Genuine question, I just don't know how to tiptoe around this in a 2023 acceptable way without asking it bluntly.
Sounds like we need better medical treatment if half of people with the condition want to commit suicide, and telling people on the internet to stop bullying and putting colorful flags in your twitter profile won't suffice. Not advocating for hate, just saying that it seems the medical community delegated this whole thing to society with a note of 'please be nice and everything will sort itself out'.
We KNOW exactly what to do and how to help trans people be happy and successful and not want to kill themselves: Preferred gender supporting care, treating them like the human beings they are, hormones for those who are confident enough to not regret it.
Here's what half the country currently votes for instead: Banning trans people from bathrooms, banning books that acknowledge the existence and acceptableness of trans people, calling trans people pedophiles and groomers on large public news channels, generally just making """jokes""" that amount to "if you are trans then you are stupid and broken and don't deserve to live"
The Trevor Project collects research on these lines: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/article/facts-abo...
Says:
LGBTQ youth are not inherently prone to suicide risk because of their sexual orientation or gender identity but rather placed at higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society.
You want someone to academically prove this concept to you? It is basic, as in fundamental, to human psychological safety and thus physical survival. Not everything true exists in a report.
Transitioning is an effective and proven treatment, which has a far higher rate of success than basically any other psychiatry-related treatment. The medical part is pretty much solved, and those physical differences can be reconciled quite well.
But as it turns out, the hate from society still remains, and it still has an effect. Turns out being happy is a bit tricky when it is literally a coin flip whether the person you are talking to believes you should be murdered merely for existing.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
"Conclusions
Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Our findings suggest that sex reassignment, although alleviating gender dysphoria, may not suffice as treatment for transsexualism, and should inspire improved psychiatric and somatic care after sex reassignment for this patient group."
If you read the Discussion, you'd see that this study actually contrasts other similar studies, which saw no such outcome. It even explicitly states that the overall mortality rate was only significantly increased for the group operated before 1989, and mentions that
> However, the latter might also be explained by improved health care for transsexual persons during 1990s, along with altered societal attitudes towards persons with different gender expressions.
This study is often used in an attempt to discredit transgender healthcare. In fact, it is used so often that there is even an interview[0] with the author about its misrepresentation. The interview links half a dozen other studies done since then which confirm that transgender healthcare does indeed work, and is in fact quite effective.
[0]: https://www.transadvocate.com/fact-check-study-shows-transit...
> Thank you for your question and I am happy I was invited to AMA.
> I am aware of some of the misinterpretation of the study in Plos One. Some are as you say difficult to keep track since they are not published in scientific journals. I am grateful to friends all over the world who notify me of publications outside the scientific world. I do answer some of them but I can’t answer all.
> I have no good recommendation what to do. I have said many times that the study is not design to evaluate the outcome of medical transition. It DOES NOT say that medical transition causes people to commit suicide. However it does say that people who have transition are more vulnerable and that we need to improve care. I am happy about that it has also been seen that way and in those cases help to secure more resources to transgender health care.
> On a personal level I can get both angry and sad of the misinterpretations and also sometimes astonished that some researcher don’t seem to understand some basics about research methology.
"Trans people have a higher rate of suicide than the general populace even after reassignment" isn't disproving either the 'innate' or the 'societally-driven' risk model here.
There is clearly a significant social aspect here but I'm not willing to toss out that the body may just really not enjoy not being naturally in the expected configuration. Going to the gender you want seems to be partially solved but, like the person with the lost limb, it's doubtful we have anything close to a full substitute. I really worry the medical community has been doing a dis-service to the development of treatment by underplaying the suicidal aspects that may be less socially related.
With transgender people, the "original" state is unnatural. Medical treatment fixes this mismatch by making the body match the brain. It is a voluntary treatment with an extremely high success rate and negligible regret rates.
As far as I can tell, there is zero evidence that any remaining issues are caused by the treatment itself. All evidence points that the remaining issues are primarily socially related.
if you have references, I'd welcome them.
If by "quite new and unsupported" you mean "pioneered in the 1920s, well-established for many decades, backed by dozends of studies, and successfully applied to hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide", then yes - it is indeed quite new and unsupported.
If you want to read just one study, why not start with the last one? The Amsterdam Cohort consists of 6,793 people since 1972. That should be plenty to start with.
If you want even more, I recommend reading the "Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People". Currently in its eighth edition, it describes the entire process, with hundreds of additional studies cited.
The treatments you are familiar with have been around since the thirties. Research on them started with the Institut fur Sexualwillenschaft, which has been since burned down, and hundreds of papers have been published on the topic since, dealing with thousands of patients all over the world, with their findings all being remarkably consistent.
How hard have you actually looked into it?
What's the difference when so many US states are now prohibiting treatement for this?
Impossible to reconcile when they’re blocked from effective treatment. In a decent society trans people would be given treatment when asked for.
They haven't. This is an invented statistic that just gets repeated and repeated until people accept it as if it's truth.
The flaw was in how the survey was conducted. I won't try to repeat it here- it's a long explanation to do justice.
If your brain does not get exposed to the ‘right’ set of hormones at the right time while you’re in the womb, your brain can develop a different gender identity than the rest of your body. This can be the explanation for some trans people, but I don’t know how many.
Research has pretty firmly come down on the "nah, it's society." side of things.
I agree with you that research has pretty firmly come down on the side of "nah, it's society" for the former. I think the latter is a fair point. To pin it all on society I find to be disingenuous. Transitioning can be a healthy thing in that case. Disclaimer: am not trans, so I openly admit I may be totally ignorant and off base.
https://nicic.gov/being-transgender-no-longer-mental-disorde...