(THE CENTER SQUARE) – A study using California government data found suicide rates double after surgery for transgender females who receive male-to-female gender change surgeries.
This study follows a 2020 analysis of the entire Swedish population that found there is “no advantage of surgery in relation to subsequent mood or anxiety disorder-related health care visits or prescriptions or hospitalizations following suicide attempts in that comparison.”
The study, published in the Journal of Urology, studied 859 Californians who underwent a vaginoplasty (male-to-female gender surgery), and 357 who underwent phalloplasty (female-to-male surgery) for two years before and after their surgeries. Of those who underwent gender affirmation surgery, a similar proportion of vaginoplasty and phalloplasty recipients experienced at least one psychiatric encounter, coming in at 22.2% and 20.7% respectively. However, suicide rates were markedly higher among vaginoplasty than phalloplasty patients after their surgeries; vaginoplasty suicide rates more than doubled from 1.5% to 3.3%, whereas phalloplasty suicide rates remained stable at 0.8% before and after surgery.
