Parshall Partners

Crying Foul

         “What would you rather have – a dead son or a live daughter?” That hideous lie is the cudgel used by transgender ideologues to scare parents into affirming their child’s sexual confusion.  But is that true?

         The medical watchdog group Do No Harm published a study countering the claim that laws restricting sex-rejecting procedures, or “gender-affirming care,” as it is often called, lead to increased suicide rates among young people with gender dysphoria.

         Do No Harm noted that “although gender-dysphoric youth experience markedly elevated rates of mental-health distress, the evidence linking so-called gender-affirming medical care to reductions in suicidality has been remarkably tenuous”.

         The watchdog group noted serious concerns with other studies, pointing out they often rely on weak observational designs that can’t isolate the causal effects of medical interventions or related policies or they use Google searches for the word “suicide” that might not be a reliable metric.

         Ian Kingbury, senior director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine, told The Daily Signal:

“When we examined the widely cited claim that restricting pediatric sex-rejecting procedures will spike suicide rates, we found it rests on a mass of shoddy and dishonest research.”

         The director used the term “transgender industrial complex” to describe the juggernaut surrounding this ideology and accused the complex of “weaponizing these bogus studies to scare parents into letting their children undergo irreversible sterilizing procedures.”

         He went on to tell The Daily Signal:

“Our study aims to counter the manipulative schemes of radical ideologues and shed light on the reality: States that protect children from so-called gender-affirming care do not see increased suicide rate.”

         One of the other studies highlighted in the Do No Harm report was The Trevor Project, which describes itself as the “leading global organization provide 24/7 crisis intervention and suicide protection” for homosexuals. A study from the project was published in Nature Human Behavior in 2024 finding that “anti-transgender” laws caused up to a 72% increase in suicide attempts among young people identifying as transgender or nonbinary in the past year”.

         But The Daily Signal pointed out that “the 72% figure came from a tiny subsample in Idaho, of roughly 60 adolescents per year, responding in the years following Idaho’s 2020 bills. During the time period studied, the laws in question had not gone into effect: One was blocked by a federal court, and another had been blocked as a violation of an existing 2018 permanent injunction.”  And, the Do No Harm study found that state adoptions of bans on gender-affirming practices for minor had no effect on 13–17-year-old minors.

         These alarmist claims of teen suicide are part of a bigger agenda.  Most of the studies are built on flimsy evidence driven by ideologues who want a desired outcome.  For a study to be credible is must be grounded in evidence not driven by ideology.  That is the only way to do no harm to minors.

         Those are my thoughts. I’m Janet Parshall.