In a previous post, I noted the Fox News segment on a girl whose parents have raised her as a boy since the age of five. The story’s narrator warned about what can happen if parents don’t transition their children, citing research from the LGBT activist organization Trevor Project: “48% of LGBTQ youth reported engaging in self-harm in the past twelve months, including over 60% of transgender and nonbinary youth.”
There are several issues with this.
First, according to its website, the Trevor Project used “an online survey platform” that targeted LGBT-identifying 13- to 24-year-olds who were “recruited via ads on social media.” Though there is a heavy emphasis on identity, no mention is made of the survey’s participants’ mental-health status or histories — whether they suffered from depression, trauma, or mental disorders. It is not even clear whether participants were asked whether they had gender dysphoria.
Rather, the focus is on external encounters related to bathrooms, “conversion therapy,” pronouns, and the availability of gender-affirming therapy.
Moreover, the Trevor Project makes its ideological bias even more explicit by claiming that “affirming gender identity among transgender and nonbinary youth is consistently associated with lower rates of suicide attempts.” This is utter nonsense.
The only long-term study done on post-operative transsexuals is the 2011 Swedish study that found that “the overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from suicide. Sex reassigned persons also had an increased risk for suicide attempts and psychiatrist inpatient care.” [Emphasis added]