Research Increasingly Shows Gender Medicine Leads to Suicide

American Academy of Pediatrics Ignores Ramifications for Adolescent Girls

While UK activists fret wrong-sex identified people are dying due to their recent puberty blocker ban, in the US, efforts to protect kids from gender medicine are progressing as seen in Ohio, where such a ban was recently upheld. A similar bill in New Hampshire warns of the coercive context in which medicalization is typically presented. That verbal Taser is medicalize or die.

Thus, many were surprised when the White House announced in June it does not support surgeries for minors. That announcement contradicted ongoing messaging from HHS secretary and pediatrician Admiral Richard / “Rachel” Levine who claims “affirmation” averts suicide: "We often say that gender-affirming care is health care, gender-affirming care is mental healthcare, and gender-affirming care is literally suicide prevention care."  Hold on. 

This seizing on gender medicine as cure all overlooks known harms. In fact, the FDA placed a warning on puberty blockers in 2022. Meanwhile, according to emails obtained as part of a recent lawsuit, an FDA official backed dangerous puberty blockers and the agency withheld results of their own study and earlier research showing increased depression and suicidality. 

Medical societies have similarly come under activist influence. The American Academy of Pediatrics, AAP in particular, is now an “overtly political body.” Early on, Psychologist Dr. James Cantor definitively showed their 2018 policy institutionalizing affirm-only as THE model for treating gender distress, misrepresented the studies to justify medicalization as preventing suicide. Fear-based decision-making thereby eclipsed informed consent, since the AAP dismissed as “outdated,” the successful standard of watchful waiting (ongoing exploratory therapy) to address gender dysphoria.

It thus took the venerable AAP to relegate therapy to a non-option. Desistance-- outgrowing gender distress-- was a common place of developmental psychology, well known to psychologists in the DSM 5 in 2013. Since then, gold-standard research --large studies over longer durations--underscore the best response is therapy. Two nationwide long-term studies are of particular interest. Surveying a group of 2,772 kids every three years for 15 years, a Dutch study published last February reported diminished gender discontentedness of 64%. When discontent endured, the researchers discovered behavioral and emotional difficulties or same- sex attraction. Likewise, a recent German study found desistance rates from “gender identity disorder” were over half, with even higher 73% rates of desistance for teenage girls. Most kids outgrew gender discontent within five years. The AAP’s affirm only approach impedes the kind of exploratory therapy that leads to this known desistance.

By contrast to watchful therapy, the AAP’s endorsement of medicalization places distressed adolescents at elevated risk. That’s because adolescents are especially prone to the suicide scare. After increasingly exploring gender in high school, Cristina Hineman, for instance, was repeatedly told by Planned Parenthood (the subject of her recent lawsuit) that surgery was “the only way” to make the “crippling feeling” of suicidal depression go away." 

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According to another detransitioner, “The industry is under huge pressure from the trans community to move things along quickly because of statistics around suicide. This frightened me into feeling I had to do everything as quickly as possible to avoid feeling that way.”  Feeding such fears leads to more suicides. The UK’s activist-oriented Good Law Project, recently shrilled that Britain’s puberty blocker ban would “kill trans children.” In response, the UK’s Chairman of the national suicide prevention strategy advisory group, Prof Louis Appleby criticized the “‘dead child’ rhetoric” since that represents a known risk for suicide. 

This may have been the case for Yaeli, a vulnerable 16-year-old removed from her home and started on testosterone, a psychoactive drug that causes emotional and mental health disturbances in women. Taken by CPS into the foster care system, Yaeli was prescribed testosterone without parental consent. Three years later, becoming more depressed, she committed suicide. Such accounts demonstrate medicalization can be a death sentence for adolescents. 

One of the more public accounts of how affirm-only dogma led to splitting apart a family and ultimately to suicide, Abigail Martinez testifies that her daughter’s adherence to the affirm-only model led not to improved mental health but while on testosterone, to increased depression and suicide.  

Affirm-or-Die Drugs Increase Suicide Risk
Since affirm-only has become a proxy for suicide prevention, the AAP needs to demonstrate that affirm only produces measurable functional benefits. The kind of gate-crashing panic Hineman reports was fed by an over-reliance on self -reports soon after achieving surgical goals rather than analysis of long-term objective measures of mental health. Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright observes that rather than assessing double mastectomies within a rose-colored post-surgical haze, researchers need to chart “objective measures of long-term improvement in anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and overall quality of life.“  

Instead, the AAP relies on two sets of guidelines: WPATH (the World Professional Association of Transgender Health) and ES (the Endocrine Society). Both organizations built their recommendations on the weakest evidence available as judged by GRADE and multiple systematic reviews. The weakness of the guidelines becomes apparent because gender is assumed the underlying cause of distress and comorbidities are left unexplored and unresolved. Looking specifically at suicidality among adolescents and young adults  another major study concluded this year found “this group’s higher suicide rate was tied to the fact that they had a higher rate of severe psychiatric problems, not to their gender distress.” 

Likely sensing the increased resistance of a public incredulous over pediatric mastectomies and even genital surgeries scheduled at leading children’s hospitals, the AAP’s more recent hedging reveals their need not to appear too obviously an engine of ideology-addled butchery. Walking back its affirm-or-die positioning, for instance, the AAP misled the public with reassurance that medicalization under their rubric is rare. Yeah--right. In its editorial for the Wall Street Journal, the AAP denied these surgeries even take place, such that articles were written solely to demonstrate that yes they were with new surgical wings rapidly constructed to accommodate the 38- fold increase in mastectomies. Many expressed astonishment and opposition to genital surgeries being performed on healthy kids at major American children’s hospitals. 

Recently,  the AAP doubled down on its partisan “transphobia” rhetoric. In their Pediatrics, a perspective piece argued gender medicine mitigates suicidal ideation so that not to affirm constitutes child abuse. In response, Dr. Kathleen McDeavitt pointed out the authors cite a study unsupportive of their overzealous claim that affirm-only medicine “entirely mitigates the increased risk of depression and suicidal ideation.” Simultaneously, the AAP censored members who disagreed with the affirm-only rubric they’d falsely represented as consensus. As a result, pediatricians fear risking child maltreatment or suicide and losing their job. In this way, the affirm-or-suicide narrative can actually grow this dark spiral. In 2022, an affirming AAP member was called out for overstepping the group’s own prohibition against glorifying suicide.

The affirm-only medicine the AAP favors treats females as a male cohort, resulting in medical negligence. This is the premise of a lawsuit against the Academy and Dr. Jason Rafferty. The affirm only approach he authored for the AAP allegedly resulted in a lapse in medical oversight of his patient Isabelle Ayalla. Prescribed testosterone at 14, Ayalla’s anxiety and depression worsened, resulting in a suicide attempt. According to medical records, Dr. Rafferty increased her dosage, neglecting to take into account her female physiology and documented comorbidities. Treating her as literally male-bodied, Rafferty prescribed very high doses of testosterone.

Putting a female system on disproportionately high levels of testosterone, however, is extremely dangerous. Under the rubric Rafferty authored for the AAP, emotionally unstable girls like Ayalla are being, in some cases, prescribed male adult doses. However, higher testosterone levels in females experiencing mental health issues have been found to be predictive of suicide. Neglecting to treat a patient according to her female cohort thus represents a dangerous departure from sound medicine. According to Endocrinologist Dr. Michael Laidlaw, “Because adolescents are prone to risk-taking and lack maturity, we believe that they should never be prescribed testosterone.”

Following Invasive Gender Surgeries, Suicides Increase
The failure to correctly identify a patient as female goes beyond some small unethical breach. For instance, Megan Keller, a re-identified woman, testified before the Ohio Senate that she similarly contemplated suicide “after regretting a surgery doctors recommended to solve her gender dysphoria.” Such testimony shows suicide increases following surgical affirmation, which should of course not be the case according to the life-saving rhetoric of the AAP. Recent research demonstrates “gender-affirming surgeries” lead to suicide attempts, not the other way around.

In particular, two recent studies confirm genital surgeries elevate suicide risk. A Texas study drawing on 20 years of data from 56 United States healthcare organizations found “Patients who have undergone gender-affirming surgery are associated with a significantly elevated risk of suicide.”  Reviewing ER visits occurring within five years of gender-related surgeries, University of Texas researchers compared their outcomes to the much larger 15.6 million ER patient population with no history of such surgeries. Visits to the ER within 5 years of surgical intervention indicated complications from these invasive surgeries, and by comparison, the study reported 12.12 times more suicide–related visits. 

The other six year California-wide study, similarly analyzed psychiatric emergencies and found suicide doubled for males, following genital surgeries. Both of these recent studies confirm earlier, landmark long-term research drawing on 30 years of Swedish data, discovering a nearly 20% higher rate of overall mortality for trans-identified patients, including suicides. Commenting on this comprehensive, long-term follow-up study,  Neuropsychologist Dr. Alan Hopewell noted that patients become discouraged by their persistent mental health issues following gender treatments. In Hopewell’s opinion, suicide following surgery suggests mental illness is left unaddressed. 

Many were shocked to learn that HHS Secretary Levine pressured WPATH to remove age limits in their latest guidelines, yet journalist Benjamin Ryan notes it was actually the AAP that forced age out. Court documents released as part of Alabama’s defense of their efforts to safeguard children from high-risk gender medicine show the AAP threatening to withhold endorsement unless ages were excised. Instead, the pediatrician’s union recommends “an individualized, case-by-case basis with parental involvement and consent.” The word “individualized” suggests the protocol comes with careful differential diagnosis; screening is nominal, however, when suicide hovers like the sword of Damocles.

The AAP’s back peddling--similar to the White House withdrawing support for surgery on minors-- reflects awareness the public supports bans such as that in Ohio and New Hampshire. Once highly regarded doctors, members of the AAP are increasingly held to account for ignoring the suicide risk of prescribing testosterone to adolescent girls. Gender medicine is especially dangerous for kids. Youth generally are particularly vulnerable to consenting to a future of urinary tract infections and fistulas they did not envision. Fertility seems expendable to teens, while permanent loss of sensation or function in highly sensitive areas of the body is to a teen inconceivable. 

Adolescents-- most of whom have never experienced long term illness or considered the difficulties faced by people who undergo surgeries with high complication rates-- are among the most vulnerable groups when it comes to suicide. With a terrible rush to medicalize their condition via the macabre forces of a predatory gender industry, teens are funneled into a lucrative medical pipeline. As a result, many never come out alive. 

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