Attempted Suicide Rates More Than Double After Gender-Reassignment Surgery: Study
BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, APR 03, 2024 - 10:20 AM Rates of attempted suicide who identified as transgender more than doubled after receiving a vaginoplasty (surgically turning one's dick into a vagina), according to a peer-reviewed study published in The Journal of Urology.
While researchers found that rates of 'psychiatric emergencies' were high both before and after gender-altering surgery, suicide attempts were markedly higher among those who received vaginoplasties, the Epoch Times reports. "In fact, our observed rate of suicide attempts in the phalloplasty group is actually similar to the general population, while the vaginoplasty group’s rate is more than double that of the general population," wrote the author of the study
Aside from suicide attempts, the study found that the proportion of those who experienced an emergency room and inpatient psychiatric encounter was similar between the two groups - with 22.2% of vaginoplasty and 20.7% of phalloplasty groups experiencing at least one psychiatric encounter.
According to the study, 33.9% of biological males undergoing vaginopasty would experience a post-surgery psychiatric encounter vs. 26.5% for biological women who underwent phalloplasty, if an episode had occurred before surgery.
That's a lot. BUT OVER LONGER TIME THE RATES SEEM WORSE.
In a 2011 paper published in PLOS ONE, researchers found that people who underwent sex reassignment surgery had substantially higher rates of overall mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity compared with the general population. “It’s hard to refute this paper because it’s a longitudinal study,” Dr. Oliva said. “In Sweden, everyone is in a database, and through diagnosis codes, they’re able to follow what happens to every citizen in terms of their medical history. They waited more than 10 years after people had surgery and found that death by suicide had an adjusted hazard ratio of 19.1.”
You can “quibble” about emergency room encounters, but this study shows that for patients who had transgender surgery, their suicide rate after 10 years was 19-fold higher than the general population, Dr. Oliva said. Additionally, the study excluded people with psychiatric illnesses, so these are individuals thought to have no psychiatric illness outside of dysphoria.
Surgical Procedures
A phalloplasty is a multistep process undertaken by a biological female who wants to transition to a male, where a penis is created using tissues from the genitals and forearm or thigh. The external genitals, such as the labia or outer labia, are used to create a scrotum, and testicular implants are inserted months later along with an implant that will cause erections.
Vaginoplasty is the most commonly performed gender-reassignment surgery for those with gender dysphoria, with more than 3,000 procedures performed annually. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, vaginoplasty is a surgical procedure that involves removing the penis, testicles, and scrotum to create a vulva and functional vagina. Surgeons typically create a vaginal canal using the skin surrounding the existing penis and scrotum or by using a skin graft from the abdomen or thigh. When you take a child who’s about to undergo puberty—and they suggest giving puberty blockers to stop puberty at age 10 to 11 1/2—and when you do that for little boys, they aren’t able to get tissue from the penis and scrotum, so creating a vagina is very difficult,” Dr. Oliva told The Epoch Times. “You have to use tissue from other areas of the body, such as the peritoneum or the colon.
Dr. Oliva said complications with these surgical procedures are very high and he thinks this is why suicide rates are so high.
“People think this is going to solve the problem and it doesn’t,” he said.
A June 2018 paper on postoperative outcomes of 117 patients who underwent vaginoplasty published in the Journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons found that 26 percent of patients experienced granulation tissue, 20 percent had intravaginal scarring, and 20 percent experienced prolonged pain.
