26/11/2025
The top US blog Erin in the Morning is worth visiting this week, as it pulls together new scientific reports that show up the lies of anti-transgender campaigners. The website says "
In the last year, many pseudoscientific organizations and anti-transgender activists have worked to prop up misleading claims to imply that gender-affirming care is ineffective or dangerous. These claims fly in the face of the dozens of important studies released over the last decade showing the powerful, measurable impact that gender-affirming care has on transgender youth who need it. Now, a recent study published in The Journal of Pediatrics adds yet another data point to the overwhelming body of evidence supporting this care, finding that suicidality scores dropped significantly an average of two years and up to five years after patients received gender-affirming treatment.
The study was conducted at an unnamed Midwestern clinic, though the authors note it was likely located in a state that banned gender-affirming care, as those bans prevented researchers from gathering additional data on the transgender youth in the study. It examined all transgender youth who initiated hormone therapy between 2017 and 2024 and completed a suicidality intake questionnaire at the start of treatment. Importantly, researchers did not limit follow-up to patients seen exclusively in the gender clinic—data was collected at any clinic within the hospital system that the transgender youth later visited, making the study far more resistant to the common challenge of losing patients to follow-up. Suicidality questionnaire data was then gathered from these young people for up to five years after treatment initiation, with the average follow-up occurring roughly two years later.
Of these patients, only eight refused to take the follow-up survey. Just seven discontinued hormone therapy, and the researchers note that of those who stopped HRT, only four did so because their gender identity had shifted. Even then, those four continued to identify as “gender diverse,” not reverting to a cisgender identity. These findings mirror a similar study at a pediatric clinic in Australia, which used comparable methods and sample size and found that only two of 552 patients discontinued hormone therapy after initiation. Together, these studies sharply contradict conservative narratives claiming that transgender youth are poorly screened for care or that regret and harm are widespread outcomes of treatment.
Importantly, the study found that gender-affirming care is likely lifesaving. While the authors do not present the result as a percentage, suicidality scores fell from 0.46 to 0.15—a roughly 68 percent decline—after patients were on gender-affirming hormones for an extended period of time when compared to their baseline. The effect was the same for both feminizing and masculinizing therapy. Researchers also note that the real impact may be even larger: 30 patients had already undergone puberty suppression before starting hormones and had likely experienced some benefits. As they write, “at baseline, participants who had received pubertal suppression prior to HT (n = 30) showed lower suicidality scores (M = 0.23, SD = 0.77) compared with the overall sample (M = 0.44, SD = 0.95).” Many others began with a suicidality score of 0, possibly because the knowledge they would receive treatment was itself protective. Even with these factors, the study still shows a significant reduction in suicidality."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002234762500424X
