0:00
There's a new study out of Finland that is being used by anti-trans influencers to claim that gender affirming care does not save lives and that gender dysphoria is not even linked to suicide. Now this is of course entirely untrue, and this stems from both a misreading of the study and big limitations and problems with the study itself. Let's go ahead and dig in.
0:22
So this study done by Dr. Kaltiala in Finland, a very noted name by the way in anti-trans research, compares trans people, or actually people with a diagnosis of transsexualism or gender identity disorder, to matched controls in the population sample. And what she does is she claims that gender dysphoria is not linked to suicide, actually whenever you control for psychiatric specialist visits. And also that gender affirming care does not prevent suicide. Except it gets some major things wrong.
0:56
Let's dig in. So first of all, the study looks at data from between 1996 to 2022. A major problem with this though is that gender dysphoria did not exist as a diagnosis until 2013. Prior to that, it was gender identity disorder. Why is this a problem? Well, because gender identity disorder was not actually about trans people. It was about gendered behavior that people saw as pathological.
1:21
So for instance, a young very feminine boy might be diagnosed with gender identity disorder. Notably this old disorder did not even require you to want to become another sex. Similarly, overly masculine cisgender girls could be coded with gender identity disorder. But that is not the biggest problem with the study. The biggest problem with the study is that by controlling for psychiatric specialist visits, they end up controlling for the very variable that they're trying to measure.
1:49
It amounts to a tautology. Somebody who is going to commit suicide is by their very nature going to be more likely to have seen a psychiatric specialist. Notably, these psychiatric specialist visits include suicide crisis referrals. It would be like trying to claim that the gender wage pay gap does not exist because whenever you control for hours worked, it goes away. Even though women might work less hours because of gendered expectations.
2:18
You can come up with some really silly examples on this. For instance, you could eliminate the effect of carbon dioxide on global warming if you control for ice cap thickness. Or you could eliminate smoking's effect on cancer if you control for chemotherapy visits. Here's the real kicker though. Even when controlling for this, tucked away in a little section in the paper, it shows that those who receive gender affirming care had similar suicide rates to population controls.
2:49
And those who did not receive gender affirming care had three times higher suicide rates. So the study even itself provides evidence that gender affirming care saves lives. The study's authors virtually don't even talk about this. Of course, Benjamin Ryan publishes in the New York Post about how this shows that gender affirming care is not life-saving, and it goes without saying.
3:10
Anti-trans media wants to latch onto anything it can get a hold of. Now for most researchers, I would give them the benefit of the doubt on perhaps missing something in their model. But it's also important to note that Dr. Kaltiala in Finland has many allegations of patient abuse in this treatment. Stories have come out of that clinic where she has allegedly told trans patients that they were too short to transition, or trans men were too girly to transition.
3:38
Allegedly, she's reported patients to Child Protective Services for obtaining legal care elsewhere. There are also allegations of her telling patients that trans surgery doesn't work. This is just scratching the surface. The stories out of her clinic are rather horrifying. She gate-keeps the vast majority of people from getting care. So even if everything with this study was done perfectly, you can't compare what passes for gender affirming care in Finland, especially for trans youth, to people in the United States.
4:08
Lastly, this study doesn't even really look at trans youth. The median age in the study is 19 years old. Most people would have already gone through a puberty by that point. It's important to have literacy around anti-trans studies. I hope this will help you if you ever encounter this one in the wild.
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