The Lie, the Science, and the Truth
UK mental health scientist debunks false claim that denying gender affirming care "literally kills" kids
*The Lie*
Using bogus child suicide risk claims is a dangerous and hideously loathsome tactic to get what you want - but they are thrown about by all sorts of political advocacy groups, politicians, and behavioral health organizations (who stand to gain) to amend laws, adopt policies, and emotionally blackmail the public to get their way.
How many times have you heard that “if we don’t provide gender affirming care - even if we must conceal it from parents - kids will die!” This insidious claim endangers vulnerable children who internalize the falsehood, where it festers and metastasizes, plunging the child further into despondency, fatalism, self loathing, spiritual darkness. Nothing good comes from this lie. Healing becomes more difficult if not impossible. Families are torn apart - or worse, murdered.
This is why we know that Satan is the father of all lies - because lies separate us from the truth. Like demons on our backs whispering in our ear, they feast on the soul, hollowing us out. The desperation and darkness that overtakes us when we are fed a constant stream of lies is the effect of a light going out. We lose strength and descend. We give up.
This is the opposite of love. Suffering compels compassion. Compassion compels charity. Charity requires speaking truth, with love.
To combat The Lie, start with the data. What we can know.
I have written about child suicide data in Arizona here. I hate to even contemplate this subject, but I have to - because they just won’t give up The Lie. It’s just too easy to spread, the capital value too great, to not use that arrow in the quiver.
Now turn to the UK where the reaction to its recent ban on “gender affirming” use of puberty blockers has, predictably, added new life to The Lie.
After the Cass Report debunking the (manipulated) science behind the WPATH standards of care for gender identity transitions, in June this year the UK finally banned the use of puberty blockers to chemically retard sexual development in children. The Cass Report triggered shockwaves especially in the U.S. where much of that research originates. Many U.S. courts have accepted the WPATH standards of care as true and authoritative expert evidence to justify all sorts of rulings to stop these kind of attacks on The Lie.
And now California is attempting to enshrine into law that schools must conceal from parents their children’s mental health struggles with identity and sexuality.
This is the insidious effect of The Lie - using the force of law to separate children from the only human beings in the universe that love them in a way no one else ever will. Hearts shattered, families destroyed, The Lie consumes all. Their youthful spirts give up. They spiral and descend.
It didn’t take long for UK legal activists to assert the ban was cruel, that denying the treatment was causing kids to literally kill themselves. So this week a professor of psychiatry and advisor to the UK government on adolescent mental health, Dr. Louis Appleby, published a report debunking their claims. Dr. Appleby explains his motivation here:
The claims have been led by the legal campaign group the Good Law Project, who are challenging the decision by the previous Health Secretary to end the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs by private clinics to children and young people with gender dysphoria.
The central claim, made on X (formerly known as Twitter), is that there has been a large rise in suicide by current and recent patients of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) service at the Tavistock since an earlier restriction of puberty-blocking drugs that followed a High Court decision in a case (Bell v Tavistock) in December 2020. The rise is described as a “surge” in suicides and “an explosion”, indicating a substantial and, by implication, unequivocal increase. There are multiple references to children dying in future because they are unable to access puberty-blocking drugs.
This claim is said to be based on unpublished data provided by 2 members of staff at the Tavistock, described as whistleblowers. On Twitter/X the evidence is presented in screenshots of extracts from the records of Tavistock Board meetings and other documents. These variously refer to suicides, deaths from unspecified causes and “safety incidents”. A specific claim is that there was one suicide by a patient on the GIDS waiting list in the 3 years before the High Court judgment, and 16 deaths (rather than suicides) in the 3 years after the judgment. The whistleblowers are said to have alleged a cover-up by NHSE.
These claims have been retweeted thousands of times by other campaigners and members of the public. They have been repeated by some leading journalists, though there is nothing to suggest that they have examined the evidence for themselves. They too have adopted the language of “dying children”.
Professor Appleby is not a knee-jerk, Tory-conservative, Christian nationalist who just hates gays. This is his entire field of research: children’s mental health and suicide. He currently leads the UK’s Center for Mental Health and Safety. For 10 years he served in government as the National Director for Mental Health. He’s the author of the UK’s first national strategy for suicide prevention. He is, quite literally, an expert. The adult in the room.
He’s also sympathetic. But he is a scientist first, in the nation that more than any other actually invented the scientific method. And the reality-tethered data from 2018 exposes The Lie is hollow:
In this period of 6 years the data show a total of 12 suicides: 6 in the under 18s, 6 in those 18 and above. In the 3 years leading up to 2020-21, there were 5 suicides, compared to 7 in the 3 years after. This is essentially no difference, taking account of expected fluctuations in small numbers, and would not reach statistical significance. In the under 18s specifically, there were 3 suicides before and 3 after 2020-21.
Alongside the figures, there is a summary of the problems faced by the young people who died. These include mental illness, traumatic experiences, family disruption and being in care or under children’s services.
These figures clearly do not support the main claim that suicides have risen steeply since the High Court judgment. They do not support the claim of one waiting list death before and 16 after the judgment. The information confirms the multiple factors that contribute to suicide risk in this group.
He concludes:
The Lie is based on claims that “do not meet basic standards for statistical evidence.”
The whole report is short and worth the read here.
Let the healing begin.
End.