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Trans activists have long insisted that medicalizing gender-confused youth is settled science that saves lives. That claim is collapsing — and the data doing the collapsing is impossible to dismiss.
A major new study from Finland published in the academic journal Acta Paediatrica is extending the conclusions of the United Kingdom’s landmark 2024 Cass Review, which found that transgender medicine is an area of remarkably weak evidence with no good data on long-term outcomes. The Finnish researchers set out to provide that evidence — but what they found demolishes the foundational assumptions of transgender ideology.
Finland’s government-run medical system maintains detailed psychiatric and medical records on every citizen dating back to 1994. The study analyzed every patient under twenty-three who attended Finnish gender identity clinics from 1996 to 2019 — the entire national population of gender clinic patients for over two decades — and compared them against a matched control group. This is not a self-selected sample. This is comprehensive, population-wide data of the kind that rarely exists in medical research.
The findings are stark. Adolescents who were gender-affirmed showed significantly higher psychiatric illness than the control group, and that illness increased substantially in follow-up. Among those who underwent gender transition procedures, psychiatric illness rose from roughly ten percent to over sixty percent in one group, and from twenty-two percent to fifty-five percent in another. The researchers themselves stated plainly that this does not support the claim that gender transition improves mental health.
The same Finnish research team reported two years ago in the British Medical Journal that medical gender reassignment has no measurable impact on suicide risk. The Cass Review reached the identical conclusion — deaths by suicide in transgender patients remain above the national average regardless of whether they received gender-affirming treatment.
Let’s be clear about what this means. The entire justification for putting children on hormones and performing irreversible surgeries rests on two claims — that it improves mental health and that it prevents suicide. The best available evidence now says it does neither.
These are not the conclusions of political activists. They are the findings of honest researchers working from rigorous, population-wide data.
The science was never settled. It was manufactured. And it is now coming apart. Stay informed and engaged on all the latest at PhyllisSchlafly.com, and join us again for the Phyllis Schlafly Report.
