Daily Caller Misrepresents Denmark Findings on Suicide Rates

A Denmark study showed that as the country grew more tolerant and more trans people came forward, suicides rates among trans people decreased.

by Evan Urquhart

There’s a new study from Denmark that isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but does provide further support for the accepted understanding of the vulnerability trans people have to suicide, as well as the benefits greater acceptance brings. In the right wing press, of course, the existence of inconvenient data supporting both the medical establishment and trans advocates is suppressed. Sometimes that means ignoring inconvenient outcomes like this, but with a little spin, and a lot of ignoring the study’s actual results, the Daily Caller has managed to present a somewhat predictable but useful bit of data as if it meant the opposite of what the researchers actually found.

The top-level findings, as reported by the New York Times, showed something everyone already knew: Trans people have elevated rates of both suicide attempts and death by suicide. This represents a step forward in the data purely because directly measuring deaths by suicide is very hard. You can’t survey dead people to ask them if they identified as transgender, after all. However, in Denmark there are national health records going back decades which are tied to an ID numbers every Dane has. These ID numbers include a code for sex, which means in order to change sex legally this number has to change as well. All this makes it significantly easier to compile information about the causes of death for people who were either diagnosed with gender dysphoria (or related legacy diagnoses) or who have legally changed their sex since that became legal in 2014.

In the past, one disingenuous line of argument from the anti-trans side has been that even though studies have found that gender-affirming care reduces thoughts of suicide, that doesn’t prove it reduces suicide deaths. Despite fewer thoughts of suicide being, by any reasonable reckoning, a clear sign of improved mental health regardless, this has been spread widely as if it meaningfully undermines arguments that gender-affirming care is necessary care.

At the same time, however, some on the right have made a contradictory claim. They accept trans people are at a higher risk of suicide but say that it’s identifying as trans that causes trans people to become suicidal, pretending there’s some way that transness can be prevented and, by extension, trans suicide can too. For example, earlier this month a story in the National Review related an anecdote of a mother who rejected her trans son (misgendered in NR as her daughter). The young man wound up in the foster care system and eventually took his life, which the story blames not on familial rejection, but on his being trans.

screenshot from the National Review

More than one study has shown that family support is one of the key protective factors when it comes to trans youth’s mental health. This is why clinics that treat gender dysphoria in youth strongly encourage families to be supportive. However, despite this evidence, conservatives persist in the belief that parents can stop their children from being trans by refusing to accept them, and that this rejection will protect them from the increased risk of death.

It is in that context that the Daily Caller is misrepresenting the Denmark study’s findings, falsely claiming they show that transition increases risk of suicide. In the article the Caller builds on a previous misrepresentation of a Swedish study which found a similar result, and has long been used to falsely claim that transition causes suicides to increase, despite the study’s authors objecting strenuously to this misreading.

screenshot from the Daily Caller

So, what did the Denmark study itself say about the causes of increased risk? Well, in addition to finding that rates of suicide are elevated among trans people, they found that the rates used to be higher and have decreased (for both trans people and the wider population). During this same period the number of people identifying as trans in Denmark has increased. If gender transition caused suicidality that’s not what you’d expect to see! If being trans caused suicidality you’d expect that having more trans people would lead to more trans suicides, with those suicides happening at a similar rate as before.

That is likely why the study itself concluded that reducing structural discrimination and increasing best practices medical care would be one way to reduce suicidality among trans people.

screenshot from “Transgender Identity and Suicide Attempts and Mortality in Denmark” 2023

Distortions of scientific research are endemic to the right wing press. The idea that transition causes suicide is one of the more far-fetched claims, but it is necessary to guard against the reality that family acceptance is one of the most important factors in transgender resilience and good outcomes in the long term.