The Liberty Daily 
(The Daily Signal)—The medical watchdog group Do No Harm published a study Thursday countering the claim that laws restricting sex-rejecting procedures, often euphemistically described as “gender-affirming care,” lead to increased suicide rates among young people with gender dysphoria.
“When we examined the widely cited claim that restricting pediatric sex-rejecting procedures will spike suicide rates, we found it rests on a mass of shoddy and dishonest research,” Ian Kingsbury, senior director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine, told the Daily Signal in a statement Thursday.
Kingsbury, a co-author of the report, accused the “transgender industrial complex” of having “weaponized these bogus studies to scare parents into letting their children undergo irreversible sterilizing procedures.”
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“Our study aims to counter the manipulative schemes of radical ideologues and shed light on the reality: States that protect children from so-called gender-affirming care do not see increased suicide rates,” he concluded.
The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ activist group behind one of the studies Do No Harm criticizes, told the Daily Signal that it “stands by all findings from the 2024 study, which remain valid and credible.” It stands by the claim that “anti-transgender” laws increase the risk of suicide among young people.
The restrictions generally prohibit minors from receiving “puberty blockers,” cross-sex hormones, or transgender-related surgeries. While pro-transgender advocates argue that these interventions are often necessary to improve mental health and prevent suicide, critics argue that there is not enough evidence of increased mental health to balance out the harms these procedures cause.
Responding to Older Studies
The Do No Harm study first addresses other research claiming to demonstrate that “anti-transgender” laws led to increased suicide attempts among young people who identify as transgender or nonbinary.
The study criticizes the Trevor Project’s paper, published in Nature Human Behavior in 2024, finding that “anti-transgender” laws caused up to a 72% increase in suicide attempts among young people identifying as transgender or nonbinary in the past year.
In May, Nature Human Behavior published a peer-reviewed critique of that Trevor Project paper. The critical paper notes that the 72% figure came from a tiny subsample in Idaho, of roughly 60 adolescents per year, responding in the years following Idaho’s 2020 bills. During the time period studied, the laws in question had not gone into effect: One was blocked by a federal court, and another had been blocked as a violation of an existing 2018 permanent injunction.
The Trevor Project defended its study by arguing that Idaho’s outsize influence makes sense for this kind of statistical analysis. The group also claimed that even though the legislation had been blocked, school sports associations began implementing the law, anyway, and that the law influenced public debate despite the injunctions.
Pro-transgender advocates often claim that sex-rejecting procedures are necessary to help the mental state of young people suffering from gender dysphoria, and that “gender-affirming care” can lead to decreased suicide risk. Yet the Do No Harm study notes that, when ACLU attorney Chase Strangio faced questions about this matter at the Supreme Court, he “carefully distinguished between completed suicides and broader measures of suicidality (i.e., ideation and attempts),” and “declined to assert that the interventions reduce completed suicide.”
The Do No Harm Study
Unlike the Trevor Project study, which examined self-reported suicide attempts among youth identifying as transgender or nonbinary, the Do No Harm study examined government mortality data on completed suicides.
Do No Harm took data from the Kaiser Family Foundation on which states implemented the laws at what times, and considered “only those policy changes that have gone into effect and focus on the date that those policies were put into effect, not when they were enacted.”
The group took suicide rates by age and state from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Do No Harm used three different models to analyze the research: the difference-in-difference model focused on each state’s trends, an adjustment on that model, and a national model. All three models yield the same result.
“We find that state adoption of bans on gender interventions for minors has no effect on suicide rates among people who are 15-19 years old,” the report states about the second model.
“The results of our national time-series model find that state adoptions of bans on gender interventions for minors have no effect on suicide rates among minors 13-17 years old,” the study adds.
“The alarmist claim that protecting children from sex-rejecting procedures increases suicide is false,” Jay Greene, director of research at Do No Harm, said in a statement on the research.
“Medical practice and policy must be grounded in evidence, not emotionally manipulative talking points,” he added. “That principle is all the more critical when it’s a matter of children’s health and well-being.”
