Somewhere in America, a parent sat in a pediatrician's office and heard words that ended the appointment as they'd expected it to go. The phrasing varied by doctor, by city, by clinic — but the core of it was the same: your child believes they were born in the wrong body, and if they can't get the treatments they're asking for, the suicide risk climbs by 72 percent. The study was published in a scientific journal. Every major outlet had covered it. The Senate had cited it. The pediatrician had read it and believed it and was now saying it out loud, in this office, to this parent. You can choose between a live son or a dead daughter.
The number was a lie.
Jay Greene, Director of Research at Do No Harm, and Ian Kingsbury, the organization's Senior Director of the Center for Accountability in Medicine, went to the actual data. Starting in 2022, 23 states restricted all or some transgender treatments for minors — covering 47 percent of the nation's transgender-identifying youth. Those states created something the original researchers never used: a natural laboratory. Real comparisons between teen suicide trends in states with restrictions and states without them, drawn from CDC data, controlled at every stage for everything else that moves youth suicide rates.
The result: zero evidence that state policies led to increased suicide rates.
The study behind the 72 percent figure had a lead author named Wilson Lee and co-authors affiliated with the Trevor Project — the activist organization that runs its own surveys and then publishes research from the results. The sample was 35,196 minors recruited through social media by advocacy groups.
Lee told reporters, "We presented causal evidence that enacting state-level anti-transgender legislation increased suicide attempts." Co-author Ronita Nath called it "the first time any study has shown this causal relationship." A third co-author explained their goal to CNN directly: "We knew if we were able to show this it would be a breakthrough for using definitive scientific evidence to support calls for protective and affirming policies."
They decided the conclusion before they ran the study. Then they built the study to reach it.
The statistical case collapsed under scrutiny. The entire significance of the finding — which barely cleared the threshold at p=0.049 — traced back to approximately 100 youth in a single state: Idaho. Idaho's two relevant laws had been blocked in court over a year before the observed spike in reported attempts. The laws had never been in effect when the spike supposedly happened.
The doctors who cited the 72 percent figure in exam rooms were not citing a flawed study. They were citing a finding whose entire statistical weight came from a state where the relevant laws didn't exist.
Meanwhile, the CDC's own 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 72 percent of transgender-identifying high school students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness. That's a real number — just about the wrong thing. Sadness is not suicide, and the researchers who compressed one into the other did it for a reason.
The reason was surgical. The "transition or die" framework gave cover to every physician who prescribed puberty blockers to a 12-year-old, every clinic that performed double mastectomies on teenage girls, every school counselor who facilitated a social transition without parental knowledge. If the alternative was death, who could object?
The previous flagship studies on gender medicine collapsed under their own weight too. A New England Journal of Medicine study measured outcomes for patients who transitioned but never compared them to patients who didn't — no control group, no way to know what caused the changes they recorded. A JAMA Network Open study had a comparison group, then watched it evaporate before the study ended.
Greene and Kingsbury published their methodology, data, and statistical code so that anyone can check their work. The 72 percent study was built on a proprietary survey from an advocacy organization.
One of these is how science works. The other is how lobbying works.
The activists driving this claim, Greene and Kingsbury write, are "bludgeoning society into accepting invasive, irreversible medical interventions for children." Unless they can produce actual evidence linking state restrictions to teen suicide, that's what it is — a manipulative bluff.
The parents who heard "a live son or a dead daughter" from their child's doctor made permanent decisions for their children based on a number that was never true. The doctors who used it were practicing activism masquerading as medical expertise. The outlets that amplified it haven't called it that.
