Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Last week, a study out of Finland further challenged the myth that the sciences settled on so-called gender affirming care. I asked Lynn Stanton, a focus on the family, why this particular study is so significant. Here's Dr.
Glenn Stanton. Transactivists loudly claim that medicalizing gender-confused youth is subtle science and it saves lives. This is meant to shut down any debate or doubt on this critically important topic. Thankfully, a few important scholars, undeterred, are asking important questions and demonstrating just how false trans activist claims really are. An impressive new finish study just published in the Swedish academic journal Acta Pediatrica is extending the damning conclusion of the UK's 2024 CAS review.
The Cass Review was headed by an eminently distinguished British pediatrician named Hilary Cass, who has served as President of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, and she also chaired the British Academy of Childhood Disability. Regarding the so-called subtle science on transmedicalization, the CAS review was unequivocal in concluding, quote, this is an area of remarkably weak evidence, end quote, and that, quote, reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress, end quote. The new finish study changes all of this. Its findings on long term outcomes based on extremely strong data sets do not bode well for transactivist cocksure claims. Finland's socialized medical system has an extremely rigorous tracking system containing detailed medical and psychiatric records on all citizens dating back to 1994.
Drawing from this, the study conducted a register-based analysis of all people under age 23 attending Finnish gender identity clinics from 1996 to 2019 and compared them with a matched control group. This means that their study population is uniquely comprehensive, nationally representative, and lost no study subjects, which seriously plagues all self-selected study populations. The Finnish school system also regularly screens students for mental health disorders. The study consists of two timeframes, 1996 to 2010 and 2011 to 2019, the time when these numbers of gender-confused kids started exploding across so many different countries, likely from social contagion.
So what did this unique Finnish study find? This four-member research team attached to Finland's leading medical research institutions is very direct in their conclusions. They say, quote, gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than the control groups, and severe psychiatric morbidity increased substantially in the later year clinical follow-ups. This means they were getting worse. Those who sought gender services in the second larger cohort had greater psychiatric needs than the earlier cohorts.
In fact, these medical researchers state, among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during the follow-up. rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminizing gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculizing gender reassignment. They add, quote, after adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls. These findings directly challenge the assumption that gender transition is a natural harmless occurrence and that taking sex-rejecting hormones and cutting off healthy body parts benefits patients. These scholars bluntly confess, quote, this does not support the suggested improvement in mental health after gender reassignment initiated during the developmental years.
And in light of the present findings, severe psychiatric disorders do not appear attributable to gender dysphoria, end quote. Thus, this research supports previous conclusions that those struggling with gender confusion suffer from other serious parallel psychological comorbidities. A group of Austrian scholars explained in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2025 that, quote, gender dysphoric adolescents presenting to specialized gender identity services experience varying degrees of co-occurring mental health problems, end quote. They note that 71% of such patients suffer from moderate to high distress psychopathology, while only 29% suffer at low distress levels. Most of these patients, 77% of them, enjoyed high levels of social support in the midst of their struggle, belying another tired line of the gay trans rhetoric.
This finished study confirms that gender-confused patients are not otherwise healthy people who are just simply born in the wrong body and if we give them what they say they need, all will be well. Doing so actually appears to be making things worse. Finally, it's worth noting that this Finnish research team working from the same stellar population sample also reported two years ago in the British Medical Journal that the main predictors of mortality in this population is psychiatric morbidity and that medical reassignment does not have an impact on suicide risk. The CAS review came to the same conclusion. saying, quote, tragically, deaths by suicide in trans people of all ages continue to be above the national average, but there is no evidence that gender affirmative treatments reduce suicide risk, end quote.
The manipulative claims of trans activists continue to crumble thanks to the carefully done science by honest researchers. Thanks, Glenn. Dr. Glenn Stanton is the Director of Global Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family for the Coulson Center. This is Breakpoint.
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