Half of transgender and nonbinary youth said they were not using GAHT but would like to, 36% were not interested in receiving GAHT, and 14% were receiving GAHT. Parent support for their child's gender identity had a strong relationship with receipt of GAHT, with nearly 80% of those who received GAHT reporting they had at least one parent who supported their gender identity. Use of GAHT was associated with lower odds of recent depression (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = .73, p < .001) and seriously considering suicide (aOR = .74, p < .001) compared to those who wanted GAHT but did not receive it. For youth under age 18, GAHT was associated with lower odds of recent depression (aOR = .61, p < .01) and of a past-year suicide attempt (aOR = .62, p < .05).
There are no large-scale studies examining mental health among transgender and nonbinary youth who receive gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT). The purpose of this study is to examine associations among access to GAHT with depression, thoughts of suicide, and attempted suicide among a large...
www.jahonline.org
Peer-reviewed research is on the side of the good guys.
If anyone here finds me to be mentally unhinged or prone to bursts of foul temper, there is a reason why. I know that the Bad Faith Squad will call this "making excuses," but I have learned contempt for the kinds of people that have chosen to ignore personal context in their judgment of others. I am an imperfect spokesperson, but it would also be impossible for me to be a real spokesperson without also being affected, psychologically, by such a background as I have had. A transgender adult that had the wonderful privilege of having supportive parents and early gender-affirming care is the kind of transgender adult that I want there to be more of in this world, but there is a part of the experience that they also can never understand. I am hopeful that a time will come with knowledge of it is almost exclusively to be found in old stories and psychiatric literature, and people with my kind of background so utterly extinct that our stories sound like some strange science fiction dystopian story.
I am a transgender woman that grew up in a rural conservative evangelical household. I was being taken on deer-hunts and fishing trips from very nearly my infancy because of a negligent mother and a father that was too selfish to put aside his hobbies but also not heartless enough to abandon me entirely. I was put on ATVs, which I must admit are fun, and I was pushed into attending Cub Scout meetings, which it is just as well I never really fit in with because of the stories I have heard about them. I was shoved into trying out for tee-ball but really found the entire affair to be boring. I really kind of liked the fishing, but in this, I had only taken after my paternal grandmother, who was very much a cis-woman that just loved the shore life.
As I approached puberty, the fact that I was queer began to slowly start to show, and partly as a consequence of this fact, my relationship with my father, who had hoped to raise a straight cis-boy, began to pale. This was ill-timed because I was also diagnosed with a mild neurological disorder and having very bad reactions to every medication that I was ever put on for it, and one of the consequences of being put on SSRI therapy, as a child that was susceptible to its cognitive side-effects, was that it utterly derailed my middle school education, resulting in permanent damage to my ability to advance in my education. If I had had a father in my life that had cared, he might have listened to me when I said, "These medications are not working," but I was greeted with cold heartlessness by a man that had decided that my problems were of my own making and who believed that I was behaving that way in spite of that medication rather than because of it. Eventually, both of my parents came to treat me as someone that was malevolent if not outright evil. They should have taken me off of that medication the moment that I said that it was not helping me and that it only made me feel sick and caused me headaches and a sense of being overheated all of the time and frustrated and just wrong, but the empathy between us had already started to fade. They failed.
The seed of that empathy gap that made it impossible for him understand the reality of what was going on, though, was that my father--whose grandmother really had literally taught him how to shoot and then made him skin and cook his first kill--had been given no preparation for how to raise a kid that was quite obviously turning out to be queer. He was a conservative evangelical, and by no fault of his own, there was no such thing as a queer kid in his world, merely a defective straight cis-gender kid. In spite of having, unlike my mother, the indigenous capacity for being an affectionate parent, his cultural background had merely left him utterly unprepared. A part of me still clings to what kind of man he might have been if he had been taught better because I would otherwise have to suffer from the shame of being related to a man that I could never respect.
It is unfair to men like my father to mislead them with false ideas about gender and sexuality. They are not born as terrible people. They are not born as abusers or as emotionally negligent parents. They are merely raised in ignorance, and in some cases, they have had a false reality drilled into their heads by misguided religious leaders and by politicians that use minority groups as a political scapegoat for their own selfish gain.
They might not understand peer-reviewed research, but they can respect authority. They can respect the authority of an organization like the American Academy of Pediatrics. They can respect the professional judgment of a family doctor or pediatrician. They generally see doctors as strong, hard-working individuals.
It is imperative to continue getting the word out that the lives of their kids could depend on seeking the opinion of a real medical authority rather than turning to wishful thinking or pseudoscience. People's lives could depend on this.
If anyone here finds that I have some very serious personality problems, then tough titmouse. I am what my genetics and my personal background made me into. I accept the fact that I am damaged, but I hope that you will, in turn, accept that that kind of damage is preventable. It is easily preventable.
Get people in your life to understand that trying to change the fact that one of their kids is transgender will never reward them with a healthy cis-gender adult child, but instead, it will reward them with an emotionally damaged transgender adult child that picks up the phone to give them a call, a few times a year, and just can't do it, even though that person might really wish to try to pursue reconciliation. It won't work, and it will never work to try to force a transgender kid to conform. It can only cause pain.
The same is true for trying to change any kid that is queer. It just does not work. It only causes grave psychological damage.
We can fix this.
www.inverse.com
