The Crumbling Sham of Trans Medicine

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Trans activists loudly claim that medicalizing gender confused youth is “settled science” and saves lives. This is meant to shut down any doubt or debate on this critically important topic.

Thankfully, a few undeterred scholars are asking important questions and demonstrating just how false trans activists’ claims really are.

An impressive new Finnish study, published in the Swedish academic journal Acta Paediatrica, is extending the damning conclusions of the UK’s 2024 Cass Review. The report was unequivocal in concluding that the so-called “settled science” of trans medicine “is an area of remarkably weak evidence” and the “reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”

The new Finnish study provides the “good evidence.” Its findings on long-term outcomes, based on extremely strong data sets, don’t bode well for trans activists’ overconfident claims. Finland’s government-run medical system has an extremely rigorous tracking system containing detailed medical and psychiatric records on all citizens dating back to 1994. Drawing from this, the study conducted an analysis of every patient under 23 who attended Finnish gender identity clinics from 1996 to 2019 and compared them with a matched control group.

This means their study population is uniquely comprehensive—it analyzed the entire gender treatment patient population in the country for years and years. Other studies have only included those who chose to take part, seriously undermining the validity of their claims. The Finnish school system also regularly screens students for mental health disorders. It consists of two timeframes: 1996 to 2010, and 2011 to 2019, the time when those “trans identity” numbers started exploding in many countries, likely from social contagion.

So, what did this comprehensive Finnish study find? It’s a pretty direct conclusion: The whole basis of transgender ideology and practice is wrong. As the study revealed, “Gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls,” and severe psychiatric morbidity increased substantially in two-plus year clinical follow-ups. Those who sought gender services in the second, larger cohort “had greater psychiatric needs than earlier cohorts.”

In fact, these medical researchers state,

Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminizing gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinizing gender reassignment.

They add,

After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.

These findings directly challenge the assumption that gender transition is a natural, harmless occurrence and that taking sex-rejecting hormones and cutting off healthy body parts benefits patients. In fact, the researchers bluntly confess, “This does not support the suggested improvement in mental health after medical GR [gender reassignment].”

Thus, this research supports previous conclusions that those struggling with gender confusion suffer from other serious parallel psychological comorbidities. A group of Austrian scholars explained in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2025 that “gender dysphoric adolescents presenting to specialized gender identity services experience varying degrees of co-occurring mental health problems.”

They note that 71% of such patients suffer from moderate- to high-distress psychopathology (48% and 23% respectively) while only 29% suffer at low-distress levels. Most of these patients (77%) enjoyed high levels of social support in the midst of their struggles, belying another tired line of gay/trans rhetoric.

This Finnish study confirms that gender confused patients aren’t otherwise healthy people simply born in the wrong body, and if we just give them what they say they need, all will be well. Doing so actually appears to make things worse.
The Finnish research team, working from the same stellar population sample, also reported two years ago in the British Medical Journal that the “Main predictor of mortality in this population is psychiatric morbidity, and medical gender reassignment does not have an impact on suicide risk.” The Cass Review came to the same conclusion: “Tragically, deaths by suicide in trans people of all ages continue to be above the national average, but there is no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce this.”

The manipulative claims of trans activists continue to crumble, thanks to carefully done science by honest researchers.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Glenn Stanton.

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Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/Alexey_M

John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.

The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.

BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.