very common voiced feeling at this point. I asked a group of older teens what % of teens they think experience suicidal ideation and they all looked at me with a strange look and said, doesn't everyone? When I said no, they guessed 90-95% and many told me they don't know any friends who haven't been suicidal. Most of these teens are not making attempts but they talk about suicidal thoughts far more openly now than they did 10 years ago and far more casually.

It does seem that like with most of these trends (emo, goth, etc) that the more vulnerable someone is, the more likely they are to be drawn to these less mainstream communities where they get acceptance and inclusion for being different and with it pressure to conform within that community.

Transition also means many different things - social transition (names and gender expression) or hormones or surgical changes or what is the transition. That is also going ot impact on study results.

Many of the studies (that find both lower and higher risk) have major limitations in smple size or how representative the sample is, or what they actually defined as transition, or what they are measusing related to suicide (ideation vs attempts, deaths) and where they found the sample (convenience) and how aligned the method is with other studies etc. Definitions and terminology are also used quite differently across studies. For example self report of suicide attempts can be very misleading in what people personally define as an attempt and may include parasuicidal gestures and non suicidal self injury or depending on how the question is worded.

Here are a couple long term studies out of Amsterdam

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acps.13164
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2213858721001856

Here is a couple systematic reviews
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09540261.2022.2093629
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09540261.2022.2053070?src=recsys

@TeaKlaxon

I've have already posted links to studies you may wish to look at.

Exactly. There are no studies that show medical transition for children reduces suicidality.

Posters seem to be keen to point out transitioning doesn’t reduce the risk in anyone.

So why is it done under that pretence then? Particularly in children?

And the number of teenagers who kill themselves is even smaller @TeaKlaxon thankfully. There were 1,500 referrals of teenagers to GIDS in 2016 according to the interim Cass review and 1,800 people under the age of 35 who committed suicide according to Papyrus' latest figures.

Link?

The quote you posted compared post-transition trans people’s suicidality rates with non-trans people.

But no one claims that gender affirmation eliminates higher rates of suicide among trans people. Trans people still exist in a deeply transphobic society after transition and it is widely acknowledged that they continue to have worse mental health outcomes compared to people who are not trans.

But this tells us nothing about whether treatment reduces the risks.

Again that doesn’t make sense.

Teenagers with gender dysphoria are a tiny, tiny segment of the population. Certainly not large enough to have any significant impact on overall demographics of teenage suicide.

Results of the Swedish study:

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 suicide attempts (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.

That chart doesn’t compare pre transition and post transition at all.

So how in earth could it show higher suicide rates post-transition?