(CP) Trans-identifying adults who undergo body-mutilating surgeries as a part of an effort to seem like the alternative sex have an elevated suicide attempt risk, based on a recent study.
The study, titled “Risk of Suicide and Self-Harm Following Gender-Affirmation Surgery,” was published in April within the medical science journal Cureus. Researchers conducted the study by assessing over 90 million adults aged 18 to 60.
According to the study, individuals who underwent “gender-affirming surgery” had a 12-fold higher suicide attempt risk than those that didn’t. The researchers found that 3.5% of people that had an elective trans surgery were treated for attempting suicide. As the study reported, 0.3% of patients who didn’t undergo a surgical operation didn’t attempt suicide.
One critic of the study, trans-identified journalist Erin Reed, published an evaluation on his Substack page, Erin in The Morning, refuting its findings. The evaluation claims that the authors’ methodology raises questions on the study’s accuracy.
Reed questioned the study’s results, taking issue with the research because, he claimed, it compared individuals who had trans surgeries to non-trans-identifying individuals to find out if said surgeries increased the chance of suicide.
“To accurately assess whether transgender surgeries increase suicide risk, the proper control group could be transgender individuals who didn’t have surgery or, much more accurately, those that were denied surgery,” Reed wrote. “It could be like judging the effectiveness of a recent teaching method by comparing college students using the brand new method to those that never went to school, somewhat than to school students using the old method.”
Dietrich Jehle, certainly one of the study’s authors, said in an announcement to The Christian Post that they “checked out associations with outcomes somewhat than causation in a big propensity matched retrospective study.” Jehle serves as professor and chair of the Sealy Department of Emergency Medicine on the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, Texas.
“We didn’t take a look at the effect of surgery — just the outcomes of the population that had gender affirmation surgery,” Jehle told CP, adding that trans-identifying individuals typically have higher rates of depression.
“[I should emphasize] that we didn’t use individuals that wanted gender affirmation surgery and weren’t granted the surgery as a control as patients are required to undergo at the least two psychiatric evaluations as a way to qualify for surgery (i.e., patients who qualify for surgery are at lower suicide risk than the group who wants surgery but doesn’t qualify no matter whether the group that qualifies undergoes surgery),” Jehle added.
According to the researcher, the “key point” of the study is that individuals who’ve undergone a trans surgery “need comprehensive psychiatric care within the years following the surgery.”
“Our conclusion is perhaps higher worded: Patients who undergo gender-affirming surgery are related to significantly elevated suicide attempt risks, underlining the need for comprehensive post-procedure psychiatric support,” Jehle said.
He further told CP that researchers used “Z87.890” for the study, which is a code utilized in medical records to point whether someone has a history of undergoing trans procedures.
Regarding the methodology, the study consisted of 4 separate cohorts. The first Cohort, A, consisted of 1,501 adults aged 18 to 60, who underwent a trans surgery and later sought emergency look after suicidal ideation. Cohort B was intended to serve because the study’s control group, and it consisted of adults aged 18 to 60 who had gone to an emergency room for mental health concerns but had no history of getting undergone a sex-change operation.
Another group, Cohort C, served because the study’s second control group, and it consisted of adults aged 18 to 60, who went to the ER and had tubal litigation (surgery performed on women to stop pregnancy) or a vasectomy but they didn’t undergo “gender-affirmation surgery.”
“A secondary evaluation involving a control group with pharyngitis, known as cohort D, was conducted to validate the outcomes from cohort C,” the study stated.
The study concluded, “Gender-affirming surgery is significantly related to elevated suicide attempt risks, underlining the need for comprehensive post-procedure psychiatric support.”
Brandon Showalter, a social commentator for The Christian Post, who has done extensive research on the subject of gender dysphoria and so-called gender-affirming surgeries, noted that there generally is a number of aspects that cause an individual to feel compelled to finish his or her life.
“While I’m not surprised to see these higher numbers on this latest research, the prevailing challenge for critics of those procedures is to make visible the harms of this experimental medicalization and irreversible surgeries, that are quite a few apart from any consideration about how those medical practices might contribute to suicide,” Showalter stated.
Discussions concerning the effectiveness of so-called “gender-affirming care” and the doubtless negative impact on a person’s mental health are ongoing.
In October 2019, a study published within the American Journal of Psychiatry initially highlighted the mental health advantages related to “gender-affirming” surgeries. Researchers analyzed the records of 9.7 million Swedes within the national population registry. Between 2005 and 2015, 1018 of the two,679 individuals diagnosed with “gender incongruence” underwent surgery to remove their genitals or permanently alter their bodies.
The study authors highlighted a supposed 8% decrease in mood and anxiety disorders for postoperative patients annually after the surgery. The authors later posted a correction after several media outlets reported on the finding, stating their data “demonstrated no advantage of surgery in relation to subsequent mood or anxiety disorder-related health care visits or prescriptions or hospitalizations following suicide attempts.”
A separate extensive long-term study conducted in Sweden by scholars on the Karolinska Institute and Gothenburg University concluded that “after sex reassignment, [trans-identified individuals] have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the overall population.”
The study analyzed 324 individuals (191 male-to-female, 133 female-to-male) for over 30 years after a sex-change surgery from a period of 1973 to 2003.
