Leading US medical journal tries to terrify parents of trans kids

Yesterday one of America’s leading medical journals, JAMA*, published an editorial calling for more help for transgender youth to keep them from committing suicide. “In the time it has taken you to read this, a transgender youth has attempted suicide,” it said.  

The authors, from Connecticut Children’s Hospital and the University of Connecticut Medical School, plucked their unnerving statistics from an online survey by a leading LGBTQI+ lobby group. The Trevor Project reported last year that 14 percent of LGBTQ young people had attempted suicide and 41 percent had considered suicide.

In the light of growing resistance amongst doctors and in state legislatures to medicalising gender dysphoria, the authors declare that: “The time is now to increase, not hinder, care options. The time is now for children’s hospitals to unite, care for, protect, honor, and welcome our transgender youth.”

Figures like those published in JAMA are nightmarish for parents of children struggling with their sexuality. They support the terrifying idea that they have only two options: a trans child or a dead child.

But are they reliable?

Probably not.

Coincidently, across the Atlantic, an even more vehement debate over the effectiveness of trans paediatric medicine is taking place. England’s National Health Service (NHS) shuttered the country’s leading gender service in March after a long and thorough review of the evidence. At the moment, puberty blockers are only available on an experimental basis. They are not being prescribed as a matter of course.

This has enraged the trans lobby.

On X (formerly Twitter), people have repeatedly claimed that there has been a surge, even an explosion, in suicides. It is said that one patient committed suicide in three years while waiting for treatment before the NHS restricted puberty blockers – but 16 died in the three years afterwards.

These allegations were so alarming that the NHS commissioned an expert in suicide prevention to study them. His conclusions are relevant for parents and doctors on both sides of the Atlantic – and for the editors of JAMA.  

Professor Louis Appleby, of the University of Manchester, found that: “The evidence on suicide risk in children and young people with gender dysphoria is generally poor.” He added that: The data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide in young gender dysphoria patients at the Tavistock.

Instead of the dramatic rise in deaths, he found that there had been 5 suicides amongst these children before the decision and 7 afterwards – statistically there was no difference.

And he pointed out, along with many other observers, that the children who did commit suicide had many other mental health issues: “mental illness, traumatic experiences, family disruption and being in care or under children’s services”.

 

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Extraordinary claims – in this case, claims on which lives depend – should be backed up with extraordinarily robust evidence. And this has not been the case, said Prof Appleby:

“Campaign groups are often selective about evidence - there is nothing wrong with this until it becomes misleading and potentially harmful. The evidence put into the public domain for an ‘explosion’ of suicides is not unbiased nor has it been independently verified. There seems to be no suicide expertise behind the claims.”

For the rhetoric deployed by trans campaigners in the UK, Prof Appleby had some very strong words: careless talk about suicide on social media is “insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide”.

He pointed out that it was quite likely that: “young people and their families will be terrified by predictions of suicide as inevitable without puberty blockers”. Some young people will hear the message that “people like you, facing similar problems, are killing themselves” – and will succumb to impulses to commit suicide or self-harm.

“Suicide should not be a slogan or a means to winning an argument,” he writes.

Let Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, and a former editor at The Economist, have the last word. “It’s the most disgusting bit of moral blackmail I have ever seen in my life on any subject is to tell parents ‘you must do this thing or else your child will kill themselves’.”

And this is precisely how the JAMA editorial has tried to manipulate its readers.

*the Journal of the American Medical Association   


Do you think that the UK expert is over-reacting?    


Michael Cook is editor of Mercator

Image credit: Pexels


 

Showing 5 reactions

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  • Juan Llor Baños
    commented 2024-07-27 07:35:34 +1000
    JAMA is no longer a medical journal. It has renounced Hippocratic medical ethics.
  • mrscracker
    Once the sterilized, mutilated victims reach adulthood & litigations commence, we’ll probably see a massive rollback on this from the AMA.
  • Susan Rohrbach
    commented 2024-07-26 21:59:33 +1000
    The whole tilt of this movement is to normalize the frankentube and have children be the creatures of the state.
  • Patrick Obrien
    commented 2024-07-26 21:43:20 +1000
    Teenagers are just nuts — I was one once. The job or parents is to minimalize the effects. But the cure of the trans=campaigners is worse than the disease. There is something Satanic behind this horrible movement.
  • Michael Cook
    published this page in The Latest 2024-07-26 17:16:53 +1000