Study Claiming Anti-Trans Laws Lead to Teen Suicide is Debunked

Study Claiming Anti-Trans Laws Lead to Teen Suicide is Debunked

The idea that unless you allow teenagers to transition, they will kill themselves was always used by supporters.

City Journal reports:

Another Major Transgender Suicide Study Crumbles

In 2024, amid a wave of state legislation on transgender issues, the prestigious academic journal Nature Human Behavior (NHB) published a study titled “State-level anti-transgender laws increase past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people in the USA.” The study claimed to find that passage of state “anti-transgender laws increased incidents of past-year suicide attempts” by as much as 72 percent.

Left-of-center media kicked into full gear, announcing that a study had found causal evidence that Republican-led laws are producing an epidemic of adolescent self-harm. “More trans teens attempted suicide after states passed anti-trans laws, a study shows,” blared NPR. Similar language appeared in the Washington Post, CNN, TIME, Scientific American, NBC, andThe Hill, as well as in the medical news outlets Medpage Today and Psychology Today.

It is not uncommon for researchers in gender medicine to exaggerate their findings and let allied media spin the rest. But in this case, the authors of the NHB study themselves promoted a narrative of cause and effect. “In this study,” wrote lead author Wilson Lee on LinkedIn, “we presented causal evidence that enacting state-level anti-transgender legislation increased suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary young people in the US.” Co-author Ronita Nath told CNN, “We’ve long known that the associations between anti-transgender policies and negative health outcomes for LGBTQ+ young people exist, but this is the first time any study has shown this causal relationship.”

Yet, in what has become routine in this research area, the NHB study’s findings and conclusions later crumbled under scientific reexamination. As a methodological criticism published (to its credit) in the NHB last month—over a year after the original study—shows, the observed elevation in suicide attempts came from a small sample (roughly 100 youth) in a single state (Idaho), at a time when that state’s “anti-transgender” laws were not even in effect. Further, the researchers did not properly control for confounding factors. (The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine has published its own methodological analysis, which is worth reading.)

Predictably, neither the authors nor the media outlets that trumpeted their “findings” have so far bothered to correct the record. In fact, the authors have said that the methodological criticisms “do not alter the interpretation of our findings.” NHB gave the authors of the original study a chance to respond to the criticism. As explained below, not only did their response fall short, but it also included a potentially damning admission. To judge by how these things usually go, the study will almost certainly continue to be cited as settled fact, bolstered through citation laundering in scientific journal publications.

Read it all.

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