We ran the data on trans teen suicide panic and found the claims are misleading

“You can choose between a live son or a dead daughter.”Countless parents have heard some variation of these words — from physicians, medical associations, media outlets or online activists. If children believe they’re born in the wrong body and can’t get sex-change treatments, the argument goes, they’re at high risk of committing suicide. No claim has swayed more parents to let their kids get puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and even surgeries.The same claim has struck fear into the hearts of lawmakers considering restrictions on such treatments.But as we show in a new report, the suicide threat isn’t true. Protecting children from transgender treatments does not increase suicide rates — and our data proves it.There’s no question that suicide is higher among children who believe they’re transgender, a heartbreaking reality that demands intervention. Kids who assert they’re “born in the wrong body” typically suffer from serious mental-health issues, including depression and anxiety, that are themselves linked to suicide risk. The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 72% of transgender-identified high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.”The commonsense explanation is that such challenges preceded and even led to their gender confusion — with the encouragement of authority figures and sympathetic social-media voices exacerbating mental-health dangers. Yet activists and their allies say the real issue is the failure to medically “affirm” these children’s chosen gender identity.That failure, they say, leads to alarming numbers of suicides among trans-identifying teens.To justify this claim, they point to studies purporting to show that sex-change treatments improve mental health, and that restrictions lead to worse mental health outcomes, including suicide.Yet these studies uniformly fall short of scientific standards.They generally rely on self-reported mental health s...