In the United States, transgender activists hold the threat of suicide over the heads of parents when it comes to pediatric sex-change therapies. “Would you rather have a dead son,” they say, “or a live daughter?” Anecdotally, the reality has appeared to be the opposite, as traumatic surgical and hormonal regimes on top of mental and/or emotional issues would predictably combine for very bad outcomes.

There hasn’t been clear data on the question of transgenders and suicides, however. Until now.

Both the New York Times and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) cover it. Using four decades of data, researchers in Denmark found that the rate of suicide is higher among transgenders — astronomically higher:

Transgender people in Denmark have a significantly higher risk of suicide than other groups, according to an exhaustive analysis of health and legal records from nearly seven million people over the last four decades. The study is the first in the world to analyze national suicide data for this group.

Transgender people in the country had 7.7 times the rate of suicide attempts and 3.5 times the rate of suicide deaths compared with the rest of the population, according to the records analyzed in the study, though suicide rates in all groups decreased over time. And transgender people in Denmark died — by suicide or other causes — at younger ages than others. …

The authors of the new report identified nearly 3,800 transgender people in Denmark by pulling data from two sources: hospital records and applications for legal gender changes. Among that group, nearly 43 percent had a psychiatric diagnosis, compared with 7 percent of the nontransgender group.

Note well that the subject group are not “suppressed” transgenders. They have been identified by their gender change acceptance by the Danish government and/or their sex-change medical treatments, meaning that these subjects either fully or partly transitioned. Denmark is also famously “progressive” in this particular arena (which is why they have reliable data going back to 1980), so this is clearly not a reaction to conservative policies either. The numbers of attempts and actual suicides are not high, but the rate at which they occur in this group is shockingly high compared to the general population.

But even more striking is the association between transgenders and mental illness. Almost half of the transgender population identified in Denmark have been positively diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. (And that doesn’t exclude the possibility that a good deal of the remaining 57% might have undiagnosed mental/emotional issues that rise to levels of pathology.)  Based on feedback in the US, one would have to guess that the primary diagnosis in these cases might be a form of autism, but that’s a drill-down question. The key fact in this case is that psychiatric pathology runs at least six times higher in transgenders than it does in the general population.

And this prompts the question: Is trangenderism a medical fad that massively misdiagnoses and ignores other medical/mental problems? The astronomically higher suicide rates among transitioned or transitioning patients certainly indicates widespread malpractice, or at the very least widespread dissatisfaction with the outcomes of sex-change operations and therapies. The data strongly demonstrates that such ‘therapies’ leave patients much worse off than when they started, and doesn’t touch the actual medical issues in play.

This data should force the medical establishment — and perhaps more importantly, insurance companies that provide malpractice coverage — to completely rethink their embrace of sex-change treatments, especially in pediatric settings. The publication of this study in JAMA might well be a landmark along those lines, as it essentially informs everyone in the industry of the liabilities they are now incurring by pursuing these operations and treatments. Every lawsuit filed by a detransitioner after this point will cite this study to corroborate claims that medical providers experimented on them with no scientific basis for these therapies and with prior knowledge of the detrimental outcomes.

But perhaps it’s even more significant that the New York Times chose to cover this, even if they do it with an NYT-esque sop to progressive culture warriors:

Studies of L.G.B.T.Q. people in the United States have shown that they have high rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts, putting them at high risk of death by suicide. But with scant data on actual deaths, suicide risk has become a matter of heated speculation and debate. Some Republicans have argued that suicides among transgender people are rare, while some L.G.B.T.Q. advocates have declared that the new laws could lead more young transgender people to die by suicide.

Conservatives and Republicans haven’t argued that suicides are “rare” among this group, but that the treatment itself likely makes the suicide problem worse. The LGBTQ advocates claims that transitioning and cultural support for it makes the suicide issue better. The study in Denmark provides a “landmark” basis — the NYT’s word! — for concluding that the transgender activists have been wrong all along. Dead wrong, in fact, and in more ways than one.

Power Line’s Steven Hayward wants to be a fly on the wall inside the NYT today, and notes something rather peculiar about this article:

The study this Times article is based on was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association today. It will be hard for the transgenderists to waive off this mainstream publication.

I can only imagine the bitter arguments that took place in the Times newsroom around the publication of this article. I can’t quite tell but it appears the Times is not opening up a reader comment thread on the article.

The Times staff revolted in February over previous coverage of transgenderism that they deemed insufficiently supportive, don’t forget. The editors stomped down hard on activists in that episode; will they need to do so again? I also wonder how long this study will be accessible at JAMA before the Left’s enforcers bully the AMA into submission. Stay tuned, but in the meantime, don’t let people bully children into a life of misery with the threat of suicide. This shows your common sense matches reality far better than their radical surgical activism does.