Puberty Blockers, Cross-Sex Hormones, and Youth Suicide - Jay P. Greene, PhD

The lack of any experimental evidence of the effects of these med- ical interventions prevents the gold-standard research one would normally expect in order to isolate the causal effects of these interventions.24 The use of puberty blockers and sex hormones to address gender issues is also relatively recent, with widespread adoption occurring only within the past few years.25 The fact that randomi. [...] The problem, then, with the Turban study, is that it is impossible to know whether the reduced odds of contemplating suicide among adults who sought and received hormone therapy as children were a result of the relationship with their parents who gave consent for this intervention or a result of the intervention itself. [...] This study examines the relationship between puberty blockers and later mental health outcomes and relies on the same correlational research design to analyze data from the same survey as the cross-sex hormone study.29 The use of a correlational research design also makes it impossi- ble to draw causal conclusions from a study by Amy Green and colleagues that analyzes the mental health effects of. [...] To isolate the effect of this provision on youth suicide rates, it is better to control sta- tistically for the youth suicide rate in each state at baseline as well as the suicide rate in each state in each year among the older and unaffected age group. [...] Using the same exact regression model while replacing the suicide rate among those ages 12 to 23 with the rate for those ages 28 to 39 in the same states as the dependent variable shows no relationship between the ease of accessing cross-sex medical care and suicide rates among those too old to have been affected by these state policies.