We've all heard the stories about parents, confronted with a doctor or a counselor, threatening them over their child's "transgender" claims and demands for drug therapy or surgery: a counselor or doctor hits them with the demand, "Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?"
This isn't a new claim. There is that narrative that if you won't subject your minor child to permanent, life-altering treatments, they may kill themselves, and a lot of the basis for that argument is a study from the Trevor Project in 2024, which claimed to have found a causal link between anti-transition laws for kids and teen suicide.
A new analysis, though, is showing that study to have a lot of holes.
Independent experts are casting doubt on a widely cited study that claims “anti-transgender laws” in 19 states drove an increase in suicidality among gender-confused and same-sex attracted teens.
The study from Trevor Project researchers received widespread coverage from NBC, NPR, and CNN and other national outlets back in 2024, with several mental health professionals praising it as a meaningful step forward in establishing a causal link between red state laws and youth suicide risk.
“Anti-transgender” laws include restrictions on teens getting surgeries to permanently remove healthy reproductive organs or regulations that prohibit men from competing on girls’ sports teams.
But the ultimate finding may be corrupted, since the result only came from Idaho, which did not have in effect the laws cited.
I would argue that the premise is corrupted as well, as the Trevor Project study appears to have been at least partly agenda-driven rather than a dispassionate analysis of facts; this has the distinct feel of cherry-picking data.
Kathleen Kerr, an author of a new critique, provided further comments to The College Fix.
“The original publication gives the impression of a robust finding based on an analysis of tens of thousands of individuals and 15 states that passed laws,” the biostatistics director at the University of Washington said.
Kerr noted the limits of her own critique, which she said “does not analyze policy or make any policy recommendations.”
“Our goal was to give a careful assessment of the evidence underlying the claims made in the original study,” she told The Fix. She wrote the paper with J. Cohn and Peter Sim, researchers affiliated with the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.
“Our commentary explained that the headline finding – large effects of the laws 2 and 3 years after they are enacted — was from a single state, Idaho, which contributed only a few hundred individuals to the study data,” she said. “It turns out the two laws in Idaho, one about sports and one about birth certificates, either never went into effect or were blocked by courts shortly after enactment.”
So, not only some cherry-picking of data, but also an inadequate sample size, and the fact that the laws being cited weren't even in effect. That is, at best, sloppy. As Kathleen Kerr's study abstract states:
Lee et al.1 investigated the impact of laws characterized by the American Civil Liberties Union as anti-transgender2, applying difference-in-differences (DD) analysis to states that enacted such laws (‘treatment’ states) and states that did not (‘control’ states). The article concludes that enacting such laws increased suicide attempts by transgender and non-binary youth in the treatment states. We highlight issues related to the concentration of post-treatment data in a single state, the selection of controls and the plausibility of parallel trends, and the variability of the results based on alternative analytic specifications. By noting these methodological considerations, we aim to support careful and transparent interpretation of the reported estimates.
In other words, the Kerr study weighed the Trevor Project study in the balance, and found it wanting.
Read More: Minnesota Wastes Millions of Taxpayer Dollars on Trans Dolls to Confuse Little Kids
Here's the thing: I think that the attempts to establish some kind of causal chain here would be difficult at best, even with the most scrupulous of research. The problem isn't gender dysphoria, a mental condition that's been known of for decades, which was historically treated with therapy, not drugs or surgery. The problem isn't even certain practitioners who seem to have abandoned the basic medical ethic of non primum nocere. The problem is that a once-medical issue has been politicized. It's become a social contagion, and the activists driving that contagion have been driving this narrative: The notion that teenagers will kill themselves if not allowed to permanently alter their bodies and personalities with irreversible and, in many cases, damaging and debilitating treatments. This "live son or dead daughter" argument predates the Trevor Project study, and the activists will continue to leverage that study, regardless of its flaws, because of the narrative.
This issue, of course, goes far beyond science, good or bad, and that's part of the problem. As mentioned, it's a social contagion that has exploded in the last decade or so. This has happened before; some of us are old enough to remember the sudden explosion of anorexia nervosa diagnoses after the tragic death of Karen Carpenter, and how that faded over time, remaining a real but rare issue. Transgenderism, in time, likely will as well. In the meantime, threats of suicidal teens shouldn't be interfering with sensible regulation of some of the things around this contagion, such as barring men from women's sports teams, and barring minors, who cannot give fully informed consent, from harmful and irreversible medical interventions.
