I like to write posts to record evidence that I can use when having debates about controversial topics. Thursday night, I was reading The Federalist, as usual, and found an interesting post by Eddie Scarry. He reported that the far-left Washington Post was claiming that people who get “gender-affirming” care are very happy in the short term. But what about in the long-term?

Excerpt:

On Thursday the paper published what it called “one of the largest randomized samples of U.S. transgender adults to date about their childhoods, feelings and lives.” The survey took place last year from Nov. 10 to Dec. 1, among 515 U.S. adults who identify as trans and another 823 U.S. adults who did not.

There were a lot of depressing statistics about respondents who are less likely than regular people to say their childhoods were happy and who are more likely to say they often feel anxious. But the ultimate takeaway was that the vast majority of those who said they had “transitioned” away from their natural sex, 78 percent, were “more satisfied” with their lives than before the transition process.

That survey is just from “last year”. I would imagine that people who take out student loans to study English also feel great during their years at college… but they don’t feel the same when they graduate and have to find a job to pay those loans back. And that’s the real question… what is the effect of chopping off body parts in the long-term? Fortunately, we have a study for that.

More:

A person who decides to live in ways that make him feel more like the opposite sex isn’t a one-and-done. That’s something that has to be examined over an extended period of years. As far as actual genital surgery goes — in theory, the most fulfilling type of “transition” — only one study has done that to date.

Over the course of 30 years, six Swedish doctors and scientists tracked the outcomes of 324 transgender people who had received sex surgeries — 191 male subjects and 133 female subjects. Each subject was cross-referenced with 10 random control subjects of the sex that the trans subject was impersonating. For example, a woman would be a control subject for a man who had had surgery to make himself look more like a woman.

The results were devastating.

Subjects who underwent surgery were more likely than the control subjects to receive inpatient care for a psychiatric disorder, to be convicted of a crime, and to develop cardiovascular disease. The mortality rate by suicide was most striking: Transgender subjects were roughly 20 times more likely to have committed suicide within 10 years of their operations.

“This study found substantially higher rates of overall mortality, death from cardiovascular disease and suicide, suicide attempts, and psychiatric hospitalisations in sex-reassigned transsexual individuals compared to a healthy control population,” the authors concluded. “This highlights that post surgical transsexuals are a risk group that need long-term psychiatric and somatic follow-up.” They noted that surgery and experimental cross-sex hormones may provide some relief for transgender people, but that such treatment is “apparently not sufficient to remedy the high rates of morbidity.”

They have the link to the study right in the quotation above. So next time you get asked about this issue, refer to the long-term study.

Sometimes people prefer to read individual stories about individual people to get an idea of what’s behind the statistics. If you like that, consider this recent story from the New York Post, about an individual who received “gender-affirming care” of the sort that the Washington Post would approve of.

Excerpt:

Transgender flight attendant Kayleigh Scott — who gained fame after appearing in a United Airlines commercial — was found dead Monday in her Colorado home. She was 25.

Scott, who shared her transition story for a 2020 Trans Day of Visibility video produced by United, declared in a 2:30 a.m. Instagram post that she was planning to end her life.

[…]Scott made headlines in 2020 when United featured her as a part of its diversity campaign.

Scott said she credited United for helping her transition.

“My life changed for the better when I came to United as a flight attendant. With the support from the company, our business resource group for LGBTQ+ employees, and all of my loving co-workers,” Scott said at the time. “I was able to break free from the chains that helped me and to this day, I’m living confidently. It’s my true self.”

Everything was wonderful in the short-term. Celebrate diversity. Celebrate pride. Be affirming and non-judgmental and tolerant. That’s what people wanted in the short-term.

Here’s the long-term:

“2022 has been a year packed with upset and difficulty,” wrote Scott in a New Year’s Eve Facebook post. “I saw too much death & loss in my life, I came to realize I work a meaningless job for a company that doesn’t value me as an employee.”

United Airlines didn’t make a virtue-signaling publicity video about that post. The Human Rights Campaign didn’t turn that quote into a publicity stunt. Naturally. The people who affirm recklessness turn their backs on you when the consequences of your choices appear. People who like to party and be happy in the moment don’t want to deal with the fallout of the bad decisions that they told you to make.

Christians tell young people to keep to the moral boundaries, because we want them to be happy in the long-term. In the short-term, we look like the mean, judgmental bad guys. But in the long-term, we are vindicated. Gay activists and gay activism organizations affirm the reckless decisions of young people because they want to be liked and to feel good. But they don’t really love the people they affirm. They don’t want what’s best for other people in the long-term.

Well, that’s the example of long-term consequences for one person. I’m a studies man, myself. I like to argue from studies. If you’re like me, then my previous post about self-ending rates of people who received “gender-affirming care” might also be useful to you.