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An LGBT activist group that produces survey research promoting so-called “gender-affirming” medical interventions on children and teens claims to have conducted a “study” that has found a “causal link” between state laws that protect children from the experimental treatments and an increase in suicide attempts among minors.
Nature Human Behaviour published the study by researchers with the Trevor Project, a pro-LGBT organization whose work is often quoted by top Biden-Harris Health and Human Services (HHS) official Dr. Rachel (born Richard) Levine – a man who claims to be a woman.
Left-wing media propped up the study’s claims, including Time, LGBTQ Nation, and NBC Out News, whose headline touted the Trevor Project’s claim of discovering the “first causal link between anti-trans laws and suicide attempts.”
Ronita Nath, vice president of research at the Trevor Project and a co-author of the study, boasted to NBC Out News that “causation is the key aspect.”
“State-level anti-transgender laws caused — so, not associated with, not linked to — we can say very confidently, they caused up to a 72% increase in number of past-year suicide attempts among trans and nonbinary young people,” she said.
There remain questions about the researchers’ methodology, however.
Los Angeles-based psychiatrist Mark McDonald, M.D., who treats children and adolescents, spoke with CatholicVote about what he says is notably missing from the data.
“Nowhere in the article is there an explanation of how the researchers compared the trans-activist supporting states with the anti-trans-activist states to reach the conclusion that the anti-trans-activist states reported more mental illness/suicidal ideation,” McDonald said. “Second, the authors admit this was not a longitudinal study. It was just a series of surveys repeated once every two or three years, recruiting respondents through social media.”
McDonald affirmed the common criticism of “research” conducted by activist-based organizations:
All these “studies” operate on the same model, which is voluntary recruitment of biased respondents with an ax to grind. The real studies that come from government hospitals and clinics in northern Europe all show that supporting the transgender mental illness in any way produces worse outcomes. I cannot see how anyone could link laws (not “treatment”) that protect distinctions between biological sex with increased suicide risk for these mentally ill people. And I’m still waiting to see a valid study that shows medical interventions do not increase harm to them.
Nath reportedly said the study established causality by controlling for several variables, including “the Covid pandemic, cultural factors in the state, pre-existing suicide rates, national suicide prevention efforts and federal policy,” according to Out News.
Nevertheless, despite her enthusiasm for the results, she admitted the study failed to
… use a randomized sample since participants were recruited through social media. The researchers also couldn’t randomly assign trans and nonbinary young people to live in states with anti-trans laws and states without them, since such a study design would be unethical …. This means the sample used might not accurately represent the full population of trans and nonbinary young people.
The news report added that another limitation of the study is that it “was cross-sectional and not longitudinal, meaning it surveyed the young people just once as opposed to multiple times over the course of months or years.”
LGBT activist-adolescent and child psychiatrist Jack Turban, M.D. typically promotes research claiming to have found benefits of transgender medicine for young people.
Turban, the director of the gender psychiatry program at the University of California San Francisco, touted to Out News the significance of the study’s design technique, called “causal inference,” which, he said, provides the evidence that state laws protecting children are causing an increase in suicide among those with gender dysphoria.
“Since we have evidence that these laws are driving suicide attempts, it would be really difficult to argue that states are justified or have a compelling reason to pass these kind of laws,” he said.
Despite Turban’s apparent confidence in the conclusions of the Trevor Project study, Out News reported that he admitted “the study doesn’t break down the laws by type, so research still needs to be done on which laws might affect youth mental health more or less.”
In August 2022, Turban drew fire after what was revealed to be a “deeply flawed” study of his own published at Pediatrics – the flagship journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), in which he argued the surge in young people claiming to identify as transgender is not due to “social contagion” or the influence of the culture.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed following the release of Turban’s study, pediatrician Dr. Julia Mason and Manhattan Institute Fellow Leor Sapir warned the research “likely couldn’t have survived a reasonable peer-review process,” and explained why:
The Turban study rejects the social-contagion theory on the grounds that more biological boys than girls identified as trans in 2017 and 2019, according to data collected from 19 states by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. But the researchers who helped design the CDC questionnaire explicitly warned that youths who identify as transgender may list their sex as their gender identity, making it impossible to discern who is male-to-female or female-to-male (a limitation Dr. Turban has acknowledged in the past).
In his study, Mason and Sapir observed, Turban cited “three sources suggesting that respondents interpret ‘sex’ as ‘sex assigned at birth’—even though none of those studies says anything of the sort.”
“To use a flawed sex statistic in an attempt to set aside the well-documented phenomenon of gender-dysphoric female teens’ flooding clinics is so amateurish that one can’t help but suspect bad faith,” the authors affirmed.
As the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) noted in August, the Trevor Project’s activist campaigns have included, in Pennsylvania, successfully imposing a ban on what LGBT groups refer to as “conversion therapy” without requiring the passage of state legislation. Emails obtained by DCNF also revealed the Trevor Project has been involved in the investigation of some individual licensed therapists, including those belonging to Christian groups.
In June 2023, conservative author and speaker Matt Walsh posted to X that the Trevor Project was discovered to be hosting “a sexually explicit chat room that connects children as young as 13 years old with ‘LGBT’ adults.”
Denial of co-morbid psychological issues in gender-dysphoric young people is customary for LGBT activists, and the Trevor Project researchers continue that narrative, casting blame for mental health distress on lack of acceptance of new gender identities.
The researchers made considerable assumptions in the process:
TGNB [transgender and non-binary] young people are already at risk for mental health concerns, often tied to experiences of minority stress, which is best understood as stress that accumulates due to negative experiences associated with one’s minority identity. We hypothesize that anti-transgender legislation may function as a form of structural minority stress for TGNB young people, possibly exacerbating current mental health concerns and creating new ones. Furthermore, we draw on the interpersonal theory of suicide as an additional framework, which suggests that feeling like a burden or disconnected from others can lead to suicidal desire, and that repeated pain or fear-inducing experiences can lead to suicidal behaviour. We hypothesize that state-wide and national discrimination could lead TGNB young people to seriously consider suicide through feeling unimportant and disconnected from others. It could also lead TGNB young people who were already seriously considering suicide due to other stressors to acquire the capability for suicide and attempt through repetitive exposure to pain and fear.
The high level of LGBT activism among the “researchers” is remarkable.
Wilson Y. Lee, the lead investigator of the current study, also conducted a study published in May 2024 at the Journal of School Health titled “Middle and High School LGBTQ Students Report What Makes School LGBTQ-Affirming Across Race/Ethnicity and Gender Identity, a Topic Modeling Method.”
The premise of Lee’s earlier study with Myeshia Price, Ph.D. suggests a worldview steeped in gender ideology, one that asserts that “affirming spaces have been associated with improved mental health outcomes for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) adolescents.”
Price and Lee concluded in that study that “schools must be safe for all youth and implementing policies that make LGBTQ students feel seen and supported in their identities is a protective factor for mental health.”
The authors apparently hope to influence school policies by stating these “implications” of their findings:
School policies must ensure that youth have access to supportive people, symbols of support, and LGBTQ clubs and that they are also salient to LGBTQ students of color and transgender and nonbinary students.
In June 2022, the Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene, Ph.D., a senior research fellow in the foundation’s Center for Education Policy, reviewed the data on whether “gender-affirming care” actually prevents suicide in young people expressing gender confusion.
In a report released by the Heritage Foundation, Greene found that, once again, the “political abuse of science” had materialized on the issue of children with gender issues. The political left, he noted, had become fond of referring to the application of life-altering hormone drugs and surgeries on young people – who are not at a developmental stage at which they can give informed consent to the procedures – as “medically necessary, life-saving healthcare.”
Contrary to what the Trevor Project says its researchers found, Greene revealed that “easing access to cross-sex treatments without parental consent significantly increases suicide rates.”
After comparing annual youth suicide rates in states that allow minors to access care without parental consent to states that do not, Green said the data
clearly show no difference in youth suicide rates between these two groups of states for over a decade before 2010, when this use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones begins. Around that time, a difference in suicide rates emerges and the gap accelerates after 2015 when cross-sex treatments become more common.
“There is a 14% increase in suicide rates among young people by 2020 in states that have a provision allowing minors to access care without parental consent relative to states that do not,” he continued. “Easier access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones by minors actually exacerbated suicide rates … The relative increase in suicide rates only occurs after cross-sex treatments are introduced, and the trajectory of the increase matches the prevalence of these interventions.”
