New Study: Treatment for Gender Dysphoria Sends People Even More Mentally Ill

The trans lobby use the same emotionally manipulative argument again and again for putting sexually confused children on puberty blockers and insisting that deluded people be permitted to mutilate their bodies: “They find it so distressing that their body is not aligned with the sex they supposedly feel they are in the minds that they will commit suicide if you don’t give them what they want. Failure to give them what they want will make them so depressed that they simply won’t want to live anymore.”

This argument makes no sense. A man who feels that he is a woman is deluded. To allow him to overtly present as a woman (often not very convincingly) will do nothing to address the psychology behind why he has developed this delusion and this identity disturbance. To “transition” him is akin to accepting the anorexic’s delusion that she is fat and allowing her to starve herself to death accordingly.

If the trans lobby is correct, then all transsexuals – even those who only develop their feelings about this in adolescence – really are “born into the wrong body,” meaning that “gender-affirming” treatment or surgery will make them better psychologically. A new study from Finland has shown that this is nonsense. Consistent with the idea that gender dysphoria reflects underlying psychological problems, gender reassignment has no positive impact on their mental health.

Published in Acta Paediatrica, the new study is entitled “Psychiatric Morbidity Among Adolescents and Young Adults Who Contacted Specialised Gender Identity Services in Finland in 1996–2019: A Register Study.” It is able to take advantage of the fact that Finland has a small population on which it keeps very up-to-date information with every Finnish resident having an identifying number. It looked at every case across the period of Finns who had attended a gender identity clinic before reaching the age of 23 and it then followed their interaction with the medical services until they died or until June 2022. They also looked at whether they had seen a psychiatrist before or after the date of referral to the clinic. This gave them a sample of 2083 people. Each one of these was compared to four people of the same sex who were born in the same year and in the same region. They also looked at whether these people had been referred to a psychiatrist for some condition, usually depression.

The findings were striking. Fifteen per cent of controls had seen a psychiatrist prior to the referral date compared to 45% of those referred. Two years after the referral, 14.6% of controls had seen a psychiatrist compared to 61.7% of those referred. In other words, undergoing gender affirming treatment does not seem to assist the mental health of these people. If anything, it makes it worse.

Among men who wanted to be feminised and who underwent medical reassignment, psychiatric needs rose from 9.6% to 60.7% ,while among those who were reassigned from female to male, psychiatric needs went from 21.6% to 54.5%. Interestingly, these were rather different among people referred to the clinic who were not gender-reassigned, something that few commentators on this study seem to have explored. The males had a previous psychiatric interaction rate of 53% and a subsequent one of 59% while for the females these numbers were 65% and 67%. So, those who did not transition had less previous psychiatrist interaction than those who did and, in the case of males who did transition, this level of interaction was actually lower than that of controls. It was 13.6% for control males and 16.4% for control females.

It is very difficult to work out what is going on and, surprisingly, the authors do not mention the anomaly. They do, however, observe a significant change after the year 2010. Twenty-three per cent of the 1996-2010 cohort had seen a psychiatrist about some other issue before being referred to the gender clinic. However, among the 2010-2019 cohort, this was 48%. One way of interpreting this is that, from 2010 onwards, something changed in the culture leading to mentally unstable people being drawn into gender dysphoria.

It seems fairly obvious that the “trans madness” began around 2010 — when it began to be promoted. This would lead to a certain kind of socially anxious person who had previously suppressed mild “trans” feelings realising that they were a way of gaining status, attention and even power via a shocking new identity. It would also lead to more and more socially anxious people of this kind uber-conforming to the new marker of victimhood and virtue in order to feel that they mattered and were special. In that females are more socially anxious than males, it is no coincidence the female gender dysphoria began to be observed at this point, especially among groups of teenage girls with very high mental instability; the kind that were anorexics a generation earlier.

We can only speculate on why, among men, there is the counter-intuitive finding that controls had higher previous psychiatric interaction than men who were reassigned but this is reversed among those who weren’t reassigned. According to a Finnish psychiatrist with whom I corresponded about this, before about 2010 there were very strict criteria with regard to who could be reassigned. Doctors refused to permit reassignment to those with serious psychiatric problems. The females seemingly came en masse after 2010 and the Finnish medical authorities also became less strict about reassigning people at around this point.

However, the key point is that, at the very least, gender reassignment does not improve the mental health of those who undergo it. They have serious mental health problems prior to it and they seem to have worse mental health problems afterwards. This study demonstrates that trans ideology is based on a falsehood. People with gender dysphoria have psychological problems and responsible doctors should attempt to address these rather than allow such people to mutilate their bodies and even demand that everybody else participate in their fantasy.