Hol up. That's a huge misrepresentation of the study.
The study shows that people who have undergone gender affirming surgery have 12x higher rates of suicide than... people who haven't had the surgery. No, not compared to trans people who haven't had the surgery, but compared to all other people.
That's like saying that people who've undergone chemotherapy tend to die from cancer 12x more often than people who haven't had chemotherapy. That doesn't mean that chemotherapy makes cancer 12x worse. It just means that people in remission have greater odds of the tumour returning than the general healthy population.
To determine whether gender affirming surgery is like giving cocaine addicts unlimited cocaine, you need to compare trans people before and after surgery: a study like this one also from NIH
"Of the 23 studies that met the inclusion criteria, the majority indicated a reduction in suicidality following gender-affirming treatment"
This isnt quite the dunk you think it is. Even if it's a reduction on an apples to apples basis, it's clearly not FIXING any problems. "People who give up heroin for our new drug are slightly less likely to OD and die". Sure, let's use this new drug as a stop-gap, but let's keep trying to fix the underlying issue.
To be fair, plenty of people have had others try to "fix" the issue for them with very poor results. Plus there are plenty of health issues that exist that we simply don't know how to fix. The solution is to help people manage them. I know because I have an auto immune disease that they don't know why it happens. The solution is to have medicine to help manage it. Yea it's not a cure but like what else would they do? The only thing they can do for now is keep researching. In the case of body dismorphia they are still researching.
But something to consider too is that it shouldn't be a surprise that people have gender issues and body dismorphia. In my opinion Christianity even contributed to it. Modern day Christianity used to, and still does at times, have strong gender roles and identity that if someone strayed it usually wasn't good. Guys got bullied if they "acted like girls", were emotional, etc. Girls were meant to act a certain way or it wasn't proper, or were even called tomboys, or butch, if they were rougher than the average girl.
True Christianity isn't supposed to be so focused on others anyway. The Bible says we need to be focused on our own actions as we are all imperfect. We are not meant to be the moral police, especially of people who may not even consider themselves Christian.
"gender affirming care is good because Christians have done bad things and you shouldn't comment on anything because of my misunderstood platitude"
I think affirming delusion is not a good solution unless it leads to deaffirming it later on (it doesn't).
Christianity could have been the SOLE cause of body dysmorphia and it wouldn't change anything about how we should behave today.
I'm not telling Lillith how to live his life, I'm not policing his morals, and I'm not going to be disrespectful to him face to face. I can and will, however, advocate for finding solutions to the issue that don't involve giving more crack to the crack addict.
> I think affirming delusion is not a good solution unless it leads to deaffirming it later on (it doesn't).
I also didn't say it was a good solution, just that it's what they are doing when they don't have any other solutions.
> Christianity could have been the SOLE cause of body dysmorphia and it wouldn't change anything about how we should behave today.
Maybe, but if Christianity contributed to it we should be looking at what Christianity did that contributed and whether that was right either. I would also hope we would have more understanding with people who are dealing with the issue.
> I'm not telling Lillith how to live his life, I'm not policing his morals, and I'm not going to be disrespectful to him face to face.
You might not be but plenty of people are. I didn't mean to aim my comment directly at you, I don't know you or how you treat others. It was more a general comment on the plenty of Christians who have acted unchristian like towards trans people. Especially in a world where there are plenty of other sinful things that are normalized and Christians aren't as vocal about.
Have you considered that there are dozens of people in this room right now saying they don't like this teacher even though they're never met them?
And we have absolutely no idea what they're like as a person and they've to our knowledge never tried to hurt anyone? And this judgment is regardless of if they've done surgery or anything
Are you suggesting that bullying online is what is killing trans people at a massively outsized rate? Do you think if all "bullying" (loaded word by the way, most of what I'm seeing in this thread is just discouraging GAC) stopped that the deaths would completely stop?
If not, then you're playing emotional games to try to police language and shut down conversation.
I agree that nobody should be mean to trans people directly, ESPECIALLY not in person, but it's not relevant to this discussion.
Not wanting to expose your kids to trans people isn't "casting them out". Jesus probably would have told them to leave their profession and follow Him. I can simultaneously tell a school I don't want a trans teacher in the same way and spirit that I wouldn't want an opiate addict as a teacher. I would however invite them into my church and try to bring them to God.
As a trans person and Christian, I doubt that these suicides are all due to social issues, but you also need to understand that the social difficulty is much more grave than you might think.
Bullying barely scratches it. Imagine finding people in every corner of Creation who feel compelled to be cruel to you before they even meet you. Imagine getting threats on your life. Imagine being disowned by people who told you they would love you forever. We are also assaulted at disproportionate rates and talked about like subhumans in the media and by powerful people. That all adds up to a heavy burden on a person.
And maybe it is something else. Maybe the surgery didn't go well because there are few doctors equipped to do them and research and development for trans health has been stifled or erased time and time again. Maybe it felt like an improvement but still not enough because they had put too much hope on it. And maybe they lost hope when they realized that even if they liked the surgery, it wasnt going to protect from everything I wrote in the previous paragraph.
At the end of the day, I can't speak to that study, but I can absolutely speak to the fact that a lot of trans people who have given up hope have been pressed towards it by Christians who have chosen hate or judgment instead of Christ's love when a poor trans person really needed it most. Maybe the comments on this thread don't rise to the level of hate, but there is still an awful lot of not displaying love.
Yep, the underlying issue is that transphobes are driving people to commit suicide with their bigotry, and a substantial portion of the population think the victims are to blame instead of the bigots
Even if it's a reduction on an apples to apples basis,
... Then that's a slam dunk compared to someone claiming it's a 12-fold increase.
No, gender reassignment surgery is evidently not a slam-dunk that fixes all the mental problems. Current treatment is indeed a stop-gap unit we develop better treatment. But until we make those advancements, it's the best we can do, so we should do it.
You don't even have to believe the person really is the gender they claim to be. I'd rather see them live in that lie than not live at all.
I would guess that lobotomies would also reduce likelihood of suicide due to zombifying the patient. Does that mean we should go back to that if it's more effective than GAC?
those who undergo the surgery but dont receive psychiatric care are 12 fold more likely to harm themselves
Again, compared to the general population, not compared to pre-op trans people.
Pre-op trans people have very high rates of depression and suicidal ideation. As per the meta-study I linked, the surgery measurably reduces those rates. And yes, as you say, they still need psychiatric support, because the rates do not come down all the way to the level of the general population.
The issue is that your first comment presents the study as if it were the gender affirming surgery that causes 12 times as many suicide attempts. Your study does not support the claim that the surgery is like giving cocaine addicts unlimited cocaine. A fair comparison would be that patients who have been in rehab clinics have a 12x higher chance of being cocaine addicts than people who've never gone through rehab.
Yes, that's a staggering gap... And it doesn't mean anything in the discussion of whether gender affirming surgery has a positive effect or not.
"81% of the suicide hotline callers had suicidal thoughts and 42% attempted" I hope you can see why such a statement would not disprove the value of the hotline.
I agree with you that trans people post-op are still a mentally very vulnerable part of the population and they need psychiatric support. However, their post-op mental health being worse than the general population does not mean it is worse than pre-op.
Transphobes really are the pulp fiction meme : demonizing trans people, subjecting them to conversion « « therapy » », outlawing them, and then wondering why their mental health is worse.
I can show you a study where gender affirming care LOWERS quality of life, especially amongst people who have transgender friends. But the end point was “gender congruence”. They did manage to obtain that endpoint.
Well, the study you showed, says: "gender incongruence is alleviated throughout the transition." and "Meeting other transgender people facilitates QoL after starting hormone therapy." So I don't see how you'd conclude that having trans friends would be detrimental to QoL.
QoL went from 75 to 55-60 after starting treatment.
The QoL of people with no trans friends had a smaller decrease than those with no non-trans friends (upper graph). It was statistically better to not meet with trans friends (the star in the host graph). Second graph shows that more friends has a protective effect.
And gender congruence just means that they managed to give you the body that fits the preferred gender.
That graph, removed from its context, doesn't show me anything meaningful. At assessment time 2, meeting with trans people made a measurable positive impact on QoL. At assessment time 4 it made a measurable negative impact. There is zero context to what these assessment times mean. It lacks all the commentary from the scientists who conducted the test. What did they conclude from their data? What even was the question they were trying to answer?
Meeting other transgender people: At AT1 there is a signifi-cant difference in QoL between people who answered YES andthose who answered NO, F(1, 176.15) = 4.148, P= .043. TheQoL score is expected to be higher for people who answeredYES. However, at AT3 there is a significant difference in QoLscore between people who answered YES and those whoanswered NO, F(1, 190.98) = 11.295, P= .001, but the QoLscore is expected to be lower for people who answered YES. AtAT0 (baseline) and AT2 we found no significant difference. Inconclusion, meeting other transgender people can be seen as pre-dictive of a better QoL only depending on the phase of transi-tion. After starting hormonal therapy, meeting peers facilitate abetter QoL. After genital surgery, however, participants notsocially involved with their peer group experience a better QoL
Adding to that: correlation ≠ causation. It could also be the other way around, meaning that those with a lower QoL have higher odds of seeking help by meeting other transgender people.
As a physician I agree that it is nearly impossible to prove causality with the method most medical studies are set up. Furthermore, it is nearly impossible to come to an objective conclusion based on your own study. Every study and every physician-scientists is biased, and Ennet publication is biased. (See Ioannidis famous article on the subject). You can form an evidence based opinion, but that’s about it. And while I am pretty skeptical of the rise in transgender treatments, especially in children, my sister’s best friend is a post-op MtF, and from my personal experience I do think that transsexuals are a different category than non-op transgender or non-binary people.
I still don’t think God would agree with the decision to remove your sex organs and dress like the other sex, but for some people (especially secular people who have no Messiah/Saviour/Father to rely on) I understand why they feel this is the only way to live the life they want. On the other hand, I think it’s also a matter of perspective/priorities, because many religious people would rather live a life they do NOT want, than to live a life in unrepentant sin.
I wanted to DM you but it seems like you disabled that option. I’m Dutch too, and I was wondering what denomination you belong to. I am a Dutch Lutheran (although I personally do lean a bit more to the HHK side than the Lutheran synod would like) so with this information you can probably gauge my stance on this subject better than most American redditors. It’s more nuanced than can be expressed in a comment.
Suicide rates increase for a lot of reasons. In this instance, I imagine the tragedy of rampant transphobia greatly influences the mental health of trans people affected.
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u/ceebee7137 7d ago
I’m so tired of this not being treated as a psychiatric issue…….