People fighting against transgender rights (TERFs, Fox News and religious fundamentalists included) are making a lot out of a Swedish study on transgender people, claiming that it proves that gender reassignment leads to suicide.
This is what the study actually says about suicide among transgender people:
“The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from suicide.”
What this sentence says is not that trans people who has had gender reassignment are more likely to commit suicide than those transgender people who have not done so. The researchers behind the study explicitly say that research suggests that gender reassignment of transsexual persons improves quality of life and gender dysphoria.
The sentence is actually comparing trans people with non-transgender people, and given the social harassment and ostracism experienced by trans people, whether they have transitioned or not, a higher suicide rate among transgender people is to be expected.
“Medical transition alone won’t resolve the effects of crushing social oppression: social anxiety, depression and posttraumatic stress.”
As for the claim that the study shows that trans women show “male patterns of criminality”, Dehjne points out that this only applies to the older data. For the period between 1989 to 2003, you will find no such pattern.
Dehjne explains:
“What the data tells us is that things are getting measurably better and the issues we found affecting the 1973 to 1988 cohort group likely reflects a time when trans health and psychological care was less effective and social stigma was far worse.”
If you, whether you are trans or a trans ally, come across people who misrepresent the Swedish study in any way, refer them to this post and/or the following:
If I remember rightly, the completed suicide rate was 0.27% and the national average 0.01% - but the national average takes into account millions of people, and the study only hundreds, so it’s important to note that one trans suicide is a much higher percentage than one non-trans suicide is. Coupled with external factors, such as discrimination, the higher rates of mental health issues among LGBT+ people, and so on, that is pretty quickly explained away. Notably, IT’S A TEENY TINY PORTION OF PEOPLE, especially given that Samaritans found that the suicide attempt rate for pre-op trans people was 41%, and some studies put it as high as 50%. Also, the percentage of suicides in the more recently transitioned people was much much lower than the percentage from before aftercare and treatment (and the surgery itself) were improved - which is why the conclusion is specifically that aftercare and improved treatment will drastically reduce the risk of any issues post-transition.
I actually got an ask a while back saying that the hospital that started the surgeries discontinued because of a study, this study, saying “most post-op trans women” kill themselves - I was so so mad. Firstly the hospital stopped doing the surgeries way before this study was finished, secondly the study says nothing of the sort. They manipulated the wording and only presented a tiny portion of the statistics in their comments on the topic (describing post-op trans people as “many times more likely to commit suicide” than cis people, which is true, but hardly relevant when 0.27%, or whatever, is the actual figure we’re talking about). Even if you manipulate the statistics, all out lie, and round up in all the wrong places, you can barely make the claim that “most” kill themselves - you’d have to read the study with knives jammed into your eye sockets to take that from it.
I do recall them saying something about the suicide patterns being closer to that of the biological sex than the gender identity - but I think that’s more related to strength and other variables than in any way indicative of behaviour patterns invalidating one’s gender. Also that transmen face invisibility that could result in more suicide gestures and cries for help; while transwomen face hypervisibility that could result in more angry (therefore with less control and more strength) suicidal outbursts that are more likely to succeed; both face sexualisation, humiliation, insults, assault, invalidation and transphobia, including post-op and pre-op trans people, which contribute to the fact we’re often suicidal - which has nothing to do with transition or the operation or being “faulty”.
Bless this post and bless you and bless your face and bless your soul and bless everything.
