(UK) New data shows surge in trans kids’ suicides following healthcare rollbacks

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A freedom of information request by Good Law Project has found that deaths by suicide of trans young people under 18 surged following the withdrawal of gender-affirming healthcare

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It’s genocide, it truly is. The deaths of these children are their fault. Can no one else see their bloodstained hands?

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I think they have to know their policies caused this because they’re working so hard to cover it up:

And, when Good Law Project raised the alarm about rising deaths, health secretary Wes Streeting responded with a review that criticised our figures and attacked our reporting as “dangerous”.

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To silence those raising the alarm on rising trans suicides as “dangerous” while ramping up the policies correlating with that rise is an act of grave moral wickedness. Good Law Project has worked tirelessly since the Appleby review to get the Department of Health to come clean. For its part, Streeting’s department has fought tooth and nail to block, often on spurious grounds, every freedom of information request. This is a continuation of a worrying trend we spotted under the Tories: the Tavistock’s own board minutes from 2021 state that their communications team has not approved FOIs asking for waiting list data due to “poor performance” and “potential reputational impact”.

Forty-four of these deaths were within the time frame analysed for the government report by Professor Louis Appleby on suicides and gender dysphoria. That’s almost four times more than the number accounted for by the Appleby report, which stated that only 12 young people (over and under 18) who were current or former patients of the Tavistock took their own lives from 2018-2024.

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Still, we are appalled that Streeting commissioned and published a report to reassure the public that there was no significant rise in suicide rates, when 22 children took their own lives in a single year: 2021-22.

Good Law Project was told by whistleblowers that, following the Bell vs Tavistock judgement, there was a significant increase in patient suicides. Our claims were dismissed and described as “insensitive, distressing and dangerous” in the government report.

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Who could ever have predicted this OH WAIT EVERYONE COULD

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Now, Good Law Project can confirm that in 2021-2022 suicides of trans children in England surged to 22, a marked increase from 5 and 4 the previous two years. This spike follows the decision by NHS England to pull down the shutters on gender affirming healthcare for young trans people following detransitioner Keira Bell’s case against the Tavistock. The judgment was overturned, and heavily criticised, in the Court of Appeal following an intervention by Good Law Project. But, under heavy political pressure from the Conservatives and now Streeting, NHS England never again raised the shutters.

This new data was released via a freedom of information request made to the NHS-funded National Child Mortality Database (NCMD). The NCMD revealed that 46 trans children died by suicide from 2019-2025: 5 in 2019-20; 4 in 2020-21; 22 in 2021-22; and 10 in 2022-23. The NCMD adds “the numbers reported in more recent years will likely be underestimated, due to a higher proportion of child death reviews that have not yet been completed”. Of course, we can never know, and often there will never be, a single reason why someone takes their own life.

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Comments in United Kingdom@feddit.uk

He/Him edited

Wes Streeting DoH et al were warned suicide numbers would surge if they did it. They ignored the warning and did it anyway. Suicide numbers did then surge. Streeting et al called the reporting on the surge irresponsible and wrong and denied it all. Now this FOI shows the carnage. Carnage that is most likely as this stage under-reported.

And nothing will change because to the Wes Streeting’s of this world - and sadly a lot of the UK general public - there’s a difference between dead kids and dead trans kids.

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The surge is in 2021. 3 years before Labour was in power.

I suspect this is probability COVID related.

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He/Him

You’re right that I was wrong that it was Wes Streeting who was warned - got my dates muddled - but it was him as then leader of DoH who commissioned and then downplayed the report into the surge in suicides. It was him and his dept who tried to block various FOI requests. They knew.

Not sure how you come to the conclusion this is COVID related though.

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I guess to would have to look at the suicide rates in other populations coming out of COVID.

COVID and the associated turmoil certainly did have an effect on the mental health of the country.

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That is what I was trying to convey, yes.

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Surely a better and far easier measure is to look at suicide rates of the whole population vs suicide rates in trans people specifically? You don’t need to factor in covid at all.

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He/Him

No doubt. But the time correlation (and yes, I know correlation does not automatically equate to causation) together with the direct consequences it would have on trans kids seems much more suggestive of the withdrawal of care playing a role than COVID.

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I used COVID as shorthand for “the pandemic, lockdown, restricted NHS care, etc”

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Comments in World News@lemmy.world

If we could only have seen this coming somehow…

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OP

The UK Government knew what they were planning would kill children, and they did it anyway.

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