The Daily Signal - The Left's Lies on Hormone Therapy Kill Children

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

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

Hey there, Daily Signal listeners, Doug Blair here with a bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast. We all know that transgender activists have pushed the narrative for years that the only way to prevent confused kids who say that they're transgender from killing themselves is to provide them with hormone therapy like puberty blockers or gender affirming, quote-unquote, surgery like mastectomies and other invasive procedures. Research by Heritage Foundation's senior research fellow, Jay Green, suggests that not only is that not true and that these hormones. do not lower the sky high suicide rate amongst these kids, but it actually might make things worse. I had the opportunity to talk to Jay Green about his research on this very important topic, and I'm very excited to share this conversation with you. Take a listen. My guest today is Jay Green, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation's Center for Education Policy. Jay, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on.

Of course. You recently released a paper titled Puberty Blockers, Cross-Sex Hormones, and Youth Suicide that seems to contradict this narrative that the left likes to push, that hormone blockers and cross-ex hormones for children leads to a decrease in suicide rates. So according to the data, it doesn't seem like that's true. Actually, it looks like the opposite is true. And if I had to explain why the opposite is occurring, is that young people are having a lot of mental health issues. There's a lot of depression and anxiety,

particularly among girls, and they're looking for solutions to these problems that they're having. And sometimes they're drawn to counterproductive solutions. In the past, that was eating disorders and cutting. 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, taking puberty blockers and cross-ex hormones, and eventually surgical transition of having double mastectomies or castration. And the mental health hazard of the transgender movement is that it's failing to address the underlying mental health problems.

So in the past when a kid would come to school and there was evidence of an eating disorder or cutting, the adults in the school would recognize this as a problem, as something bad. and they would get together and work with the parents to try to address the underlying mental health issues. And that helps save lives. But if instead of seeing kids come to school and say, I'm going to change my body pharmacologically as a problem, but as an expression of their authentic self, now what we're doing is we're having the school undermine the parents, keep it secret from the parents, not working together and not addressing the underlying mental health. issues, and that's causing those unaddressed issues to lead to higher suicides. So the data then, you collected it by looking at different states and whether or not they

had these provisions in place that allowed minors to access this type of, quote, unquote, care. What did the data show? Sure. So there's a natural policy experiment that was made possible by two things. One is that these treatments, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, were not available in the United States for treating what's called gender dysphoria before 2010. So we have a period before these things were used, and then we have a period after these things were used. And then we have another policy experiment, which is in some states, they have an extra

barrier to kids accessing these drugs relative to another state, because in some states, they have a provision that allows minors to get health care without parental consent. But in other states, they don't. And in the states where they don't have that provision, that's an extra barrier. Now, this is not the most important barrier. It's not the most important thing for helping kids or hurting or preventing kids from getting these drugs. But it's a barrier that had nothing to do with the transgender issue. It preexisted the transgender issue.

And therefore, the variation in states in whether they have this extra barrier or not is effectively random. So we have something like a randomized experiment where by chance some people find themselves in the state where it's a little bit harder and by chance some kids find themselves in a state where it's a little bit easier. And we're able to compare the suicide rates in states where it's easier versus harder 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 diverge 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. So the gist of the argument then is that the increase in availability of these drugs and the increase in the sort of social perception that these are,

acceptable things to do to children increase the rate of suicide amongst these kids. Right, because what it did is it prevented the adults from addressing underlying mental health issues, which are real. This population in general has a much higher rate of suicide because they're struggling with lots of other issues. And what we need are adults to work together to help those kids address those issues in positive ways and taking drugs and undergoing surgeries are not positive ways of addressing these underlying mental health issues.

One of the top lines in your piece or in your paper is that studies finding that gender affirming interventions prevent suicide fail to show a causal relationship and have been poorly executed. That seems like it's a pretty damning indictment of this research. Is it just shoddy research or is there a political motivation as to maybe why this research is showing what it does? It's probably both. I mean, look, even if people are not persuaded by the new research I've done, they should at least walk away with a very clear picture that the existing evidence to support President Biden's claim and the claim of trans activists that these drugs are necessary for saving lives, that they're protective against suicide.

That claim has no empirical support. The type of empirical support we would normally expect for this kind of medical claim would be a randomized experiment. The kind that's actually required by the FDA for initial approval of all drugs, where by chance some people get the drug, by chance some people don't. We observe whether they have different outcomes over time, and that's how we know with confidence that drugs are helpful or hurtful. No such study exists on the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria. It's never been studied in this rigorous way. And so there's no basis for the strong causal claim that the Biden administration and trans activists make about how these drugs must be widely and readily available to save lives. That's complete bunk.

There are studies that claim to support this view, but they're badly done studies. They're not randomized studies. What they do is they give surveys to a convenient sample of adults who have. identify as transgender. By convenience sample, I mean it's not a representative sample of everyone who suffers from gender issues, but instead it's people that they recruited from trans-activist groups. So there's one problem there, which is unhappy customers. People with negative experiences are very unlikely to be represented in this survey, and therefore the results are biased in a very predictable way. But a more serious problem with this existing research is that all they

do is ask people to reflect on when they were young, did they seek these drugs when they were teenagers, and did they get these drugs, and then they ask them about their mental health currently? And the problem with this comparison of comparing those who sought and got drugs versus those who sought but did not get drugs is that one of the reasons people might not get drugs is if they weren't psychologically stable enough at the time. So one of the criteria for prescribing these drugs is that. people are supposed to be psychologically stable when they receive them.

So if you compare people who received the drugs to those who could not get them because they were not psychologically stable, it would be unsurprising to find that that control group was also psychologically unstable later in their lives. And so it tells us nothing about the effect of the drugs. It simply tells us about the condition of their mental health when they were teenagers and initially sought those drugs. So it's very, very shoddy research in a number of ways and certainly fall short of the rigorous evidence that the FDA normally would demand for initial approval of these kinds of drugs. So speaking of trans activists and people that are maybe critical of this type of research, you have received some criticism for this paper. Jack Turbin, who is a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, was critical of your paper,

and he claimed that children shouldn't have access to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones without parental consent. Therefore, certain parts of your paper are irrelevant. What do you respond to that? Right. So that's a particularly odd objection for him to raise because the way I know that it's possible for minors to get these drugs without parental consent is actually from Turbin's own research. So Jack Turbin, you know, he has a very recent. respectable looking position. He has a Harvard degree, and he is a professor currently at Stanford Medical School, although I think he's moving to University of San Francisco. But he's also, you know, if you look at his social media activity, he is really over the top activist. Of course, people might accuse me of the same. And being an activist doesn't mean that everything you say is disqualified. It just means everything. Everyone should understand who he is.

And so he is the author of two of the three studies that are very shoddy that claim that these drugs are protective against suicide. And so he did these surveys of transgender adults. And in that survey, they asked them, do you have support from your family? and they all included in that is, does your family even know that you identify as transgender? And in that survey, a fifth of the transgender adults say they did not have support from their family, do not have support from their family. And about 4% say that their family doesn't even know, okay? Which means that when they were teenagers, if 4% of the kids, of the kids, of the, you know, they're, you know. the adults who got drugs when they were teenagers, if their family doesn't even know, then they

had to have gotten it without parental consent. And if a fifth of these transgender adults got the drugs but don't have support from their families, then it's possible that as many as 20% of young people who get these drugs are doing so without parental consent. So we don't know the exact number, but it could be as many as a fifth of all kids who are getting puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones as teenagers who are doing so without parental consent. So the argument then that, you know, it's weird to focus on this thing because it doesn't happen is disproven by his own research, which indicates it is happening. Yeah, it happens.

I mean, it's not normally parents are consenting, but it also is not uncommon for kids get these drugs without parental consent. And even when parents are consenting, we have to keep in mind the level of coercion that's involved here. So the parents are not the villains in this story. They're victims also. And they're victims of this suicide blackmail. The blackmail is if you don't say yes and agree to have your kids get these drugs, they're going to kill themselves. And one of the only ways you could get parents to overcome their natural objection to chemical castration, for their children is if they think the alternative is death.

And parents, you know, will reconcile themselves to a lot of things that they find objectionable if they think it's necessary to save their kids' lives. And they're being told by all of the officials at school, all of the medical professionals, they're being told they must do this or their kids will die. And that is both false and emotionally manipulative. And that's why I think this work that we just came out with, is so important is that we need parents to be able to make these decisions without coercion. They know their children best, and they need to be working with their children to come up with

positive solutions for the mental health issues that their children are having. Another journalist named Jesse Singall had some criticism about the methodology of how you determined the number of increased suicides related to states. Apparently, there's some flaw in this? I guess can you explain maybe what? Sure, sure. So this is slightly complicated, but his objection is that this barrier to accessing drugs is not the most important barrier that included in the states where it would be

easier to access puberty blockers across sex hormones would be states like Texas or Utah. And in states where it would be harder to access in our analysis. would include states like New York or Connecticut. And he says, well, this is just ridiculous to say it's easy to get it in Texas but hard to get it in New York. But that's not really the analysis that I'm doing. The analysis is not where is it overall easier or harder. The analysis is where is there a barrier that's present or not present that is effectively random,

that is unrelated to other characteristics of the state? So the reason why that's so important is that we're trying to isolate the causal effects of accessing these drugs. So in states where they have a lot of gender clinics and they're handing out a lot of prescriptions, those states are different in lots of other ways that may be related to the mental health outcomes of the young people in that state. The nice thing about the barrier that I'm focusing on in my study, which is the ability of minors to access health care without parental consent, is that it's not related directly to the gender issue, that it predates the gender issue, and that, in fact, you see it kind of evenly represented in blue and red states,

and it's geographically distributed all across the country. In other words, it's effectively random, and that's what makes it a better comparison. And I think, you know, the problem is single is, you know, a very good science journalist, but he is not a scientist, and he's never conducted research, and he doesn't really understand the importance of coming up with a research design that isolates causal effects.

Having addressed those criticisms, what does this mean then for how lawmakers should legislate these types of issues and how they should approach laws regarding children taking these drugs? Look, I already see a lot of positive steps being taken. So some of the policy solutions that are being considered include things like raising minimum age requirements. This is already being done in a number of European countries where. they started prescribing these drugs earlier.

While these drugs were not available in the United States for this use before 2010, they were being pioneered in the Netherlands in 1990, and they were adopted relatively early in the UK and in Sweden. In all of those countries, they've recognized that this has not gone well. And they're beginning to walk back from embracing the widespread availability of these drugs. and they're raising the minimum age to 16 or 18. And that's something that's being considered here in the United States, too, is raising the minimum age so that minors are not having these irreversible decisions made that they can't consent to, that adults have to consent to or someone is doing it on their behalf. Other measures include things like tightening eligibility requirements so that we make sure that

we're addressing underlying mental health issues better. And then importantly, addressing the social transition that precedes the pharmacological transition. So before kids get to the point where they seek out puberty blockers and cross-ex hormones, they generally go through a social transition where they show up at school and they say that they have a different name. They ask for the school records to reflect a change in their sex. They change about bathrooms and sports teams and dorm rooms they stay in and so on. And all of that is being facilitated by adults in schools, often with policies that require it to be kept secret from parents.

There are parent Bill of Rights being considered all across the country and in the U.S. Congress that would, prohibit schools from pursuing social transition with children without the parents even knowing about it. That's really unacceptable. Parents have the primary responsibility for the education and health care of their children and no decisions should be made by school officials in secret from parents, you know, absent obvious cases of their exceptions for abuse and neglect, but we're not talking about that here. We're talking about parents being cut out of really key decisions about their

child's life, and there's legislation that could address that. Sure. As we wrap up here, I think we were briefly talking before we got on the mic, and we were talking about how possibly this fever is starting to break. The average American is maybe starting to get sick and tired of this as well. What do you want Americans to take from this paper, and do you think that that will sort of help with getting the fever to finally go away? Yeah, I mean, 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. 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.

And I think if they're not coerced by authorities in various ways, that they're more likely to make much better decisions for their children. And I think that's beginning to happen. And I think that people are not being bullied by these suicide claims as effectively. And once people feel free to start questioning this claim, and I think the study helps do that, the fever does break. And it is a fever that requires constant resupply because the initial recruitment into transgender movement is often young girls recruiting other girls online. And it needs a fresh supply of new recruits all the time to recruit further people.

And once that begins to slow, the whole thing begins to unravel. I'm getting a sense that it is starting to unravel, and we're starting to see things turn in a very positive direction. In 10 years, we're going to have other problems, but I don't think we're going to have this kind of problem in 10 years. That's good. I mean, it sounds like the pyramid scheme from hell is sort of going away. I think that's very much right.

All right. Well, that was Jay Green, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation's Center for Education Policy. Jay, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. And that'll do it for this bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast. If you enjoyed it, please make sure to subscribe on your podcast listening app of choice. That's Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, IHeartRadio, wherever.

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