Kentucky state Sen. Karen Berg (D-Louisville), is consoled by colleagues after SB 150 passed the Senate, 29-6, at the Kentucky state Capitol in Frankfort on Feb. 16, 2023. Berg's transgender son died by suicide in December 2022.
Ryan C. Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader / TNS
States that passed anti-transgender laws aimed at minors saw suicide attempts by transgender and gender nonconforming teenagers increase by as much as 72% in the following years, a new study by The Trevor Project says.
The peer-reviewed study, published published Thursday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, looked at survey data from young people in 19 states, comparing rates of suicide attempts before and after bans passed.
Over the past few years, dozens of states have passed laws affecting how transgender young people do things like play sports, go to the bathroom at school, and access gender-affirming medical care.
The study’s findings are not theoretical for some families.
“You know my child is dead,” Kentucky Senator Karen Berg said at the statehouse during the debate over that state’s anti-trans bill in Feb. 2023. Her transgender son had died by suicide two months earlier at age 24. “Your vote yes on this bill means one of two things: either you believe that trans children do not exist, or you believe that trans children do not deserve to exist.”
The anti-trans bill in Kentucky passed, at least 26 other states now have similar laws on the books.
As these laws were being enacted, there was already a lot of research showing a strong association between anti-transgender policies and negative mental health outcomes, explains Ronita Nath. She runs research at The Trevor Project, which offers 24-7 crisis services LGBTQ+ youth.
Lawmakers and supporters of these laws argued that the evidence of negative mental health effects was weak, she says. “So we clearly knew we needed to very firmly establish causality, and that's why we really prioritized this research,” she explains.
To do that, they gathered data from transgender and nonbinary young people, aged 13-24, from all over the country. “We do social media ads,” says Nath. “Once we reach our sample size in California or New York, we shut those ads down and we amplify the ads in these harder to reach states, let's say Wyoming or Idaho.”
Then, Nath and her colleagues used a sample of 61,240 young people surveyed from 2018-2022, a period during which 19 states passed a variety of anti-trans laws. They looked to see how the rate of attempted suicides in the previous year changed for residents of those states after the laws were passed.
“We found a very sharp and statistically significant rise in suicide attempt rates after enactment of the laws,” she says. A small rise was seen in a state soon after laws were enacted, followed by a sharper rise two or three years later. Among 13-17 year olds, two years after a law took effect, the likelihood of a past-year suicide attempt was 72% higher than it was before passage.
Nath notes a randomized control trial would not be possible for this kind of research, since you can’t randomly assign someone to live in one state or another. Instead, they analyzed the survey data for each state over time, comparing rates before and after laws were passed. The analysis took months, she says, and controlled for a variety of potentially confounding factors in order to isolate the impact of these laws on past-year suicide attempts.
“To see these numbers after everything was taken into account and the model still held — it's terrifying,” she says.
This study is the first of its kind, Nath adds. “These findings demonstrate that — regardless of a person's political beliefs — if you live in a state that has passed an anti-transgender law, transgender, nonbinary young people in your home state are significantly more likely to attempt to take their own life,” she says. “This is the reality for these young people, and it's not acceptable.”
Associate Professor Brittany Charlton of Harvard Medical School, who wasn’t involved with the study, finds it impressive.
“This study is just so important,” she says. “It's contributing to the growing body of evidence that demonstrates that these discriminatory anti-LGBTQ policies have harmful effects on health.” It does so convincingly, she says, with a large sample size and strong research methods.
Nath adds that none of this is inevitable. “Trans and non-binary young people are not inherently prone to increased suicide risk because of their gender identity,” she says. “They are placed at higher risk because of how they're mistreated and stigmatized by others, including by the implementation of discriminatory policies like the ones examined in the study.”
She says future research will explore data from 2023, which saw the largest number of anti-trans state bills to date.
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 9-8-8 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
