Countering trans suicide figures

[Walkingtheplank]

DD asked I'd we could talk about trans issues/female rights yesterday. All very calm but ultimately we disagree on key points.

She raised the point that trans teens are more like to (try to) commit suicide.

Can anyone add a link here to a article explaining why this is not true so that I can share it with her?

Causation vs correlation.

And where are her numbers from, surely not the by now years old self reported survey on the internet?

Gosh sorry, the grammar was appalling in that post. Hopefully you get the gist!

I have never seen any original sources proving or disproving that trans teens are at a high suicide rate. I've seen articles stating both but they all seem to be opinion pieces. I think everyone should be very careful when catagorically stating "facts" about teen suicide if they don't have actual evidence.

I'd be interested to see what the actual figures are presented by someone who isn't trying to proove a point.

This is why it’s so dangerous to post links when you don’t read the article or understand the stats.

Your proof ends up disproving your point, yet people take it as absolute.

a reminder for us all to read what we post as truth to make sure it actually said what we thought it did

sex-matters.org/posts/publications/teenagers-and-gender-identity-the-evidence-base-part-2/

Have a read of this.

There is no evidence that medication has a positive impact on the MH of children experiencing gender distress.

In this context regardless of the rates of suicidal ideation, medical transition is not an effective intervention.

Transitioned adults (as posted above) are evidenced to have higher rates of suicide than the average population.

This suicide argument is a red herring when trying to promote medical intervention.

sex-matters.org/posts/publications/gender-questioning-teenagers-puberty-blockers-and-hormone-treatment-vs-placebo/

Also this study

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

@TeaKlaxon

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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?

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

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.

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/

Thank you for the links, especially the Transgender Trend and Fair Play for Women ones.

I will forward them on.

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.

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.