These are bad times to be scaremongering about the mental health of children denied access to so-called gender-affirming care. A new commentary in the social-science journal Theory & Society further demolishes the narrative that such young people are at increased risk of suicidality.
Do No Harm took up this work recently with our new report “The Effect of State Bans on Gender Interventions for Minors on Teen Suicide Rates.”
There, using multiple statistical approaches, including difference-in-differences models and a national time-series analysis, we found no evidence that state laws preventing providers from experimenting on gender-dysphoric children have increased suicide rates in those states.
Now, a new article, “Causal inference from a single treated state: a peer review of Lee et al. (2024) and the exchange that followed,” takes on the widely repeated 2024 claim that so-called anti-transgender laws result in up to a 72-percent increase in suicide attempts among transgender youth.
As M. Lal, author of the new Theory & Society article demonstrates, that particular “finding” fails to stand up under serious investigation.
Predictably, the “72-percent” claim rocketed around the internet shortly after its publication in Nature Human Behavior, in the article “State-level anti-transgender laws increase past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people in the USA” by Wilson Y. Lee et al.
The radical LGBTQ+ activist organization the Trevor Project gave the statistic its own webpage and heralded the study as “groundbreaking” and “first-of-its-kind.”
NPR duly repeated the claim, as did PBS, Time, CNN, and a host of other opinion-making outlets.
Earlier this year, the first significant crack appeared in the “72-percent” figure. Responding to the original Nature Human Behavior article in that same journal, J. Cohn et al. pointed out that the Lee study’s headline finding (“up to a 72-percent increase in suicide attempts”) was driven by Idaho alone, despite the fact that the Gem State contributed only a small sample of respondents and had no “anti-transgender” law in effect during the time period in question.
Though Lee et al. publicly acknowledged Idaho’s “prominent role” in their study in the weeks that followed, they insisted that their “choice of statistical approach was appropriate given the nature of the intervention.”
Lal’s innovation in this months’ new Theory & Society article is to show that Lee et al.’s “principal statistical defenses are incorrect.” Indeed, reliance on a single treated state (Idaho) “renders the [original] paper’s reported uncertainty invalid rather than merely fragile,” and “design problems independent of the single-state issue remain unaddressed by the main study or the follow-ups.”
To wit (and in layman’s terms), Lal’s article demonstrates that the headline finding for 13–17-year-olds rests on such a small group of Idaho respondents that changing just four extreme survey responses within that group could move the underlying result by roughly the size of the reported overall effect.
As Lal concludes, the notion that “increasing access to gender-affirming care ‘could be life-saving’ for [transgender or non-binary] young people … is not supported by” the Lee et al. study.
Given the extent to which cant and propaganda govern the talking points of the pediatric transgender lobby, we are unsurprised by the weaknesses of the study to which activists have so often pointed.
What is more startling is the failure of the news outlets mentioned above to retract their coverage or even to append to their articles an acknowledgement of the original study’s flaws.
The arguments for “affirming” young patients’ gender dysphoria with surgeries, hormone therapies, and puberty-blocking drugs are collapsing all around us.
Mainstream news sites ought to report that.
