Finally caught up with the Finnish study.
If you’ve not done so already, read King Dead’s post from earlier:
In short, the fact is that suicide, while higher than the general population, is still rare among trannies despite the 41% meme. Since it correlates well with increased psychiatric needs, it seems pretty clear to me (and anyone else paying attention) that they only off themselves because they're messed up in the head, not because society won't accept them or because they're not getting that "live-saving care" they claim to need. What they really need is a good shrink that will help work through their mental problems, not a cock chop and titty skittles.
If you want more details, I recommend the SEGM summary. It’s a good explanation and quite straightforward.
I wanted to leave Tony’s blog post alone but couldn’t because I am extremely special.
Tony cites Meredithe McNamara and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, but it’s not clear where from. Searching their two names together online brings up only Tony’s blog post, which has been republished elsewhere. (Amusingly, the Los Angeles Blade republished it with a dateline of "HELSINKI, Finland". I guess if Tony identifies as being in Finland while sat downstairs in
his rented Germantown MD house, who are we to question it?) You may remember McNamara from
the infamous testimony she gave to the House energy committee, or the time she (and others at Yale) put out a document in which she revealed she didn’t know what GIDS was (the single largest pediatric gender clinic in the world).
TLDR; the Yale group didn't even know what GIDS (the largest pediatric gender clinic in the world) was, Meredith McNamara claims to never have met a trans-identified female under 25 who had or even wanted a double mastectomy. Utter jokers.
Anyway, he makes two points in the first sentence that punch a hole in his argument below the waterline.
They point out critical flaws, such as the study controlling for the variable it aims to measure
Basic scientific illiteracy here. The study compares the members of the gender-dysphoric (GD) group with controls from the general population. It finds that the GD group has a higher risk of suicide than the general population, but that the risk of suicide is the same as controls with similar levels of mental illness.
relying on outdated data from a time before "gender dysphoria" was even recognized as a diagnosis.
Obviously nonsense. While the exact contemporary criteria (and specific disorder name) has changed over time, this doesn’t matter for the GD group studied: those who "contacted specialised gender identity units at age less than 23 years". The people attending those clinics will have been referred because they met the contemporary criteria; we can’t attempt to go back and apply today’s criteria to yesteryear’s patients, or yesteryear’s criteria to today’s patients (nor does it make sense to!).
Tony’s got a whole section later about this, but it’s just trash. He’s basically playing "true trans" with changing DSM definitions, arguing that those with a GD diagnosis from before 2013 aren’t really trans and so shouldn’t be counted.
Numerous studies have demonstrated that gender-affirming care significantly reduces suicidality, with some showing a decrease in suicidality by up to 73%.
Tordoff, drink! "
Researchers Found Puberty Blockers And Hormones Didn’t Improve Trans Kids’ Mental Health At Their Clinic. Then They Published A Study Claiming The Opposite."
(
archive;
archive via Tor)
The next section, on how the researchers controlled for mental illness, is funny because it shows that Meredithe McNamara not only doesn’t understand medical research, she doesn’t understand sex discrimination in pay ("gender pay gap").
In an illustrative example, Dr. McNamara compares controlling for psychiatric contact in a study on suicide to controlling for variables such as "hours worked" in a study on the gender pay gap and using it to claim that a gender pay gap does not exist. If women work less hours due to gendered expectations, then controlling for hours worked "controls for the pay gap itself because they are so intrinsically connected."
It’s not about hours worked, it’s about
equal pay for equal work. I can’t believe it’s 2024 and I had to type this out, Jesus Christ.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that the study concludes psychological specialist visits correlate with suicide deaths, causing the connection with gender-affirming care and gender dysphoria to seemingly vanish. This overlooks the evident fact that those at higher risk of suicide are indeed more likely to have interactions with psychological specialists and amounts to a critical flaw in the article’s central premise.
Here’s what was found:
- GD group has higher risk of suicide than general population controls.
- GD group has the same risk of suicide as population controls with similar levels of mental illness (but without GD).
- GD group’s mental illness did not decrease after starting gender treatment.
In short: the GD group was at the same risk of suicide as similarly mentally ill people and gender treatment made no difference to their levels of mental illness.
Then we get to Tony’s big claim: "
The Paper Still Shows Trans Care Saves Lives".
While the vast majority of the article only looks at those referred to Finland’s gender identity clinic, the impact of gender affirming care is tucked away in one paragraph and is the only part of the results section where the researchers do not include a table comparing the model with and without psychological referrals.
See the following excerpt (emphasis added):
To explore the role of GR, models accounting for sex, year of birth, and psychiatric treatment were repeated by dividing the GR group into those who had and those who had not proceeded to GR. Adjusted HRs for all-cause mortality were 1.4 (95% CI 0.6 to 3.3; p=0.5) in the GR- group and 0.7 (95% CI 0.2 to 2.0; p=0.5) in the GR+ group, as compared with the controls. Adjusted HRs for suicide mortality were 3.2 (95% CI 1.0 to 10.2; p=0.05) and 0.8 (95% CI 0.2 to 4.0; p=0.8), respectively.
Essentially, the paragraph states that for suicide, those who did not receive gender affirming care saw a 3x higher suicide rate than controls - and this is with overcontrolling for psychological treatment visits. Those who did receive care had no significant difference in suicide rates from controls.
The
SEGM summary deals with this in detail, but the main point that Tony misses is that while there is a relative decrease in risk of suicide in the GR+ group (those who received hormones), the absolute risk of suicide is still extremely low.
There were, thankfully, just 7 suicides among the 2,083 patients. (Tony says that there were "20 suicides in the Finnish dataset" but this includes suicides among the controls.)
We don’t know what the split was between the GR- and GR+ (not treated / treated with hormones), but even if we assume that only 1/7 was in the hormone group, that means that there is only a 0.34% change in the absolute suicide risk. If you make a very rare event 0.34% rarer, does it matter? And again, we don’t know the real split, so this is the most favourable scenario to Tony’s position.
Let alone that, because there were so few suicides, the confidence intervals for these are all over the place: the GR- hazard ratio might be 1.0 or it might be 10.2; the GR+ hazard ratio might be 0.2 or it might be 4.0 (the p value is 0.8! a p value of 1 means the results are indistinguishable from random chance).
There are other problems with this comparison which SEGM points out, including:
- This doesn’t factor in the known harms of hormonal treatment (ie is infertility worth a potential 0.34% decrease in suicide risk?).
- The GR- group is likely more mentally ill than the GR+ group due to a relative reluctance to give hormones to the more mentally ill people. (Ironically one of the complaints Tony & Vanessa / Evan Urquhart are voicing about Finland!)
- The measure of mental ill health (number of hospital-level psychiatric visits) doesn’t account for the severity of mental illness (eg an inpatient stay for schizophrenia and an outpatient consultation for depression are both counted as a single visit).
Phew, and finally, we come to the ad hominem attacks on Riittakerttu Kaltiala. Surprise! I’m not going to bother with this (very long!) section except to note that the troons attack literally everyone who opposes their demands to dish out hormones and surgeries with no restrictions. Kaltiala was quite literally the head of the Finnish pediatric gender clinic when opened with an "affirmative" model in 2011, but now she’s a heretic and the trannies treat her like one. She was interviewed on a podcast by Stella O’Malley and Sasha Ayad, burn her!
