Trans activists’ claims that the puberty blocker ban will increase child suicides are unfounded and dangerous, an independent review has found. The Telegraph has more.
A suicide expert was commissioned by the Government to examine assertions made by trans groups and the Good Law Project, a legal campaign organisation, that there had been an increase in gender-questioning young people taking their own lives.
Prof Louis Appleby found the data “does not support the claims” and hit out at the “insensitive, distressing and dangerous” language being used by some, such as lawyer Jolyon Maugham, Director at the Good Law Project, who said the puberty blocker ban would “kill trans children”.
Prof Appleby said young people and their families “will be terrified by predictions of suicide as inevitable without puberty blockers” and criticised the “‘dead child’ rhetoric”.
“Suicide should not be a slogan or a means to winning an argument,” his report said.
The review concluded that there had been no significant increase in suicide rates among patients at the Tavistock clinic at any point since 2020, despite claims to the opposite.
It found that there had been 12 suicides over six years among patients, half of whom were over 18, and at various stages of their care plan, including post-discharge from the Tavistock, meaning they were not linked to any one aspect of care.
While five of the deaths occurred from 2018-19 to 2020-21, there were seven in the three years since then.
Prof Appleby, who is the Chairman of the national suicide prevention strategy advisory group, also said it was likely there had been a rise in suicide rates over time because of the increase in young people at risk being referred, and that there was “a degree of uncertainty about the deaths recorded as ‘suicide not confirmed’”.
He said that “campaign groups are often selective about evidence” and the claims put into the public domain had not met “basic standards for statistical evidence”.
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