Penna Dexter

New research reveals that the politically correct way we're responding to teens who come out as transgender — affirming that decision and "treating" them with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones — is not helping them. In fact it's increasing their suffering and is dangerous. Even faced with this evidence, the Left won't see it that way. The new study titled "Transgender Adolescent Suicide Behavior" was published in the September issue of Pediatrics, the official peer-reviewed journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The study found that more than half of adolescents who are born female but identify as male have attempted suicide in the past year. Let me say this another way: Fifty-one percent of transgender boys tried to kill themselves in the year prior to the survey. In addition, the study showed the attempted suicide rate to be 40 percent among adolescents who are gender nonconforming — in other words they identify as neither exclusively male nor female. And 30 percent of biological boys who identify as girls said they had attempted to take their own lives in the past year. Any sane person looking at these findings would assume these teens are abnormal, troubled and need help. In fact the attempted suicides are a cry for help. But the "help" being offered by the LGBT Left, and increasingly by the pediatric community, is to affirm these young people in the deception that their gender was somehow "misidentified" at birth. These disturbing results emerged when researchers from the University of Arizona analyzed a survey filled out by more than 120,000 young people between the ages of 11 and 19. Fourteen percent of them said they had attempted suicide at least once, a stark contrast with this alarming rate of attempts among transgender teens. With the number of teens identifying as transgender having doubled in the last decade, we've got to be brave enough as a society to admit that we're doing something very wrong.