If the Finnish study is correct
Wait what? Tranz kidz aren’t at greater risk of suicide if they don’t wreck their bodies? But we were assured they are!
A new study challenges the common assertion that gender-dysphoric youth are at elevated risk of suicide if not treated with “gender affirming” medical interventions. If it’s true, it ought to have a seismic impact on the accepted medical approach to gender-confused youth.
Reported in the BMJ, the study examines data on a Finnish cohort of gender-referred adolescents between 1996 and 2019, and compares their rates of all-cause and suicide mortality against a control group. While suicide rates in the gender-referred group studied were higher than in the control group, the difference was not large: 0.3% versus 0.1%. And — importantly — this difference disappeared when the two groups were controlled for mental health issues severe enough to require specialist psychiatric help.
In other words, if I understand correctly, some adolescents who are gender dysphoric may have other mental health issues that nudge them into suicide.
In other words: while transgender identity does seem to be associated with elevated suicide risk, the link is not very strong. What’s more, the causality may not work the way activists claim.
As in, not “lack of gender fiddling–>elevated suicide risk” but “mental health issues–>gender dysphoria and elevated suicide risk.”
The association between gender dysphoria and mental illness is well-documented by both providers of “gender-affirming care” and trans advocacy groups and clinical psychology research. But one less well-evidenced claim, based on this association, is that these difficulties are caused not by being transgender, but by the political and social stigma associated with it. Gender dysphoria, we are to understand, is not in itself a mental health issue. What causes mental health issues in transgender youth — up to and including suicide — is the wider world’s rejection of their identity, and of the metaphysical frame of “gender identity” as such.
Which looks like not so much a medical or mental health explanation as a tactic. “Give me what I want or I’ll kill myself,” to put it concisely.
But if the Finnish study is correct, this whole rhetorical, legislative, and medical edifice may be built on sand. If the elevated risk of suicidality in trans youth disappears when you control for other psychiatric difficulties, this suggests strongly that trans youth are not more at risk due to transphobia or invalidation, but due to the well-documented fact that gender dysphoria tends to occur in people who are disturbed and unhappy more generally.
Horse and cart as opposed to cart and horse.
If the results of this study get a lot of pushback from trans organizations, media, and internet congregations, it could result in an uptick of suicides or self-harm. There’s now an urgency behind the need to demonstrate how painful and life-sucking it is to be a trans person denied validation. Suicide is known to be contagious.
What a horrible thing it is to agree with young people that killing yoursef is an expected and reasonable response to what other people think about you.
Indeed.
I believe that much of that confusion comes from transactivism itself. How could children who’ve been seduced by genderism not be confused when the whole concept of “gender identity” itself is a self-contradictory, ad hoc agglomeration of ever-changing bullshit concocted by delusional, reality-denying maniacs who believe that humans can change sex.
Now that “watchful waiting” is considered “conversion therapy” these children will have access to fewer voices counselling caution, or examining possible co-morbidities and alternate causes of distress, and will be exposed to more voices who’ve already decided that dysphoric children are all “trans kids,” more people ready to push these children into the wood-chipper that is “gender-affirming care.” Fewer desistors, more detransitioners. More victims, because that’s what they are set to become. Not “patients.” Victims. That “accepted medical approach” should never have been accepted, and is only “medical” in that its “treatments” are performed by people who have undergone medical training without having really taken on the concept of “first, do no harm” as conscienciously as they should have.
And once shunted off onto the “gender affirming” path, I imagine the chances of the underlying mental health issues that the “transing” is incapable of addressing will recieve ever decreesing attention, as the focus will become the patient’s adjustment (or lack thereof) to the ongoing gender “treatments.” “Therapy” around the permanently ongoing gender fiddling will use up all the oxygen in the room, meaning that any distress or disturbance arising will be ascribed to the patient’s “failure” to adapt to their “new” identity, which was supposed to fix everything, rather than being the result of the problems ignored, bypassed, or brushed aside in the one-size-fits-all rush to start reshaping the body.
Having put all the eggs into the gender basket, and then breaking them to produce the “omlette” of the new identity, there’s nothing left when the only recipe recipe they have doesn’t work out. There’s no choice but to stay the course and keep on cooking. The placebo effect will only get you so far when the goal of becoming the sex your not was impossible to start with. Procedure follows procedure, but things don’t improve. And it goes without saying that the treament can’t be wrong; the screening can’t be wrong. After all, it’s what they do. They’re the experts. They’re the specialists. They would be doing this if they didn’t know what they were doing, right? So, as with faith healing, the failure to reach the impossible destination must be the patient’s fault. They didn’t try hard enough; they didn’t believe enough. They lacked Faith.
How could there ever be an increased risk of suicide on that “journey.”
IT’S THE TERFS’ FAULT! IT’S JKR!!
Yes, it’s entirely the result of the body’s failure to align its development with this poorly defined, unevidence entity we’ve posited called a “gender identity.” So let’s we’ll violently reject any efforts to explore the psychological half of this mismatch we’ve
inventeddiscovered, and focus all of our attention on the flesh of the body.It’s like a reverse exorcism, where the practitioners are trying to keep the malign Spirit, and drive the body away, or at least cut away those parts of which the Spirit disapproves.
JESUS FUCK; TAKE SOME GODDAMN RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN WORDS. How many times do transactivists themselves evoke the spectre of suicide in the framing of their demands? More often than not. And if “trans kids” survive the marinade of suicidal ideation lovingly prepared by the very people who are supposedly on their side, those same “supporters” and “advocates” have assured them that the Whole World wants to murder them. Who the fuck subjected to this kind of treatment wouldn’t be prone to mental health issues if they hadn’t gone in with them to begin with? And their “supporters” have the nerve to blame those of us who want to carefully consider these children’s real needs before drugguing them and cutting them up? Fuck right off. And maybe, just maybe the world is right to reject “the metaphysical frame of ‘gender identity’ as such” because it’s GODDAMN FUCKING BULLSHIT, and a ghoulishly piss-poor reason to mutilate and sterilize children.
Hey, transactivism? This is what you’ve done.