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A new Finnish study has found that what is obvious is indeed true, namely, that providing cross-sex hormones and ‘gender-transition’ surgeries to adolescents and young adults doesn’t appear to have any significant effect on suicide deaths.
As I noted in my LifeSiteNews podcast last week, the transgender debate has finally come to Canada as premiers from New Brunswick to Alberta put forward policies on parental rights and puberty blockers, with federal Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre condemning the “transitioning” of children.
The reaction from Canada’s progressive establishment has been both insidious and predictable: the press and the politicians are claiming that to inform parents of children choosing a new name or pronouns or to restrict giving life-altering drugs to kids is to trigger a wave of “trans suicides.”
This has been the transgender movement’s most potent and politically unanswerable point: That any questioning of identity claims leads to dead kids. “Gender-affirming” professionals have blackmailed thousands of parents into putting their children on the path to lifelong medicalization with a similar question: Would you rather have a live son, or a dead daughter? We are hearing these arguments nonstop in Canada right now, from the prime minister to the LGBT activists (I repeat myself).
But as a recent study out of Finland found, these arguments are based on… nothing at all. As the New York Post noted: “The movement backing gender-transition treatment for children is built on the claim that pediatric medical interventions are not only ‘medically necessary’ – but truly ‘life saving.’ However, no researchers have ever tried to figure out whether this claim is true. Until now.”
The study “found that providing cross-sex hormones and gender-transition surgeries to adolescents and young adults didn’t appear to have any significant effect on suicide deaths.”
Let’s repeat that for those in the back: no significant effect on suicide deaths. Furthermore, the study found that “gender distress severe enough to send young people to a gender clinic wasn’t independently linked to a higher suicide death rate, either.” What the study did find is that suicidality was linked not to gender dysphoria, but to other several mental health challenges – something that “gender therapists” and other “trans-affirming” professionals have entirely ignored.
The study produced to conclusions: that “suicide deaths were higher, but still rare in gender-distressed young people” and that “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.” The conclusion of the study’s authors is that gender dysphoric young people are in need of “comprehensive mental health care” – not the transgender treatments advocated by LGBT activists. From the New York Post:
Dr. Kaltiala’s research findings fly in the face of a vast and powerful coalition of supporters of gender-transition treatment for young people, who all claim it is life saving – including WPATH, major U.S. medical societies like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the ACLU, and LGBTQ groups like GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign. Dr. Kaltiala was once herself a supporter of gender-transition treatment for adolescents. She launched one of Finland’s first pediatric gender clinics in 2011, but soon started having doubts. The study’s conclusion that medical interventions do not necessarily saves lives flies in the face of pro-surgery organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics. Since then, multiple teams of researchers have systematically reviewed the available studies about gender-transition medicine for kids. They all found the science subpar and uncertain.
The Canadian progressive establishment is telling us, virtually with one voice, that the “science is settled” on this issue and that those who question “gender transition” pose a genuine danger to “trans kids.” As is so often the case with their claims, the precise opposite is true. It is progressives who have been ignoring the mounting body of evidence that these “treatments” cause irreversible damage; it is the progressives who are so beholden to ideology that they refuse to consider that evidence; it is progressives who are responsible for the most insidious and widespread scandal carried out by the medical community since eugenics. Justin Trudeau would like us to believe that common sense policies on “transition” are American-imported MAGA culture wars. I had no idea that Finland was located in Mississippi
