A Killing Lie
The transgender-suicide myth harms kids
IT’S the lie that convinced a thousand parents — and, increasingly, politicians across America. As a psychologist specializing in child-behavioral issues, I frequently talk with parents misled into believing their child will commit suicide unless allowed to transition genders. Suicide fears have led medical professionals to threaten to call Child Protective Services if parents don’t affirm their child’s chosen gender identity.
Governors and lawmakers have given in to the same fear. The mere mention of suicide stops them from enacting laws that protect children from undergoing unproven and experimental medical procedures.
Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed such a bill, saying it could lead children to kill themselves. The Legislature overrode his veto Wednesday.
Good thing, too. Those who use the threat of suicide to encourage
ELLIOT KAMINETZKY
children to go down a transgender path either don’t understand the research or are being deliberately manipulative. Worse, they may be encouraging the very suicide they want to prevent.
It’s obvious why suicide is front and center here. It horrifies every decent person, especially the suicide of a child. Parents have likely heard some variation of “Better a live son than a dead daughter,” and for years, activists and their allies have flogged reports that large percentages of children who identify as transgender are suicidal — more than 50%, according to the Trevor Project. President Biden has repeated this statistic, and as states have banned medical treatments for trans-identified minors, it has been aired more than ever to prevent reforms.
But this narrative is false. Biased researchers typically reach their conclusions based on nonrandom, online self-report surveys — not exactly a scientific approach. What’s more, they conflate suicidal thoughts such as “I wish I was never born” — something many angst-filled adolescents feel — and suicidal behavior, which is categorically different and fortunately far rarer. And using such low-quality statistics to claim medical procedures will lower suicide is another logical leap, not borne out by evidence. Any “researcher” who fails to make these distinctions is spreading dangerous misinformation, misleading therapists, parents and politicians on an important aspect of child mental health.
We need to look elsewhere for a more truthful picture. When Oxford University researcher Michael Biggs examined the scandalridden, soon-to-be-shuttered Gender Identity Development Service at the United Kingdom’s Tavistock clinic, he observed four suicides in 11 years among 15,000 adolescent patients. That’s a tragedy, yet it reflects an annual suicide rate of 13 per 100,000, which is only slightly higher than the US suicide rate of 11 per 100,000 among all 10- to 24-year-olds.
And there’s more. Of the four individuals who committed suicide, two were on Tavistock’s waiting list while the other two were receiving the medical interventions that were supposed to save them. This fact casts doubt on the “transition or die” trope, indicating other factors may be at work.
While activists typically pin the blame on society’s ostensible hostility to transgenderism, evidence shows gender-questioning children often have psychiatric comorbidities, such as anxiety or obsessive-compulsive disorder, along with neurological or developmental disorders, such as autism. These factors likely contribute to assertions of gender dysphoria as well as suicidality.
Treating these conditions and mitigating suicide risk must be medical professionals’ — and parents’ — top priority, not rushing children to hormones or surgeries after just a single visit.
The falsehoods about child suicide are bad enough, misleading parents and policymakers; perversely, they may also encourage suicide. Activists and media outlets frequently hold up gender questioning children who commit suicide as courageous heroes because of their struggle, suggesting a similar fate awaits others whose chosen gender isn’t affirmed and medicalized. Yet suicidologists warn against attributing suicide to a single factor, which can actually lead to increased suicidality in individuals who relate to the factor.
In online transgender communities, children often receive coaching on using the faulty suicide statistics to persuade their parents to support a transition.
Such actions break the cardinal rule of suicide discussion: Never dwell on suicide or lionize the deceased because doing so can inspire others to take their lives. That’s especially true since evidence suggests suicide can be socially contagious.
The lies about suicide are a gross disservice to children, parents and society. Struggling children are being pushed toward lifetime involvement with the medical system in lieu of the true mental-health care they need. The best way to protect children is to pass common-sense laws grounded in facts, not misleading scare tactics.
Elliot Kaminetzky is a licensed psychologist, founder of Serenity Parent Consulting and the Center for Child Behavioral Health and a visiting fellow at Do No Harm.