The Left has told us for years that if we deny "gender-affirming care" to minors, they will commit suicide. It was a gross and nefarious ploy that played with parents' emotions to push harmful sterilizing and mutilating procedures on children. 

"Do you want a living daughter or a dead son?" was the question often asked. In December 2024, a lawyer with the ACLU told the Supreme Court that such care didn't decrease suicidality in minors. Chase Strangio admitted that when questioned by Justice Alito.

"But on page 195 of the Cass Report, it says there is no evidence that gender affirmative treatments reduce suicide," Alito said. 

"What I think that is referring to," Strangio replied, "is that there is no evidence in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide. And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare and we're talking about a very small population of individuals with studies that don't necessarily have completed suicides within them. However, there are multiple studies, long-term, longitudinal studies, that do show that there is a reduction in suicidality, which I think is a positive outcome to this treatment." And in May of 2024, a study showed the risk of suicide actually increased 12-fold following surgery.

Now another study has shown that restrictions on puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries for minors did not, in fact, increase suicide rates in teens.

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Here's more from Do No Harm:

The study, titled "The Effect of State Bans on Gender Interventions for Minors on Teen Suicide Rates," examines the claim that state bans on so-called gender-affirming care for minors lead to spikes in suicides. Employing three distinct analytical models, Do No Harm found no evidence to support the claim.

"The alarmist claim that protecting children from sex-rejecting procedures increases suicide is false," said Jay Greene, Director of Research at Do No Harm. "We examined the evidence in a first-of-its-kind study of how teen suicide rates were affected by states adopting policies restricting so-called gender-affirming care for children. No matter how you examine the data, the result is consistently clear: These state policies did not increase teen suicide rates. Medical practice and policy must be grounded in evidence, not emotionally manipulative talking points. That principle is all the more critical when it’s a matter of children’s health and well-being."

In a thread, Ian Kingsbury also laid out what the study found.

Kingsbury pointed to the "living son/dead daughter" argument used by lawmakers, activists, and the media.

That link has never been substantiated through research, Kingsbury noted, calling out the "questionable ethics of trying to enact a policy agenda through emotional blackmail."

The research used in the suicide claims was often either analysis done via mental health surveys of kids seeking or undergoing "transition" and the other was an analysis of the relationship between "the timing of state restrictions and proxy suicide measures."

Kingsbury calls the research "deeply flawed" and "unhelpful for addressing the question of suicide."

The study conducted by Kingsbury, Greene, and Do No Harm used CDC data on actual teen suicide rates and looked at the 23 states where some or all treatments were restricted for patients under 18. That trend started in 2022, and in the four years since, the study found zero evidence that state policies led to increased suicide rates.

Greene and Kingsbury wrote about the study for The New York Post:

Activists and their allies may object that our findings neatly conform to our organization’s goal of ending transgender medicine for minors. 

That’s why our report carefully details our methodology — and even contains the data and code we used in our statistical software.

We made our results, our methods and our data completely public so that others can conduct their own analyses to validate our findings.

Transgender activists will continue to use the threat of suicide as a means of bludgeoning society into accepting invasive, irreversible medical interventions for children. 

But unless they can produce evidence for a relationship between state restrictions and suicides, their tactics should be called out for what they are: A manipulative bluff.

Parents and policymakers, armed only with common sense, can’t be blamed for buckling when confronted with a dishonest nightmare scenario. 

Now they have the facts they need to protect children at home, at school and by law.

This is a victory for parents and for kids, who now have facts. Blocking so-called "gender-affirming care" does not increase suicide rates in teens, but it does protect them from a lifetime of painful, expensive, and damaging treatment.