Hormones help trans teens, U.S. study finds, as state bans loom

Transgender teenagers prescribed cross-sex hormones are less likely to have suicidal thoughts and other mental health problems as adults, research showed this week as lawmakers in several U.S. states seek to ban the treatment among minors.

Debate has grown about the age at which transition treatment should begin as more people come out as trans. Some fear hormones and puberty-blocking drugs are prescribed too early or hastily, but others say access to them can be life-saving.

The new paper published by researchers at Stanford University and The Fenway Institute, a Boston-based LGBTQ+ health research center, found trans adults who started hormones before 18 were less likely to report recent suicidal thoughts than those who did not.

Lawmakers in at least five states – Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, Kentucky and Mississippi – have introduced bills this year to stop minors from accessing hormones. Last year, lawmakers in several other states presented similar bills.

“We’re already seeing that so few transgender and gender-diverse people, and young people in particular, are able to access the support and medical care that they need,” said Jack Turban, lead author of the paper published in peer-reviewed journal PLOS-ONE.

“Now it may be getting even worse (with) introducing these bills,” Turban, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a video call.

The state bills presented this year would bar healthcare professionals from providing minors with puberty-blocking drugs, hormones and gender-reassignment surgeries. Most such surgeries are not usually performed before adulthood.

A similar law passed last year in Arkansas and was suspended by a federal judge.

‘TRANSFORMATIVE’

Among those who supported the Arkansas law – presenting a friend of the court filing in the ongoing case – was the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), a group that says it works to “protect, advance and restore the rights of women and girls”.

Alix Aharon, an advisory council member of WoLF, which also opposes trans women’s participation in college sport, said by email that providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or surgery to minors was “a crime against humanity and also child abuse”.

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