Finnish Register Study: Medical Gender Transition Tied to Major Spike in Teen Psychiatric Crises

Finnish Register Study: Medical Gender Transition Tied to Major Spike in Teen Psychiatric Crises

About 2 years ago, I wrote that French Senators wanted to ban gender transition treatments for minors, after a report described sex reassignment in minors as potentially “one of the greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine”.

As more real scientific evidence has been allowed to be published and shared, the French Senate’s assessment is proving to be its most prescient.

For example, a study recently published in the Nordic medical journal Acta Paediatrica found that adolescents who receive medical gender transition are much more likely to end up in serious psychological trouble.

The paper is titled “Psychiatric Morbidity Among Adolescents and Young Adults Who Contacted Specialised Gender Identity Services in Finland in 1996–2019: A Register Study.”

For this analysis, the researcher utilized a special feature of Finland’s health system in which every citizen has an 11‑digit ID number used in medical records, allowing doctors and researchers to follow people’s care over time through linked medical databases.

Researchers used diagnostic and procedural codes to find adolescents who transitioned, then tracked what psychiatric services they needed after their sex change procedures, comparing their need for psychiatric intervention to a control group of adolescents who didn’t receive sex change procedures.

Result: “Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up — rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment.”

Sex change procedures made adolescents much more likely to experience psychological crisis so severe that it required significant professional treatment.

Interestingly, the study indicated that medical interventions related to gender transitions may lead to more mental illness.

According to the Finnish data, then, not every young person who identifies as transgender will suffer from other mental health issues, but a significant proportion will — far higher than in the population at large. And, contrary to the claims often made in policy debates, the data show that medical transgender interventions may cause more mental health issues, instead of alleviating them.

“The considerable severe psychiatric morbidity prior to contacting the GIS, and its increase over time, suggest that for some of these adolescents, GD may be secondary to other mental health challenges,” the authors, Sami-Matti Ruuska, Katinka Tuisku, Timo Holttinen, Riittakerttu Kaltiala, concluded. “This underscores the need to thoroughly assess and appropriately treat mental disorders among those seeking GR before and after undergoing irreversible medical treatments. Psychiatric needs must be adequately met.

In a closely related Finnish study using the same cohort, overall death rates of gender‑referred youth were similar to controls after accounting for psychiatric treatment history, but suicides made up a larger share of deaths in this group, and risk was strongly linked to the amount of prior psychiatric care.

The demographic characteristics of the study population are summarised in table 1. Among gender-referred individuals, 41.3% were registered males (p<0.001). There were 55 deaths in the study population, including 20 suicides. In bivariate analyses, all-cause mortality did not statistically significantly differ between gender-referred individuals and controls; however, the proportion of suicides was higher in the gender-referred group (0.3% vs 0.1%; p=0.004). Psychiatric treatment was more common and the number of contacts was higher among gender-referred individuals than among the matched controls. Of the gender-referred individuals, 38.2% had proceeded to GR interventions.

These studies support the idea that underlying psychiatric illness, rather than gender identity itself, is a major driver of serious outcomes like suicide. So, it’s not a choice between a “dead boy or a live girl”…it’s a choice between getting someone struggling with psychiatric issues the proper care to accept realities or allowing them to continue with their delusions.

It turns out that medical gender transition alone does not “fix” mental health problems.

Gender reassignment surgery needs to be placed on the ash heap of medical atrocities, alongside the Tuskegee syphilis study, lobotomies for mental illness, and bloodletting as a cure-all.

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