The claim is sensational and designed to terrify the parents of young people with gender dysphoria. “Better a trans son than a dead daughter,” activists tell them. The argument has been made ever more loudly since prescriptions of puberty blockers were restricted by the NHS following a High Court decision (Bell v. Tavistock) in December 2020. We’ve been told repeatedly that children will kill themselves if they can’t get puberty-blocking drugs.

I’m tempted to put the next sentence in capital letters: it isn’t true. A hard-hitting report, published yesterday, exposes the untruth of such claims, insisting that they “do not meet basic standards for statistical evidence”. Indeed, a review of suicides and gender dysphoria at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, carried out by Professor Louis Appleby of Manchester University, could hardly be more damning.

“The data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide in young gender dysphoria patients at the Tavistock,” it says. It contains a stinging rebuke to people who have made such claims on social media, describing the discussion as “insensitive, distressing and dangerous”. The report also points out that it “goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide”.

In a highly unusual move, the report singles out the Good Law Project, which is challenging a decision by the outgoing Health Secretary, Victoria Atkins, to end the prescription of puberty blockers to children by private clinics. Its founder, Jolyon Maugham KC, launched a vicious personal attack on Atkins’s successor, Wes Streeting, after he confirmed that the new government will make the ban permanent. Maugham claimed that the ban “will kill trans children” and said his feelings about Streeting were “unprintable”.

In remarks that appeared to verge on deranged, Maugham made the hugely irresponsible claim that Streeting was locking his colleagues into “a future of bereaved parents tipping ashes outside No 10”. But he was not the only commentator to use such inflammatory language. “There is already evidence of a huge surge in the deaths of young people since their healthcare was trashed,” Guardian columnist Owen Jones stated on X last week.

Contrast those claims with the measured tone of Professor Appleby’s review. His conclusions are based on figures provided by NHS England for the period between 2018-19 and 2023-24, using an internal audit by the Tavistock of deaths among current and former patients of the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS).

There were 12 suicides during the six-year period, six of them by children under the age of 18, and no statistical difference before and after prescriptions of puberty blockers were restricted. The report specifically refutes the sensational claim that there was only one suicide on the GIDS waiting list before the 2020 judgment and 16 deaths afterwards.

“There seems to be no suicide expertise behind the claims,” the report says. The same could be said about a parade of columnists and politicians, including Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who are fond of making the claim that almost half of trans young people have attempted suicide, based on two statistically unreliable online surveys from 2017.

The report blows all this nonsense — and the emotional blackmail it’s given rise to — out of the water. Its conclusions are scathing about what it calls “the insensitivity of the ‘dead child’ rhetoric”. It goes on: “Suicide should not be a slogan or a means to winning an argument.” A lot of prominent people who have used it in just such a way should be hanging their heads in shame this weekend.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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