The Suicide Trope is a Huge Lie

I know because it happened to my family

My husband and I were told by a psychiatrist who specializes in gender that if we did not affirm our son’s identity as being a girl, he would kill himself. This doctor said, “Do you want a live son or a dead daughter?”. He said this in front of our son. Those words will forever haunt me. 

My son did take his life, but only after he tried to transition, not before. Did this psychiatrist plant the seed? How is it ethical for a mental health professional to say this in front of a child, ignoring the known and well-documented contagion of suicidal behavior?

Our son was on cross-sex hormones for a short time. He found that he didn’t like how it made him feel. He never took them again and then desisted from his trans identity. He re-established contact with us, moved home, said it was all a mistake and was working to get his life in order, including going back to school. This was when he took his own his life. He had few friends and was very lonely. Social transition is not a neutral act according to the Cass review:

• For the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress. For those young people for whom a medical pathway is clinically indicated, it is not enough to provide this without also addressing wider mental health and/or psychosocially challenging problems.

• There is relatively weak evidence for any effect of social transition in adolescence. The Review recognises that for adolescents, exploration is a normal process, and rigid binary gender stereotypes can be unhelpful. Many adolescents will go through a period of gender non-conformity in terms of outward expressions (e.g. hairstyle, make-up, clothing and behaviours). They also have greater agency in how they present themselves and in their decision-making.

• The systematic review showed no clear evidence that social transition in childhood has any positive or negative mental health outcomes, and relatively weak evidence for any effect in adolescence.

It does great damage to a young adult’s psyche to socially transition. It harmed my son's mental health. He had always been a very outgoing kid with a lot of friends in elementary and middle school. It was when he began high school and decided he was trans that his mental health declined, not before. He became very depressed and then COVID hit. The isolation did not help. After he desisted from his trans identity, he was headed in the right direction, but he was lonely, and the anxiety he experienced from the years of social transition stayed with him.

The few friends he had took to social media to blame us for his death, rather than take responsibility themselves for not being a good friend to him. Nor did they own up to how affirmation of his trans-identity was ultimately very traumatic. My son had taken responsibility for how he treated us while he was pretending to be a woman and was very remorseful after he desisted. We had worked out our differences and we had a good relationship before he died. 

The suicide trope of “dead son or alive daughter” is tragically misguided and a criminal lie. This study found that the rates of suicide among trans-identified adolescents were higher than the general public but similar to those in adolescents with mental health issues. According to the Cass Review: “It has been suggested that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide in this population, but the evidence found did not support this conclusion.”  People are far more likely to commit suicide after transition. These kids become convinced they will kill themselves if they don’t transition because that is what they are taught by doctors and social media. They also believe their lives will be so much better after transition. They do not understand that anxiety is a normal human condition and it was never about gender. After realizing that transitioning doesn’t solve their problems and things didn’t get better, the risk for suicide is even higher.

It’s scandalous how doctors have entrapped parents to harm their own child by pushing this suicide troupe. My son told us his gender identity had been a phase and that he was just rebelling. How many scientific journals need to report on this before the lie ends? Blackmailing parents into accepting the gender affirmation model is causing tremendous psychological harm to the parents and makes it hard for their kids to move on after they realize the false promise of transitioning. 

The suicide myth is just that - a myth, a lie and it will one day be recognized as contributing to the medical scandal of gender affirmation.