The paper, “Psychiatric Morbidity Among Adolescents and Young Adults Who Contacted Specialised Gender Identity Services in Finland in 1996–2019: A Register Study,” uses data from the Finnish Population Information System which contains current personal data on all residents of the nation.
"Brace yourself for a shock, but pediatric sexual mutilation may not cause happiness," The Federalist's Chris Bray noted. "Researchers used diagnostic and procedural codes to find adolescents who transitioned, then tracked what psychiatric services they needed after their sex change procedures, comparing their need for psychiatric intervention to a control group of adolescents who didn’t receive sex change procedures."
The result, according to the study: “Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up — rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminizing gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinizing gender reassignment.”
The trans procedures made adolescents much more likely to experience mental health breakdowns so severe that they required significant professional treatment.
The researchers identify a pivotal moment in the pro-trans movement: After 2011, they write, “there has been a tenfold increase in the number of referrals” for pediatric sex change treatments. The sudden and dramatic acceleration of hormone treatments and sex change surgeries for minors, including elective mastectomies on healthy breasts and genital surgeries like phalloplasty and vaginoplasty, correlates with a sharp turn toward a more psychological crisis. The growing group of minors who transitioned after the pivotal moment were more likely to need subsequent mental health treatment: “Those referred after 2010 displayed noticeably more psychiatric morbidity than those referred earlier.”
The researchers also note that minors receiving sex change procedures after the 2010/2011 pivot were more likely to have received other forms of psychological treatment before being referred to sex change clinics. “This suggests that increasingly, adolescents with severe psychiatric morbidity are referred to GIS,” they conclude, referring to gender identity services.
The researchers also hint at a cause: “Subsequent morbidity burden may also arise from treatments not meeting the expectations placed on them.”
The "implications become clearer," Bray wrote. "First, children experiencing depression and anxiety are meeting with therapists who suggest that their mental health problems may have an origin in gender dysphoria, and will go away after sex change treatments. But then procedures like vaginoplasty, not addressing the actual causes of the depression and anxiety, deliver a growing sense of helplessness in a mutilated body. Depression, surgical castration and vaginoplasty offered as a treatment, more serious depression."
"Compare this documented reality to the bizarre media fetishization of wonderfully cheerful trans 4-year-olds:"
Anyone not blinded by ideology has been able to see the facts for years now. Gender "medicine" isn't medicine. It's dangerous snake oil https://t.co/OO9TUB7i1w
— Helen Joyce (@HJoyceGender) April 5, 2026
