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?

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’.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

Unless you have any data, I'm really not interested in engaging with you any more @TeaKlaxon

Have a good evening

The poster likes to unpick data without offering any credible research in rebuttal themselves.

Notice the lack of response to the research I offered in links (that also cites credible research itself).

This is the 2012 Swedish study https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016885. It has the advantage of Swedish medical record keeping which essentially covers all people, so the usual problems with samples don't apply here much if at all. It addresses completed suicide, not ideation, and only for those transgender people who medically transitioned.

I think someone asked about it?

On suicidal ideation, in general: It's higher among certain teens, including those with autism or various mental or mood illnesses, those who are gay or Lesbian, and those who identify as transgender.

To understand how being just transgender affects suicidal ideation, research needs to address the fact that teens can be all three of those things or two of them at the same time, and if that's the case we can't just attribute all observed differences to being transgender.

So studies need to control for those other causes of suicidal thinking. I have not found one which seems to do that, but this paper by Briggs brings out some of the issues:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02287-7

I've been thinking about this and I wonder if practically there would be anyway to produce robust data on this.

I don't think anyone would want a study where children with gender dysphoria are randomised to transition or not and then somehow forced to go about their lives in a way where there were no confounding factors and then followed up a few years later to see who had died by suicide.

I can't see another way of robustly testing specifically whether or not transition prevents suicide.

I feel that one of the reasons it is very difficult to separate trans out from other comorbidities is that, well, trans isn't actually a thing, exactly. I mean it's not "wrong sex brain" that's not real and thankfully we are seeing that nonsense argued a little less these days. It's not any physical actual condition. It's really just a belief. Body dysmorphia is a real psychological condition but then you're drawing the obvious comparison to anorexia (also correlated with autism and child sexual abuse). But anyway, whilst body dysmorphia is a condition that's not precisely what "trans" means and often isn't even part of "trans" at all. Especially for boys who consider themselves trans as opposed to adolescent girls.

This whole thing about what trans correlates with feels like old scientific concepts of the Ether. It's assumed its there and lots of conversation about it's effect on those with it. But what if it was just autism and social expectations and unfounded belief all along. Is it meaningful to say "this way of thinking about yourself is a medical condition"?

I feel not.

That graph (figure 2 ) doesn’t show anything about transitioning. It is lifetime suicidality.

But I’m not the one making claims here. You are.

You first claimed that transition increases suicide risk. Turns out that was false.

Then you tried to claim that the demographic information around youth suicide implied no higher rate of suicide among trans people. That was also wide of the mark.

Its not up to me to produce data backing up claims I’ve not made.

Thanks for the link. I thought that might have been the Swedish study being referred to.

That also does not compare pre-transition with post-transition, so is also not relevant for those claiming that transition makes suicide figures worse.

@TeaKlaxon - the relevant part of the Swedish study linked to upthread:

Results
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.
Conclusions
Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group.

Your DD is likely correct, if we go by the fabulous study @Clymene posted:

“In the studies examined in the current meta-synthesis, an average of 56% of participants experienced lifetime suicidal ideation and 29% had ever attempted suicide. Given the rate of suicidality in the general population, 0.5%2 and 3.7%,3respectively, it is clear that transgender individuals are disproportionately impacted by this phenomenon. Indeed, even over the past year, where 51% of participants ideated and 11% attempted, suicidality is approximately 14 and 22 times higher than in the general public.”

You forgot an important bit there @Clymene - the fact that lifetime suicidality is a cumulative measure so it is literally suicidality before transition + suicidality after transition. You cannot compare them directly and go Ah ha! Lifetime is higher than before trabsition so transitioning is making suicidality increase. This statistic works counter-intuitively.

So the conclusion you have intuitively arrived at is actually wrong, because it is unknown without any control population as to whether transition reduced the final lifetime suicidality % or not. The study even goes on to say this, but you stopped your cut and paste a little prematurely.

“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). However, we may expect to find higher rates of suicidality over the lifetime because this is a category that represents a non-transition specific and cumulative experience, in contrast to the single period represented by before transition. It may also be the case that individuals who do not desire transition represent a less dysphoric group and are therefore less suicidal.64 By contrast, evidence is mounting that barriers to transition-related healthcare contribute to suicidality among those who desire such measures63,78 and though it sometimes increases during transition,78 it typically decreases once desired transitional goals are completed.30,102 Indeed, a recent qualitative inquiry into suicide protective factors among trans adults identified several important protective factors among this population, one of which was socially and/or medically transitioning (for those who seek it).103 Additionally, suicidality may be generally higher among transgender individuals than the general population throughout the life course, due to factors unrelated to transition, such as stigma and discrimination.20,55,78”

What part of that do you think contradicts what I’ve said?

@TeaKlaxon you wrote "You first claimed that transition increases suicide risk. Turns out that was false.

Then you tried to claim that the demographic information around youth suicide implied no higher rate of suicide among trans people. That was also wide of the mark."

Perhaps you could explain to me how the results of the study quoted in my post do not contradict what you said?

Sample size= 324 people.
Tiny study. Only 3 suicides led to that conclusion.

Hmm - and yet weight is placed on a self-selected group of 27 in the other study quoted upthread whereas this is taken from a whole cohort of properly matched people?

It's not really a sample, but as close to the total population we can get of Swedish transitioners who both had hormone treatment and genital surgery, because the government collects medical data on almost all Swedes. Sweden is not a large country in population, and transgender people who had had surgery would have been a very small group before 2012.

The thingy walsh video that was shared on twitter contains videos of an adult ftm who cites statistics saying the highest danger point is I think 7/8 years post transition.

Sorry bit vague. I'm meant to be cooking. Good luck.

No weight given by me to that study, been ignored/dismissed.