About this episode
For years, transgender activists have pushed a narrative that the only way to prevent confused kids who say they're transgender from killing themselves is to provide them with hormone therapy such as puberty blockers. Parents, scared into submission by politically motivated activists and doctors, then agree to pump their children full of dangerous hormones that render them permanently sterile. The activists tell the parents that this is the only way to save their child's life. New research by Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Jay Greene, however, suggests that not only do these hormones not lower the sky-high suicide rate among so-called transgender kids, they make things worse. (The Daily Signal is Heritage's multimedia news organization.) "There's a lot of depression and anxiety, particularly among girls. And they're looking for solutions to these problems that they're having," Greene says. "Today it's body transformation in a different way through transgender ideology, which then involves not just social transition of changing names and pronouns, but eventually pharmacological transition [by] taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and eventually surgical transition of having double mastectomies or castration." Greene, who is part of Heritage's Center for Education Policy, continues: We're able to compare the suicide rates in states where it's easier versus harder [to get hormone therapy] both before and after 2010. And what we see is that before 2010 there's no difference between the states, just like we would expect. After 2010, the suicide rates diverged, so that in the states where it's a little bit easier for the kids to get them, there's a ramp-up in the suicide rate and it spikes up in 2015. So that by 2020, we see an extra 1.6 suicides among young people per 100,000, which is a 14% increase in the suicide rate. To Greene, the best cure for this transgender moment is for parents to reclaim responsibility over their kids. "I think removing the coercion is the most important thing, which is don't believe that you have to do things or your kid is going to die," he says. "Parents need to be skeptical of what experts tell them. And ultimately, remember that they're responsible for raising their own children, and they know best for their own children." Greene joins this bonus episode of "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss his research and how society can fight to protect children from gender ideologues. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices