(LifeSiteNews) — A new and thorough study out of Finland has added even more evidence of the harms of “gender transitions,” finding a link to a substantial increase in other mental health issues.
Published in the April 26 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Acta Paediatrica, the study examined “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019,” a pool of 2,083 individuals. It found those who went through “medical interventions,” i.e. “gender transition” procedures, had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity [other mental health issues] than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions[.]”
45.7 percent of adolescents referred for transgender “services” had other known mental health issues beforehand, which rose to 61.7 percent two or more years after beginning a “transition.” By contrast, just 15 percent of the control group had mental problems at the starting point, and 14.6 percent two years later.
“When prior psychiatric morbidity was controlled for, the gender-referred adolescents had a 5- to 6-fold increased need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment two years or more after the index date compared to the male controls, and 3- to 4-fold greater risk compared to the female controls, regardless of the desired direction of change and GR [‘gender reassignment’] status,” the authors wrote. “This does not support the suggested improvement in mental health after medical GR initiated during developmental years, and in light of the present findings, severe psychiatric disorders do not appear primarily attributable to GD [gender dysphoria]. Psychiatric disorders require their due treatment regardless of a young person’s [so-called] gender identity.”
“Actually, considerable increases in need for psychiatric treatment were seen among those adolescents who had undergone medical GR, particularly among those seeking change toward female,” the paper continues. “Oestrogen has been found to potentially cause depressive symptoms in both [actual women] and [gender-confused men], which may partly explain the increases in psychiatric needs among those who underwent feminising GR. Masculinising hormones may temporarily improve mood, and testosterone-related bodily changes – typically emerging within a few months – could be expected to alleviate GD and subsequently psychiatric treatment needs. However, psychiatric treatment needs were also markedly increased among those who obtained masculinising GR. Subsequent morbidity burden may also arise from [interventions] not meeting the expectations placed on them.”
The findings reinforce the conclusions of a large body of evidence showing that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
In 2024, National Health Service (NHS) England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that “[w]hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.”
Yet the practice still has intensely-devoted backers within the medical establishment, both for ideological and mercenary reasons.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners, individuals who attempted “transitioning” before regretting it and returning to life as their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s “Clinic for Transgender Health,” where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”