RUTHFULLY YOURS

A new study published June 13 debunks the theory that injecting gender-confused children with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones decreases suicide rates. In fact, the study, done by Jay Greene, senior research fellow at the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, found the exact opposite:

In the past several years, the suicide rate among those aged 12 to 23 has become significantly higher in states that have a provision that allows minors to receive routine health care without parental consent than in states without such a provision.

Greene made various recommendations based on his findings, including raising the minimum age at which cross-sex treatments can be given as well as mandating that school administrators and health professionals receive parental approval before providing health services to children.

On Tuesday, the Heritage Foundation held a panel discussion of the study at which Greene was joined by Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; Jay Richards, director of the DeVos Center at the Heritage Foundation; and Virginia Gentles, director of the Education Freedom Center at the Independent Women’s Forum.

“It’s time to stop cruelly manipulating children with cult-like slogans,” Gentles said. She argued that, in recent years, “trans activists have ushered in a new era that cuts parents out of critical decision-making regarding their children.” Left-wing LGBT groups such as GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and PFLAG seek to help children transition without consulting their parents, she said, creating a “gender-support plan” for the child.

Anderson, whose book When Harry Became Sally was banned by Amazon in 2021, also spoke of how the transgender issue is affecting the parent–child relationship. As he explained, parents are being drawn into using these experimental drugs on their children:

Unfortunately, many parents are being told they have a choice between a living son and a dead daughter. They’re then being told that puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and possibly even sterilizing surgeries, are the only thing that will save their child’s life. These are entirely experimental.

Richards pointed out that the number of pediatric gender clinics has exploded from one in 2007 to about 60 today. He also said that, according to his research, about 260 Planned Parenthood clinics give out cross-sex hormones “like Pez dispensers.”

“We are in the middle of a rapid-onset gender-dysphoria pandemic,” he said.

Greene told National Review why certain states are intent on giving kids immediate access to these experimental drugs:

The driving force behind this is not science but an ideological commitment to a radical gender agenda. Even most of the state politicians’ supporters are not fully on board for that agenda, but they are under intense pressure from a very well-organized and highly vocal minority of gender-ideology advocates.

The pediatric use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones was “extremely rare” until 2010, according to Greene. Using Google Trends to investigate the frequency of the terms “puberty blockers,” “transgender,” “gender-identity disorder,” and “gender dysphoria” in searches by Google users, he found that these terms were rarely searched until 2015; such searches increased from then through the end of 2020. Greene paired this data with anecdotal evidence that the administration of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones saw a spike in recent years. Of course, Greene’s methodology here is not entirely scientific, since hard data on minors’ use of these drugs is not available. Suicide rates among those aged 12–23 started climbing beginning in 2015, after these drugs were introduced. Greene compared the suicide rates of minors in states that have provisions permitting minors to access health care without parental consent (33 states) with states that do not have them (17 states), concluding that the former experienced higher suicide rates while the latter did not see an increase. There has been a 14 percent increase in the annual suicide rate in states that have access provisions for minors compared with states that do not, according to Greene.

Greene explained to NR why he decided to conduct this study:

When I heard the repeated claim that kids will kill themselves if these drugs are not made more widely available, my BS detector went off. Sure enough when I looked into it, I found that there were only a handful of studies, and they were very poorly done. Then I thought of a better way to try to study this issue. Doing that felt particularly important given how central the suicide claim is in coercing parents and policy-makers into going along with things that all their instincts tell them are bad.

Greene hopes that the debate surrounding access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for kids could change as a result of his study. “Once we remove the emotional blackmail of scaring policy-makers and parents that kids will die if these drugs are not made more widely available, the fever of this craze will break. This study raises serious doubts about this coercive claim.”

Families do have other options. Just like anyone else going through a mental-health crisis, these children need psychological help. Choosing experimental and life-altering methods instead of giving children the mental-health assistance they need is simply cruel and ignorant. “We should empower parents to help address these underlying mental-health issues with their children together as families and without coercion,” Greene said. “We should encourage them to fully explore noninvasive and reversible therapies before considering more drastic measures.”

Unsurprisingly, Greene’s study has sparked intense backlash in left-wing media outlets. But as Anderson put it, this is about “speaking unpopular truths, but truths nonetheless.”