by Jo Bartosch, spiked
A new study from Finland shows that puberty blockers and hormone treatment deepen troubled kids’ distress.
Some ideas are so bonkers they ought never to be put to the test. Big-cat obsessives may believe they have a mystical affinity with lions, but no sane zookeeper would indulge them by opening the enclosure. And yet, it has taken researchers in Finland to confirm what anyone with a functioning brain already knew: telling children that their bodies are wrong does not improve their mental health. It makes it worse.
A recent paper published by Acta Paediatrica examined the outcomes for 2,083 patients referred to gender clinics between 1996 and 2019, and compared them with a large and carefully selected control group. The researchers found an elevated risk of ‘psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls’. This means that the girls and young women given testosterone and boys and young men given oestrogen suffered significant increases in distress after starting ‘gender-affirming’ treatment.
The patients had all been diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria’, which meant they were already mentally unwell. But ‘gender-affirming’ treatment didn’t help them. ‘Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals’, the study concluded. ‘Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.’