BURSTTrans-identifying people continue to have mental health issues even after transgender medical treatment, a new study out of Finland shows.
Despite what advocates claim, many people who undergo transgender medical treatment continue to need significant psychiatric treatment afterwards, according to the peer-reviewed study conducted by three Finnish researchers.
The study appeared last month in the journal European Psychiatry, which is published by Cambridge University Press.
The researchers looked at 3,665 people who contacted Finland’s gender identity services between 1996 to 2019.
“Both before and after contacting [gender identity services], they present with many more common psychiatric needs than do their matched population controls, even when medical [gender reassignment] interventions are carried out,” the study said.
Patients are coming in for transgender medical treatment at “ever younger ages and with more psychiatric needs,” the study said, and their psychiatric needs persist regardless of treatment. Adolescents and girls in particular are seeking out the treatments more often, the study noted.
The researchers also noticed a “marked increase” in the gender dysphoric group’s psychiatric needs over time.
The most common psychiatric problem was severe mood disorders, which were more prevalent in the gender dysphoric group than the control group. The second most common problem was anxiety disorders, which were about the same for both groups.
Autism was also more common among the gender dysphoric group.
The study also found that people seeking transgender treatments now tend to have more psychiatric issues than the people who sought out treatment in the ’90s and early 2000s.
One of the study’s authors is Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, who helped pioneer transgender hormone treatments for children in Europe but now sounds the alarm on medicalizing gender-distressed children.
Back in 2011, Kaltiala was put in charge of the youth gender clinic at Finland’s Tampere University Hospital, and she had concerns from the start.
“We were being told to intervene in healthy, functioning bodies simply on the basis of a young person’s shifting feelings about gender,” Kaltiala said last month. “The young people we were treating were not thriving. Instead, their lives were deteriorating.”
Kaltiala also sounded the alarm on American medicine pushing the “affirming” model of transgender services for children.
Hundreds of teen girls in the U.S., some as young as 12, have gotten elective, gender-related double mastectomies to remove their healthy breasts over the last few years.
Meanwhile, gender identity changes are more popular than ever among children. An estimated 300,000 minors aged 13 to 17 identified as transgender as of last year.