About Suicide and Trans Kids

A letter to the editor of The New York Times

To the editors:

In “What I Heard on a Suicide Hotline for Trans Kids,” from July 2, 2025, the author writes: “The risk of attempting suicide is even higher among L.G.B.T.Q. young people because of stigma and discrimination.” On June 18, another author wrote, in “ My Daughter Was at the Center of the Supreme Court Case on Trans Care. Our Hearts Are Broken”: “I’m not being hyperbolic when I say youth without gender-affirming medical support could die by suicide.”

In fact, there is no good evidence that suicidal thoughts and attempts among LBGT youth stem from stigma and discrimination, and it is indeed hyperbolic to assert that gender-affirming care reduces their risks.

Parents of kids identifying as transgender are routinely told they have a choice: a living trans kid or a dead cis one—the implication being that they will kill themselves if they don’t transition. I’ve interviewed members of many families who were told this by doctors.

But youth gender medicine started in the early 90s in the Netherlands not because adults who transitioned had fared well, but because they hadn’t. They suffered high rates of suicide and mental health issues. Clinicians assumed that transitioning before puberty would facilitate “passing” as the opposite sex, especially among natal boys, and might lessen suicide risks later.

Yet in an almost $10 million NIH-funded study, two out of 315 affirmed, transitioned young people committed suicide. The studies that suggested gender-affirming medical interventions might reduce suicidality have been marked as “very low certainty” in many systematic evidence reviews—meaning they are at such risk of bias and faulty methodology that we cannot trust their conclusions. Meanwhile, a high percentage of trans kids suffer from concurrent mental health issues; there is no way to tell which issue could lead to suicidal ideation.

Thus, not only are these essayists' assertions untrue, but they violate guidelines created by trans advocacy groups Movement Advancement Project and GLAAD—in part because suicidality is known to be contagious.

“DON’T normalize suicide by presenting it as the logical consequence of the kinds of bullying, rejection, discrimination and exclusion that LGBT people often experience,” they write. And: “DON’T attribute a suicide death to experiences known or believed to have occurred shortly before the person died.” “DON’T talk about suicide 'epidemics.'"

Why are families of and advocates for trans kids insisting that they are at risk of suicide, when that insistence seems to increase the risk? More importantly, why are publications sharing this dangerous misinformation?

It's time to stop threatening suicide on behalf of trans kids. It can only make them feel worse.

— Lisa Selin Davis, author of a forthcoming book on the culture war over gender-affirming care and trans kids