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Comment by davidtanner | Hacker News Reader

Ssnake's assertion is false and provides a good example of the sort of cocksure, wilful ignorance and bigotry trans people have to face every day.

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Replying to yourself to take a snipe at someone else, with no data of your own, is pretty weak. Especially when you are wrong. In just 30 seconds of searching, I found a 2011 long term study conducted in Sweden that concluded the "overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher... particularly death from suicide".

I have no stake in this discussion, and if anything, am generally opposed to the topic/lifestyle/whatever. But I have empathy for anyone going through such depression that they ultimately take their own lives. When the primary end goal for many is SRS/GCS, and when the data suggests that leads to higher suicide rates, I find it deplorable that anyone would try to suppress that information.

Some might even say that is good example of cocksure, willful ignorance.

The full quote is:

"The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 1.8–4.3) than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from suicide."

So trans people are at an increased risk of suicide compared to cis people of the gender the trans person transitioned into.

The original claim was that trans people are at increased risk of suicide post-op relative to pre-op transsexuals!

You're "generally opposed" to a medical intervention that has dramatically improved the lives of many thousands of people over the last 50+ years? You're "generally opposed" to something that I know for a fact has dramatically improved my own life?

Go fuck yourself. I'm not wrong, you misrepresented the study and you're a bigot.

I'm not sure what you mean by being "opposed" -- if you don't think there should be people who are unbearably unhappy with the gender they got stuck with at birth, we agree. If you think people shouldn't play around at being the other gender, that's not what we're talking about, because I can assure you that those of us with this problem are deadly serious about it, and a lot of us would be quite happy if we could find a way to go through life in a functional way without having to make the kind of enormous, life-altering changes involved in transitioning.

I have heard lots of studies on trans folk kicked around, but some of these things have inherent methodological problems. In particular, I think we're all aware that the gold standard for medical efficacy studies is double blind studies, and it's pretty obvious that a double blind study on SRS is impossible, right? Worse yet, in this study they're not even comparing SRS patients with other trans folk who didn't have an operation, they're comparing them with the general population of people of their original assigned birth sex.[1] We already know that trans people have an enormously high suicide rate already, so this comparison tells us absolutely nothing about a before/after comparison, never mind what we really want to know: what happens to the same population if they do/don't get surgery.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21364939/ -- You didn't cite a study, but hopefully this was the right one?

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