Finland Study Exposes the Harms of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ and Hints at the Real Cause of Gender Dysphoria
Tyler O’Neil @Tyler2ONeil
Tyler O’Neil is senior editor at The Daily Signal and the author of two books: “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” and “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.”
Imagine you are confused about your gender, and you think you were “born in the wrong body.” Do you really think a series of experimental drugs and surgeries to erase your biology and make you appear as the opposite sex would improve your psychological condition?
It should come as no surprise that a landmark study from Finland suggests the exact opposite: Fins under 23 who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria proved more likely to receive specialist-level psychiatric treatment, both before and more than two years after the first referral to a gender clinic—and “gender-affirming care” made things far worse.
The study, published Saturday in the journal Acta Paediatrica, finds that young people who were referred for gender identity services were more than three times more likely to receive specialist-level psychiatric treatment than other Fins, both before and after their first appointment.
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Those who underwent medical interventions after such referrals proved even more likely to need specialist-level psychiatric help.
Most studies on the issue suffer from a lack of follow-up and a lack of consistent control groups. This study included both.
Working with the Finnish government, Statistics Finland, and a hospital with one of the country’s two gender clinics, the study analyzed eight groups: men and women with gender dysphoria who did not undergo sex-rejecting procedures; men and women with gender dysphoria who did undergo such procedures; and men and women from the general public, matched by birth year and municipality to each patient in the other groups.
The study used the 11-digit personal identification number that each Finnish resident receives to track medical data and psychiatric visits.
The study found that 61.7% of the gender-dysphoric young people received specialist-level psychiatric treatment more than two years after being referred to a gender clinic, while only 14.6% of the control group received such treatment in a comparable time period.
These young people also proved more likely to receive psychiatric treatment before their gender dysphoria diagnosis (45.7% compared to 15.0% of the control group).