We ran the data on trans teen suicide panic — and found the claims are misleading

“You can choose between a live son or a dead daughter.”

Countless parents have heard some variation of these words — from physicians, medical associations, media outlets or online activists. 

If children believe they’re born in the wrong body and can’t get sex-change treatments, the argument goes, they’re at high risk of committing suicide. 

No claim has swayed more parents to let their kids get puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and even surgeries.

The same claim has struck fear into the hearts of lawmakers considering restrictions on such treatments.

But as we show in a new report, the suicide threat isn’t true. 

Protecting children from transgender treatments does not increase suicide rates — and our data proves it.

There’s no question that suicide is higher among children who believe they’re transgender, a heartbreaking reality that demands intervention. 

Kids who assert they’re “born in the wrong body” typically suffer from serious mental-health issues, including depression and anxiety, that are themselves linked to suicide risk. 

The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 72% of transgender-identified high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.”

The commonsense explanation is that such challenges preceded and even led to their gender confusion — with the encouragement of authority figures and sympathetic social-media voices exacerbating mental-health dangers. 

Yet activists and their allies say the real issue is the failure to medically “affirm” these children’s chosen gender identity.

That failure, they say, leads to alarming numbers of suicides among trans-identifying teens.

To justify this claim, they point to studies purporting to show that sex-change treatments improve mental health, and that restrictions lead to worse mental health outcomes, including suicide.

Yet these studies uniformly fall short of scientific standards.

They generally rely on self-reported mental health surveys — a low reliability method. 

One of the most widely cited, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, doesn’t include an untreated comparison group, making it impossible to discern what caused changes in mental health. 

Meanwhile, a study published in JAMA Network Open suffers from enormous attrition from the control group, preventing the comparisons required for reliable results.

Other subpar studies abound — all of them repeated ad nauseam by the media.

Enter our study. 

We are the first to analyze the real-world effects of state restrictions on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries, using CDC data on actual teen suicide rates. 

That research is only possible because, starting in 2022, 23 states — with 47% of the nation’s transgender-identifying youth — restricted all or some trans treatments for patients under age 18. 

These states have in effect provided a natural laboratory, allowing for direct comparison of teen suicide trends with states that haven’t restricted sex-change treatments.

If the activists are right, suicide rates for children would have increased in states with restrictions.

But we found zero evidence that state policies led to increased suicide rates, period.

To start, we calculated changes in the suicide rates of minors who were and were not covered by state restrictions.

We also examined national trends in teen suicide rates, to gauge a potential increase as more trans-identifying youth became subject to restrictions. 

At every stage, we controlled for a wide variety of factors, including suicide trends among young adults who are barely old enough to avoid state restrictions.

This approach separates trends that affect youth suicide rates in general from the specific effects of state restrictions.

Our results were the same across the board: No rise in teen suicides when transgender treatments are banned. 

Activists and their allies may object that our findings neatly conform to our organization’s goal of ending transgender medicine for minors. 

That’s why our report carefully details our methodology — and even contains the data and code we used in our statistical software.

We made our results, our methods and our data completely public so that others can conduct their own analyses to validate our findings.

Transgender activists will continue to use the threat of suicide as a means of bludgeoning society into accepting invasive, irreversible medical interventions for children. 

But unless they can produce evidence for a relationship between state restrictions and suicides, their tactics should be called out for what they are: A manipulative bluff.

Parents and policymakers, armed only with common sense, can’t be blamed for buckling when confronted with a dishonest nightmare scenario. 

Now they have the facts they need to protect children at home, at school and by law.

Evidence, not emotional appeals or baseless assertions, is essential when our kids’ health and well-being are on the line. 

If we’re going to lower the suicide rate among deeply confused teens, we should at least begin with intellectual honesty and genuine compassion — not activism masquerading as medical expertise.

Jay Greene is Director of Research at Do No Harm, where Ian Kingsbury is Senior Director of the Center for Accountability in Medicine.