J. Edward Les: False suicide narratives harm gender-confused youth and their families

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Of all the distressing aspects — and there are many — to the ongoing debate around “gender affirming care,” surely the most deplorable has been the weaponization of suicidality.

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“Would you rather have a live son or a dead girl?” parents of gender-confused youth are asked by transition advocates and gender clinic doctors, as if standing in the way of gender “transition” dramatically increases the risk of suicide.

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The truth is, as a Finnish study of more than 2,000 young people concluded, there is zero evidence of increased suicidality in gender-conflicted youth once one corrects for psychiatric co-morbidities (like depression, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, PTSD, and so on).

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Not that those who are critical of the gender-affirming care model are guiltless; they too have overhyped the risk of suicide, claiming incorrectly that gender transition has been shown to increase suicide.

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What we do know with reasonable certainty is that the risk of completed suicide in transitioned and gender-dysphoric youth, while significantly higher than the general age-matched population, fortunately remains overall quite low. But that doesn’t make it any more acceptable to falsely claim increased risk of suicidality among such patients, given what we know about suicidal contagion, which is more common among teens than other age groups.

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Suicidal contagion is a well-recognized phenomenon. One of the earliest recorded clusters occurred way back in 1774, following publication of Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel “The Sorrows of Young Werther;” about 40 young people, mimicking the book’s main character, committed suicide.

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Closer to the present and closer to home, in 2026 five young people in the Woodstock, Ontario, region took their lives; at least 36 others had expressed suicidal thoughts or attempted to do the same. And if you’ve watched the documentary, “The Edge of Success,” you’re familiar with the two suicide clusters that claimed the lives of nine Gunn High School students in Palo Alto, California, in 2009 and 2014. Other such tragic occurrences are well documented.

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Plant in the mind of a mentally-suffering teenager the notion that suicide is an acceptable off-ramp from distress, and the chance that he or she will consider — or attempt — suicide rises dramatically.

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That’s why suicide prevention experts warn that the topic of suicide amongst teens should be approached with abundant caution, to avoid fostering suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and deaths by suicide. That’s why media are coached to behave responsibly in their reporting of suicides.

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And that’s why it is so dismaying to witness ideologues seizing upon suicidality as ammunition to advance their agenda.

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Case in point: In 2024 the journal Nature Human Behavior published a study claiming a dramatic rise in suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary youth following passage of state “anti-transgender” laws in the U.S.