It was never the “wrong body”

Cultural leftists have a way of inventing radical new social revolutions and enlisting their media friends to relentlessly assure us their ideas are improving human well-being. Yet, years down the road, experience and careful research prove just the opposite.

It happened with the separation of sex from marriage in the sexual revolution. What happened? Sociologists and economists told us it resulted in men no longer stepping up to marry the mother of their children and thus, “the feminization of poverty” arrived as a problem.

The cohabitation revolution was supposed to empower women, strengthen love, and lead to stronger road-tested marriages. It failed miserably at each of these and by every other measure.

We were promised the divorce revolution would lead to happier new marriages and thus more self-actualized parents raising thriving, well-adjusted children. No one fully anticipated what a disaster it actually became.

We are now living through the dawn of the same-sex marriage/family redefinition revolution, yet scholars are afraid to report on the fruit of this experiment because of the witch hunt that infamously came after UT- Austin sociologist Mark Regnerus when he published his dire findings in 2012.

Sometimes people are just born into the wrong body, and if we help them change that body to match their true gender identity, all will be well. That has been the gender medicalizing narrative, and trans activists have infamously claimed the matter is “settled science.”

It is far from settled. In fact, the best data indicate that this claim has no foundation at all. The highly respected Cass Review, commissioned by the British government and published in 2024, explained upfront that “the reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”

This is now changing, however. A new Finnish study published in the journal Acta Paediatrica is shedding light on teens and young adults being treated by gender clinics. The news is not good for the pro-trans thesis.

First, this study comes from a reputable four-member team of scholars working from a large nationally representative sample spanning three decades, buttressed by a large comparable control group and consistently reliable patient follow-up data—which nearly all other studies on the topic have lacked.

Adolescents and young adults seeking medical transitions are not otherwise healthy patients simply seeking alignment for mismatched bodies. These scholars state their conclusion honestly: “Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals.” This surge was “a tenfold increase” of those seeking gender medicalization in the 2011-2019 cohort over the 1996-2010 group. Of course, many nations witnessed this contagion increase across the last decade or so.

But the Finnish study found the proportion of gender dysphoric patients requiring “specialist-level psychiatric treatment” before seeking gender medicalization was multiple times higher than the control group and it doubled from the first to the second cohort. Essentially, the gender confused patients got worse as they received more clinical attention.

This fact is further documented in the study’s robust follow-up data. These scholars report, “Gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls both before (45.7% vs.15.0%) and ≥ 2 years after referral (61.7% vs. 14.6%).”

Serious psychiatric problems for gender troubled youth were more than twice that of the control group. And while that percentage shrunk for the control group at 2-plus year follow-up visits, as one would expect with regular therapy, it increased substantially from 46% to 62% for those receiving ongoing gender-related treatment.

The study notes as well, “Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminizing gender re-assignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinizing gender reassignment.” [emphasis added] They add, “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” (emphasis added).

These surprising findings led the scholars to bluntly confess, “This does not support the suggested improvement in mental health after medical GR [gender reassignment] initiated during developmental years, and in light of the present findings, severe psychiatric disorders do not appear primarily attributable to GD [gender dysphoria].”

Thus, this research supports previous conclusions that those struggling with gender confusion also suffer with other parallel psychological comorbidities. A study on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) published this year in the journal Trauma, Violence & Abuse adds to this finding, explaining that “LGBTQ+ populations experience a disproportionately high prevalence of ACEs, accompanied by adverse mental and behavioral health outcomes.” What is more, the “prevalence of [four or more] ACEs was slightly higher in gender-diverse than sexually diverse individuals.” 

The research team authoring this new Finnish study, working from the same stellar population sample, also reported in a 2024 British Medical Journal article that “medical gender reassignment does not have an impact on suicide risk.” This finding led Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a longtime leading expert in the field of youth gender, to tell Gender Clinic News, “It is now time to bury the ‘trans kid or dead kid’ trope.” The Cass Review comes to the same conclusion, “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 this.”

The lies of the sex and gender revolutionaries will continue to be exposed thanks to careful, honest researchers. We can hope that the weight of these findings will soon be enough to protect our children and their peers from these destructive lies.