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In 2024, amid a wave of state legislation on transgender issues, the prestigious academic journal Nature Human Behavior (NHB) published a study titled “State-level anti-transgender laws increase past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people in the USA.” The study claimed to find that the passage of state “anti-transgender laws increased incidents of past-year suicide attempts” by as much as 72% .
Left-of-center media kicked into full gear, announcing that a study had found causal evidence that Republican-led laws are producing an epidemic of adolescent self-harm. “More trans teens attempted suicide after states passed anti-trans laws, a study shows,” blared NPR. Similar language appeared in the Washington Post , CNN , TIME , Scientific American , NBC , and The Hill , as well as in the medical news outlets Medpage Today and Psychology Today .
It is not uncommon for researchers in gender medicine to exaggerate their findings and let allied media spin the rest. But in this case, the authors of the NHB study themselves promoted a narrative of cause and effect. “In this study,” wrote lead author Wilson Lee on LinkedIn, “we presented causal evidence that enacting state-level anti-transgender legislation increased suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary young people in the US.” Co-author Ronita Nath told CNN, “We’ve long known that the associations between anti-transgender policies and negative health outcomes for LGBTQ+ young people exist, but this is the first time any study has shown this causal relationship.”
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Yet, in what has become routine in this research area, the NHB study’s findings and conclusions later crumbled under scientific reexamination. As a methodological criticism published (to its credit) in the NHB last month — over a year after the original study — shows, the observed elevation in suicide attempts came from a small sample (roughly 100 youth) in a single state (Idaho), at a time when that state’s “anti-transgender” laws were not even in effect. Further, the researchers did not properly control for confounding factors. (The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine has published its own methodological analysis , which is worth reading.)
Predictably, neither the authors nor the media outlets that trumpeted their “findings” have so far bothered to correct the record. In fact, the authors have said that the methodological criticisms “do not alter the interpretation of our findings.” NHB gave the authors of the original study a chance to respond to the criticism. As explained below, not only did their response fall short, but it also included a potentially damning admission. To judge by how these things usually go, the study will almost certainly continue to be cited as settled fact, bolstered through citation laundering in scientific journal publications.
Wilson Lee et al. will likely enter the pantheon of zombie studies that provide “evidence” for common talking points: that the practice of pediatric transition was launched based on good evidence , as asserted by de Vries et al.; that regret is less than 1%, per Bustos et al.; that “gender-affirming care” reduces suicidality by 73%, per Tordoff et al.; that hormones improve “psychosocial functioning,” per Chen et al.; and so on. That the findings from these studies have been scientifically examined and discredited (see here and here for de Vries; here and here for Bustos; here , here , and here for Tordoff; and here , here , here , and here for Chen) does not diminish their canonical status among advocates of pediatric transition.
But even by the standards of this literature, the NHB study and its shaky foundations stand out. In fact, a co-author confessed in an interview soon after the study’s release that the work had an explicit political goal. It’s worth examining the story in full.
The two main problems with the NHB study concern its data source and methodology. To begin with the first, the authors — who were (or are) all affiliated with the Trevor Project , a national advocacy group for suicide prevention among “LGBTQ+ young people” — utilized a Trevor Project survey of LGBTQ youth ages 13–24 between the years 2018 and 2022. The survey is a non-probability (non-representative) sample, and the total number of minor respondents was 35,196. Respondents were recruited through social media.
Surveys of this nature are notoriously unreliable as a basis for scientific studies on cause and effect. Consider, for example, the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS-15). The survey has served as fertile ground for gender-affirming researchers to produce studies that claim to find positive mental-health benefits from puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones…
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