I mean there's a lot of stuff like that. And I think it's at the very least plausible that we check and find, hey, just independent of anything else, that "trans" amplifies each of those categories - that a trans person with any other given set of risk factors gets more risk from being trans. Could be, and even seems likely.
But the big part after that for me is knowing if the proposed treatments (puberty blockers, social transition, surgical transition, hormonal transition) help improve suicide rates. It's important because that's why they are pushing the "50% suicide rate" narrative in the first place - it's an important and powerful rhetoric tool.
If it's true that these treatments actually reduce suicides, they have a strong moral positioning to argue from in terms of saying things like "parents who don't let their kids transition are doing a form of child abuse, and the decision should be taken out of their hands". Right now they *can't say this based on data*, but they do anyway, hoping nobody notices the difference between self-reported ideation at the group level and actual suicide rates.
It is likely that we can use sexual preferences to help diagnose the problem, and that most people with gender dysphoria just cannot "chill" with their femininity or inceldom. This explains why the incel-to-trans pipeline exists for sexually liberal areas, but not areas of conservative areas where asexuality is tolerated. The same phenomena can be seen when "neurodivergence" is promoted and misdiagnosed in affluent areas but severely underdiagnosed in resource-deprived areas. https://aella.substack.com/p/women-prefer-more-violent-porn-and/comment/11966339https://archive.ph/I6aARhttps://archive.ph/xgM28
I can't however fathom why sexually fundamentalism are paradoxically controlled by winners of sexual liberals, and in the same vein as the hyper-conservatives in working class areas are royally intolerant of those with psychological needs ala boomer "get a job" memes, and in both cases Andrew Tate and its kind of mercantile expat-rich fits the bill.
I do bet that the trans suicide rates are high, because male suicide rates are high as well, but that surgery is merely a "drink tea-ism" (redirecting efforts and not problem-solving) when put in the context of cultural pressure and economic involution. Surplus men are often causes of social instability as per Peter Turchin's social model, and war is have said to have a Malthusian effect of reducing economic stress and selecting for "better men". My hypothesis is that euthanasia and castration is used to displace active social unrest, but Chinese history would suggest otherwise. https://normielisation.substack.com/p/drink-tea-ismhttps://www.jstor.org/stable/3092100https://archive.ph/z5Tqphttps://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/of-eunuchs-and-wannabes/comment/9245191
TL;DR This explains why in online communities, transgender movements and militarist genocide fetishism tends to be from similar demographics even when their political opinions diverge. Other than the meme explanation of lack of discipline and paternal supervision vs lack of forgiveness and maternal love, it can be seen as exhibitionism vs self-denial. The opposing side of canon fodder as loyalist martyrdom, is castration or human sacrifice as internalized scapegoat mechanisms. Freedom of collaborative self-expression is removed in favor of codified hyper-"masculinity" and trans-ideology. https://archive.ph/HIFuRhttps://archive.ph/JtuYNhttps://eggreport.substack.com/p/the-political-question
There is also a moral case against it, just like how increased health testing leads to false positives, if some of the kids are in fact part of the "low risk" category then any treatment is considered ineffective. The "real" trans rate according to Jordan Peterson is ~10%, but very few of them leads to serious issues. The weirdness in the trans community though is that it is ~1% of the general population, which more closely mirrors the rate of Cluster B behavior (anti-social behavior), and are less likely to be of androgynous temperament as the target audience of help. It is better to standardize the tests for GNC (gender non-conformity) such that Cluster B and political pressure is removed from the equation.
I remember reading Turban et al, 2020 and seeing that they recommend a treatment that there study shows a 90% probability that it increases the thing they are trying to prevent(suicide). And it may have even reached 95% if a multivalent analysis was run. That was one of the biggest abuse of hypothesis testing and 0.05 P values I have seen.
Transitioning does not seem to reduce suicide rates. This guy https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/on-transgenderism/ looked and a bunch of studies, I think all that he could find. If anything medical transitioning or socially transitioning increased the odds of suicide. Even if people report feeling better after transitioning.
I want to be really careful in how I say this, because I don't think the individual's data work is bad from what I can tell, but he's making what I consider to be a pretty big mistake in this space by talking about "suicide rates" without specifying that he's talking about "reported rates of attempted suicide or ideation that may or may not have led to suicides".
That doesn't mean this article is bad, but it means any statements he makes that imply that suicide rates might go up as a result of treatment have to be treated in the same way as people that say they might go down, i.e. with extreme doubt because we don't know what those rates even are, or if they are positively or negatively correlated with "successful" suicide.
I definitely think his article could be clearer. When I looked over it reported rates of attempted suicide or idealization will be used as a proxy for suicide rates, seamed like it was meant to be implied. Or so "suicide rates" was used in a theoretical hypothesis forming way as well as to actual suicide rates where the data existed.
I understand the focus on actual "successful" suicides, but isn't the level of misery necessary to attempt or seriously consider suicide an important consideration too? There is a world where trans suicide is no higher than the general population but the level of misery deserves intervention.
For example, the article explains the well understood phenomenon of suicidal ideation being higher in women but actual suicide being higher in men. Consider this study that concludes women are unhappier on average then men:
This ends up being a mixed bag for me. So, for context, that study you linked measures the unhappiness of people by asking questions, which is not wrong (it's the best option we have, sometimes!) but it's also subject to the same kind of problems asking people how suicidal they are has.
So if we recognize that men and women often communicate differently (and we usually do) this gets pretty fraught for me pretty quick. If the "are you suicidal" happiness indicator is off by so much between the combinations of young/women and old/men, how off are other happiness indicators?
I actually think it's really important that people are able to do things that make them happy and that preventable unhappiness is something we should take into account. And I also don't think whatever is happening here is "lying", really. I'm just uncertain how to read these numbers - it's POSSIBLE trans people are orders of a magnitude unhappier than 75 year old men, but it's also possible they and old men have very different opinions on how much you should reveal on surveys, and I'm not sure which is which.
I totally agree with your points about issues with survey based respsonses, a big chunk of all those lists of common fallacies and biases you can find are about the problems you describe. My only point was suicide is not the only measure of whether society should intervene\help, suffering\misery also is (as difficult as that is to measure).
And the causal arrow may not go the way these studies assume - young people may be deciding they are transgender *because* they are suicidal (i.e., they loathe themselves and their bodies). So the fact that some unexpectedly high number of them have suicidal ideation may have much more to do with the reasons they think they are trans and much less to do with availability of treatment, etc.
I note there might be a definitional issue in what exactly "trans" means. Reading the first part of the article I was getting the impression that a person was called trans if they wanted to change their apparent gender, not after they had done so. That makes sense if you are looking at things like "do trans people commit suicide more if they are denied access to surgery or puberty blockers, etc.?" Then we get to the Dutch study (and others) and it seems to switch back to people being trans after they actually get the surgery or whatever to transition. Particularly with the suicide rates being ~5x higher for transwomen (former men) than transmen; people with XY chromosomes commit suicide about 5 times more frequently than people with XX, so that lines up in a nice way.
One reason this definitional variance is important is that if people who undergo actual surgery or other treatments to transition are committing suicide more the proximate cause is the transmission process itself. Maybe it goes badly, maybe it doesn't improve their life as much as they had hoped and decide they've tried everything and give up, who knows. Plus you have the issue that people who go through all the hassle of transitioning are disproportionally possessed of personality types/issues that lead to suicide.
If the definition of trans is "Would like to have different apparent gender than what they were born with" then treatment, if it lowers suicide rates (big if, apparently) becomes desirable, although one must also check that being trans doesn't have a high correlation with other mental issues that lead to suicide. E.g. a kid is a misfit at school and really depressed, and latches on to gender dysphoria as the cause and solution, not the other way around. Surveys seem really bad at sorting that sort of question out.
The cynical, or maybe realistic, side of me think that the confusion around the definitional meaning of trans is not accidental, as at best the traditional, post-transition definition with high suicide rates suggests pretty strongly that mental illness at least goes hand in hand with being trans. Being trans before getting any treatments to transition suggests the suicide rate is due to cis oppression, which is always more appealing to certain sets. It is SUPER appealing if you run a company selling puberty blockers, or a clinic or doctor performing treatments or therapy, I suspect.
To what you'd generally think of as the "pro trans" side of the fence, trans is something you are *born into*. There's a slight differentiation in the use of "transgender" (which is a fundamental, inborn state of being in that system) and transsexual (which has fallen out of favor, but implies surgery/transition).
I think at least for Cauwenberg and Biggs, that's what we are talking about - people who found their way to the clinic and are "trans" regardless of what stage of transition they find themselves in.
But you are right that it is tricky - the DSM-5 defines transgender in a way that essentially lets them say "transgenderism is never, ever a disorder that causes problems, it's just a perfectly fine way to be. Unless it causes problems, but then it's gender dysphoria and completely different." So it does end up being really tricky to disambiguate.
That makes sense, and suggests to me that the definitional confusion is going to cause huge messes using data without super carefully checking how exactly the researchers defined things. With the terms evolving very quickly, and there not being a long term agreed upon term of distinction between "gender doesn't match my body" and "got surgery to make my body match my gender" (other than pre/post-op, but I don't think that flies in polite society) we are not going to be able to assume that any given phrase means the same thing between papers. Possibly even the same author will change terminology between papers, and we are going to have to hope they remember to specify what they mean.
Ideation correlates with attempts but suicides are the product of Attempt X Method Success Rate. Because Method Success Rate varies widely, and because different ages and genders vary widely in their choice of method, we see a weak correlation between ideation -> suicide and attempt -> suicide when looking at demographic breakdowns. Some studies attempt to get around this issue by combining suicides and hospitalizations from attempts into a single metric.
I'd like to see good breakdowns of the data showing this. Pre-seeing it, I'm leery of it. In the US women use guns in ~35% of their attempts in the younger age groups, if I remember right, and men about 50%. Women report making more attempts, so that should even up those numbers a bit, but then if we check men commit suicide about five times more. Old men use guns I think about twice as often as young women (75% of the time?), report attempted suicides basically never, but have a suicide rate something like 7x what young women do.
I'm not saying this doesn't explain *some* of it, but at first blush it doesn't even seem possible for it to explain most of it.
Relatedly, I am kind of curious how many attempts turn out to be accidental near deaths that then get translated into suicide attempt after the fact for some reason. Like if you didn't know not to take pain killers and alcohol together, whoops, almost die, then when people suggest "Did you try to kill yourself because you are unhappy? We can help you." answer "well, I didn't slam a bunch of pain killers and vodka because I was having a good day at work, so sure, what the hell."
It probably doesn't account for much variation, but there are so many bad habits people turn to when their life sucks that have a tendency to almost kill them that it seems like it would be non-zero.
Another example, a friend of mine in college pulled a Carradine, but his family was pretty seriously Catholic, so they officially claimed it was something neither suicide or otherwise embarrassing. If they hadn't worried about the mortal sin aspect, would they have called it a suicide instead of auto-erotic asphyxiation? I dunno, but I could see it happening.
I dunno, it is pretty far down my "List of Questions to Ask God", but I would be curious to find out how many incidents of "Almost killed myself by accident doing something dumb" are turned into "Uhm... Cry for help?" when the victim has to explain what happened, and how that varies by age and gender, etc.
By the same token, I wonder how many people somewhat spontaneously try and kill themselves on a whim, e.g. by driving their car off the road into a tree or something, then when asked what happened just reply "It was an accident" instead of "Well, for a moment despair overtook me and it seemed like the thing to do." Or they are successful, and it is recorded as just another traffic accident.
My dad used to tell a story in which he was a young man who had recently purchased his first house. There was a small pad of concrete in the front yard on which the mailbox post had once been mounted, but was now just (to him) an eyesore.
At the time, the closest he had to an appropriate tool for breaking up a concrete block was a drywall hammer. For reference, a drywall hammer is a relatively lightweight hammer that, among other interesting design features, has a hatchet-like blade on the non-poundy end.
Knowing that the tool probably wouldn't be heavy enough to break the concrete, he said he hit it as hard as he could, every ounce of strength in the blow and all that. The hammer bounced off the concrete and the hatchet caught him in the middle of the forehead.
According to him, he had just enough time as the hammer rebounded and hit him to think something like "Shit, they are going to think my wife murdered me with a hatchet" before it hit. He didn't die or anything, but your thing made me think of this thing and I like the story.
I don't disagree with either of you, but the big question is "where are you going to get that data?". Right now you are relying on couple of studies that look at an entirely treated population, and a population that's half in treatment and half not. Outside of those, you have to take people on their word - there's no better option.
Things like "does this help with the suicide rate" are arguably downstream of "what is the suicide rate". Right now, we are relying on one study that seems fine (but we can't compare to anything) and one study that seems like a massive outlier that we can't rely on very well.
The massive outlier (Cauwenberg) is useless for "does treatment help" because everyone in their system was getting treatment. Biggs, the "normal" study, compares a treated and untreated population and finds basically no effect. That might be correct, but there's so little data they might have got it very, very wrong as well and we wouldn't really know.
All that to say I don't disagree, but it's frustrating to try and answer the question we both agree is important, because there's just not a lot of data to draw from.
Yes, exactly. I have no horse in this race either way, but it seems to me that we need to ask a few additional questions…
First, are those seeking transitions more likely to be suicidal? IOW, are propensity to transition and mental instability or depression or whatever correlated?
Second, and even more importantly, does actually transitioning have an effect on suicide tendencies? Do post trans have the same, lower or greater risk of suicide? Everyone seems to just assume it is improved by transitioning.
From what little data is available, largely anecdotal at that, it seems like there is a higher number of completed suicides among longer-term transitioners, with some speculation that the failure of the transition process to improve their problematic feelings maybe a significant factor...
Whatever the case, I believe there is a good basis for the general principle of
"Don't do anything permanent as a teenager!"
Including tattoos, starting a family, or having unnecessary surgery...
How to communicate, to both political sides, the things that needs to be known:
1. Examine the trans suicide ideation rate vs success rate (direct data for reference, since we do not know the latent causes for transition)
2. Examine the incel suicide ideation rate vs success rate (control for the "incel to trans pipeline" and "AGP" hypothesis)
3. Examine the male homosexual suicide ideation rate vs success rate (control for the "HSTS" and gender conformity hypothesis)
4. Examine the male heterosexual suicide ideation rate vs success rate (control for normalcy)
5. Cross-check against cultural norms (inequality, in-group affiliation) and aggression.
I mean there's a lot of stuff like that. And I think it's at the very least plausible that we check and find, hey, just independent of anything else, that "trans" amplifies each of those categories - that a trans person with any other given set of risk factors gets more risk from being trans. Could be, and even seems likely.
But the big part after that for me is knowing if the proposed treatments (puberty blockers, social transition, surgical transition, hormonal transition) help improve suicide rates. It's important because that's why they are pushing the "50% suicide rate" narrative in the first place - it's an important and powerful rhetoric tool.
If it's true that these treatments actually reduce suicides, they have a strong moral positioning to argue from in terms of saying things like "parents who don't let their kids transition are doing a form of child abuse, and the decision should be taken out of their hands". Right now they *can't say this based on data*, but they do anyway, hoping nobody notices the difference between self-reported ideation at the group level and actual suicide rates.
Post-hoc adding fuel to the bonfire:
It is likely that we can use sexual preferences to help diagnose the problem, and that most people with gender dysphoria just cannot "chill" with their femininity or inceldom. This explains why the incel-to-trans pipeline exists for sexually liberal areas, but not areas of conservative areas where asexuality is tolerated. The same phenomena can be seen when "neurodivergence" is promoted and misdiagnosed in affluent areas but severely underdiagnosed in resource-deprived areas. https://aella.substack.com/p/women-prefer-more-violent-porn-and/comment/11966339 https://archive.ph/I6aAR https://archive.ph/xgM28
I can't however fathom why sexually fundamentalism are paradoxically controlled by winners of sexual liberals, and in the same vein as the hyper-conservatives in working class areas are royally intolerant of those with psychological needs ala boomer "get a job" memes, and in both cases Andrew Tate and its kind of mercantile expat-rich fits the bill.
I do bet that the trans suicide rates are high, because male suicide rates are high as well, but that surgery is merely a "drink tea-ism" (redirecting efforts and not problem-solving) when put in the context of cultural pressure and economic involution. Surplus men are often causes of social instability as per Peter Turchin's social model, and war is have said to have a Malthusian effect of reducing economic stress and selecting for "better men". My hypothesis is that euthanasia and castration is used to displace active social unrest, but Chinese history would suggest otherwise. https://normielisation.substack.com/p/drink-tea-ism https://www.jstor.org/stable/3092100 https://archive.ph/z5Tqp https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/of-eunuchs-and-wannabes/comment/9245191
And to look into the other direction unto sexless "conservative" men in current times, it is too cynical to say that they ought not to "exist on this earth" as part of evolution, as per historical fertility rate of 6+ per couple and youth mortality rate of 45+%. In a biological sense, half of the male population are subconsciously stereotyped by women as either forgettable or unhuman, even when in a safe and well-developed society, and only 1 in 6 men are worthy of "average" treatment. This effect are not just applicable to beauty but intelligence and personality as well, forming the bulk of "midwit" and "clueless" behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-us-1800-2020 https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past https://archive.ph/aHK9d https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/of-eunuchs-and-wannabes/comment/9263903
TL;DR This explains why in online communities, transgender movements and militarist genocide fetishism tends to be from similar demographics even when their political opinions diverge. Other than the meme explanation of lack of discipline and paternal supervision vs lack of forgiveness and maternal love, it can be seen as exhibitionism vs self-denial. The opposing side of canon fodder as loyalist martyrdom, is castration or human sacrifice as internalized scapegoat mechanisms. Freedom of collaborative self-expression is removed in favor of codified hyper-"masculinity" and trans-ideology. https://archive.ph/HIFuR https://archive.ph/JtuYN https://eggreport.substack.com/p/the-political-question
There is also a moral case against it, just like how increased health testing leads to false positives, if some of the kids are in fact part of the "low risk" category then any treatment is considered ineffective. The "real" trans rate according to Jordan Peterson is ~10%, but very few of them leads to serious issues. The weirdness in the trans community though is that it is ~1% of the general population, which more closely mirrors the rate of Cluster B behavior (anti-social behavior), and are less likely to be of androgynous temperament as the target audience of help. It is better to standardize the tests for GNC (gender non-conformity) such that Cluster B and political pressure is removed from the equation.
I remember reading Turban et al, 2020 and seeing that they recommend a treatment that there study shows a 90% probability that it increases the thing they are trying to prevent(suicide). And it may have even reached 95% if a multivalent analysis was run. That was one of the biggest abuse of hypothesis testing and 0.05 P values I have seen.
Transitioning does not seem to reduce suicide rates. This guy https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/on-transgenderism/ looked and a bunch of studies, I think all that he could find. If anything medical transitioning or socially transitioning increased the odds of suicide. Even if people report feeling better after transitioning.
I want to be really careful in how I say this, because I don't think the individual's data work is bad from what I can tell, but he's making what I consider to be a pretty big mistake in this space by talking about "suicide rates" without specifying that he's talking about "reported rates of attempted suicide or ideation that may or may not have led to suicides".
That doesn't mean this article is bad, but it means any statements he makes that imply that suicide rates might go up as a result of treatment have to be treated in the same way as people that say they might go down, i.e. with extreme doubt because we don't know what those rates even are, or if they are positively or negatively correlated with "successful" suicide.
I definitely think his article could be clearer. When I looked over it reported rates of attempted suicide or idealization will be used as a proxy for suicide rates, seamed like it was meant to be implied. Or so "suicide rates" was used in a theoretical hypothesis forming way as well as to actual suicide rates where the data existed.
I understand the focus on actual "successful" suicides, but isn't the level of misery necessary to attempt or seriously consider suicide an important consideration too? There is a world where trans suicide is no higher than the general population but the level of misery deserves intervention.
For example, the article explains the well understood phenomenon of suicidal ideation being higher in women but actual suicide being higher in men. Consider this study that concludes women are unhappier on average then men:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29893#fromrss
This ends up being a mixed bag for me. So, for context, that study you linked measures the unhappiness of people by asking questions, which is not wrong (it's the best option we have, sometimes!) but it's also subject to the same kind of problems asking people how suicidal they are has.
So if we recognize that men and women often communicate differently (and we usually do) this gets pretty fraught for me pretty quick. If the "are you suicidal" happiness indicator is off by so much between the combinations of young/women and old/men, how off are other happiness indicators?
I actually think it's really important that people are able to do things that make them happy and that preventable unhappiness is something we should take into account. And I also don't think whatever is happening here is "lying", really. I'm just uncertain how to read these numbers - it's POSSIBLE trans people are orders of a magnitude unhappier than 75 year old men, but it's also possible they and old men have very different opinions on how much you should reveal on surveys, and I'm not sure which is which.
I totally agree with your points about issues with survey based respsonses, a big chunk of all those lists of common fallacies and biases you can find are about the problems you describe. My only point was suicide is not the only measure of whether society should intervene\help, suffering\misery also is (as difficult as that is to measure).
And the causal arrow may not go the way these studies assume - young people may be deciding they are transgender *because* they are suicidal (i.e., they loathe themselves and their bodies). So the fact that some unexpectedly high number of them have suicidal ideation may have much more to do with the reasons they think they are trans and much less to do with availability of treatment, etc.
I note there might be a definitional issue in what exactly "trans" means. Reading the first part of the article I was getting the impression that a person was called trans if they wanted to change their apparent gender, not after they had done so. That makes sense if you are looking at things like "do trans people commit suicide more if they are denied access to surgery or puberty blockers, etc.?" Then we get to the Dutch study (and others) and it seems to switch back to people being trans after they actually get the surgery or whatever to transition. Particularly with the suicide rates being ~5x higher for transwomen (former men) than transmen; people with XY chromosomes commit suicide about 5 times more frequently than people with XX, so that lines up in a nice way.
One reason this definitional variance is important is that if people who undergo actual surgery or other treatments to transition are committing suicide more the proximate cause is the transmission process itself. Maybe it goes badly, maybe it doesn't improve their life as much as they had hoped and decide they've tried everything and give up, who knows. Plus you have the issue that people who go through all the hassle of transitioning are disproportionally possessed of personality types/issues that lead to suicide.
If the definition of trans is "Would like to have different apparent gender than what they were born with" then treatment, if it lowers suicide rates (big if, apparently) becomes desirable, although one must also check that being trans doesn't have a high correlation with other mental issues that lead to suicide. E.g. a kid is a misfit at school and really depressed, and latches on to gender dysphoria as the cause and solution, not the other way around. Surveys seem really bad at sorting that sort of question out.
The cynical, or maybe realistic, side of me think that the confusion around the definitional meaning of trans is not accidental, as at best the traditional, post-transition definition with high suicide rates suggests pretty strongly that mental illness at least goes hand in hand with being trans. Being trans before getting any treatments to transition suggests the suicide rate is due to cis oppression, which is always more appealing to certain sets. It is SUPER appealing if you run a company selling puberty blockers, or a clinic or doctor performing treatments or therapy, I suspect.
To what you'd generally think of as the "pro trans" side of the fence, trans is something you are *born into*. There's a slight differentiation in the use of "transgender" (which is a fundamental, inborn state of being in that system) and transsexual (which has fallen out of favor, but implies surgery/transition).
I think at least for Cauwenberg and Biggs, that's what we are talking about - people who found their way to the clinic and are "trans" regardless of what stage of transition they find themselves in.
But you are right that it is tricky - the DSM-5 defines transgender in a way that essentially lets them say "transgenderism is never, ever a disorder that causes problems, it's just a perfectly fine way to be. Unless it causes problems, but then it's gender dysphoria and completely different." So it does end up being really tricky to disambiguate.
That makes sense, and suggests to me that the definitional confusion is going to cause huge messes using data without super carefully checking how exactly the researchers defined things. With the terms evolving very quickly, and there not being a long term agreed upon term of distinction between "gender doesn't match my body" and "got surgery to make my body match my gender" (other than pre/post-op, but I don't think that flies in polite society) we are not going to be able to assume that any given phrase means the same thing between papers. Possibly even the same author will change terminology between papers, and we are going to have to hope they remember to specify what they mean.
Ideation correlates with attempts but suicides are the product of Attempt X Method Success Rate. Because Method Success Rate varies widely, and because different ages and genders vary widely in their choice of method, we see a weak correlation between ideation -> suicide and attempt -> suicide when looking at demographic breakdowns. Some studies attempt to get around this issue by combining suicides and hospitalizations from attempts into a single metric.
I'd like to see good breakdowns of the data showing this. Pre-seeing it, I'm leery of it. In the US women use guns in ~35% of their attempts in the younger age groups, if I remember right, and men about 50%. Women report making more attempts, so that should even up those numbers a bit, but then if we check men commit suicide about five times more. Old men use guns I think about twice as often as young women (75% of the time?), report attempted suicides basically never, but have a suicide rate something like 7x what young women do.
I'm not saying this doesn't explain *some* of it, but at first blush it doesn't even seem possible for it to explain most of it.
Relatedly, I am kind of curious how many attempts turn out to be accidental near deaths that then get translated into suicide attempt after the fact for some reason. Like if you didn't know not to take pain killers and alcohol together, whoops, almost die, then when people suggest "Did you try to kill yourself because you are unhappy? We can help you." answer "well, I didn't slam a bunch of pain killers and vodka because I was having a good day at work, so sure, what the hell."
It probably doesn't account for much variation, but there are so many bad habits people turn to when their life sucks that have a tendency to almost kill them that it seems like it would be non-zero.
Another example, a friend of mine in college pulled a Carradine, but his family was pretty seriously Catholic, so they officially claimed it was something neither suicide or otherwise embarrassing. If they hadn't worried about the mortal sin aspect, would they have called it a suicide instead of auto-erotic asphyxiation? I dunno, but I could see it happening.
I dunno, it is pretty far down my "List of Questions to Ask God", but I would be curious to find out how many incidents of "Almost killed myself by accident doing something dumb" are turned into "Uhm... Cry for help?" when the victim has to explain what happened, and how that varies by age and gender, etc.
By the same token, I wonder how many people somewhat spontaneously try and kill themselves on a whim, e.g. by driving their car off the road into a tree or something, then when asked what happened just reply "It was an accident" instead of "Well, for a moment despair overtook me and it seemed like the thing to do." Or they are successful, and it is recorded as just another traffic accident.
My dad used to tell a story in which he was a young man who had recently purchased his first house. There was a small pad of concrete in the front yard on which the mailbox post had once been mounted, but was now just (to him) an eyesore.
At the time, the closest he had to an appropriate tool for breaking up a concrete block was a drywall hammer. For reference, a drywall hammer is a relatively lightweight hammer that, among other interesting design features, has a hatchet-like blade on the non-poundy end.
Knowing that the tool probably wouldn't be heavy enough to break the concrete, he said he hit it as hard as he could, every ounce of strength in the blow and all that. The hammer bounced off the concrete and the hatchet caught him in the middle of the forehead.
According to him, he had just enough time as the hammer rebounded and hit him to think something like "Shit, they are going to think my wife murdered me with a hatchet" before it hit. He didn't die or anything, but your thing made me think of this thing and I like the story.
That is an awesome story :) You gotta love the things that go through our heads just before the hatchet...
I don't disagree with either of you, but the big question is "where are you going to get that data?". Right now you are relying on couple of studies that look at an entirely treated population, and a population that's half in treatment and half not. Outside of those, you have to take people on their word - there's no better option.
Things like "does this help with the suicide rate" are arguably downstream of "what is the suicide rate". Right now, we are relying on one study that seems fine (but we can't compare to anything) and one study that seems like a massive outlier that we can't rely on very well.
The massive outlier (Cauwenberg) is useless for "does treatment help" because everyone in their system was getting treatment. Biggs, the "normal" study, compares a treated and untreated population and finds basically no effect. That might be correct, but there's so little data they might have got it very, very wrong as well and we wouldn't really know.
All that to say I don't disagree, but it's frustrating to try and answer the question we both agree is important, because there's just not a lot of data to draw from.
Yes, exactly. I have no horse in this race either way, but it seems to me that we need to ask a few additional questions…
First, are those seeking transitions more likely to be suicidal? IOW, are propensity to transition and mental instability or depression or whatever correlated?
Second, and even more importantly, does actually transitioning have an effect on suicide tendencies? Do post trans have the same, lower or greater risk of suicide? Everyone seems to just assume it is improved by transitioning.
From what little data is available, largely anecdotal at that, it seems like there is a higher number of completed suicides among longer-term transitioners, with some speculation that the failure of the transition process to improve their problematic feelings maybe a significant factor...
Whatever the case, I believe there is a good basis for the general principle of
"Don't do anything permanent as a teenager!"
Including tattoos, starting a family, or having unnecessary surgery...