A treasure trove of studies relating to whether there is conclusive improvement to transgender people's lives after medicalised treatment paths can be found in this Medium article by JLCederblom (Posted by NecessaryScene on a thread today).
medium.com/@JLCederblom/the-lukewarm-perjury-of-jack-turban-a85903109051
There is an abridged version as well.
It is actually a run down of the evidence presented by Jack Turban's Declaration in Support of Plaintiff's Motion for a Preliminary Injunction in Brandt et al vs Rutledge et al in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.
In it is this review listed as footnote 15. Baker, K. E., et al, (2021) Hormone Therapy, Mental Health and Quality of Life Among Transgender People: A Systematic Review. Journal of the Endocrine Society.
academic.oup.com/jes/article/5/4/bvab011/6126016
I was interested particularly in this finding.
Quality of Life
Among adolescents, a mixed-gender prospective cohort (n = 50) showed no difference in QOL scores after a year of endocrine interventions, which included combinations of GnRH analogues and estrogen or testosterone formulations [30]. No study found that hormone therapy decreased QOL scores. We conclude that hormone therapy may improve QOL among transgender people. The strength of evidence for this conclusion is low due to concerns about bias in study designs, imprecision in measurement because of small sample sizes, and confounding by factors such as gender-affirming surgery status.
And this under Depression
Among adolescents, 2 mixed-gender prospective cohorts (n = 50 and n = 23, respectively) showed improvements in depression scores after 1 year of treatment with GnRH analogues and estrogen or testosterone formulations (both P < 0.001) [30, 38]. Another prospective study reported that BDI scores improved almost by half among adolescents (n = 41) after a mean of 1.88 years of treatment with GnRH analogues to delay puberty (P = 0.004) [34]. The overall improvement after several subsequent years of testosterone or estrogen therapy in this cohort (n = 32) was smaller, however, resulting in no significant change from baseline [35]. No study found that hormone therapy increased depression.
Anxiety
Among adolescents, 1 prospective study saw mean anxiety scores in a mixed-gender group (n = 23) improve from 33.0 ± 7.2 to 18.5 ± 8.4 after 1 year (P < 0.001) [38], but another reported no changes in anxiety after approximately 2 years of puberty delay treatment with GnRH analogues and 4 years of hormone therapy (n = 32) [35].
Suicide
The risk of bias for this study was serious due to the difficulty of identifying appropriate comparison groups and uncontrolled confounding by surgery status and socioeconomic variables such as unemployment. We cannot draw any conclusions on the basis of this single study about whether hormone therapy affects death by suicide among transgender people.
This review was published in April 2021 and if it has been posted previously, apologies for the repeat.