Has America Been Gaslit Regarding Transgender Suicides?
At least six major hospitals across the United States have recently agreed to stop providing gender-transition treatment to teens. According to the New York Times, this development stems from an agreement with the Justice Department after an investigation produced evidence of potential legal violations related to hospital billing practices and consumer fraud.
Settlement Terms
Under the agreement, the hospitals must pay fines and provide former patients with free medical care to address side effects or support detransition.
Interpretation of the settlement
The settlement supports two claims:
1. For young people, the risks of gender-transition treatment outweigh its benefits.
2. The hospitals overbilled patients or insurers to maximize profits.
International Context
The agreement also comes years after Britain’s National Health Service decided to close the United Kingdom’s only gender clinic for children and teenagers.
The government’s settlement with six hospitals underscores a contentious decades-long debate between supporters and opponents of gender-transition care. Pro-treatment commentators have consistently argued that gender-transition care is necessary to prevent an increase in suicide rates among teens with gender dysphoria. Consistent with such contentions, the University of Michigan Health-West Hospital refused to allow a Christian nurse—Valerie Kloosterman—to receive a religious exemption from engaging in hospital-mandated gender affirming behavior after she declined to validate the gender identity of gender dysphoria patients.
Now a growing body of evidence from outside the United States suggests that virtually no evidence supports the contention that restricting gender transition interventions contributes to rising suicide rates. Contrary to such contentions, a large-scale study of health data on Finnish youths who sought care from gender clinics undermines the claim that gender-transition interventions improve the mental health of gender-care recipients. Indeed, the study found that serious mental health problems increased dramatically among adolescents and young adults who underwent gender-transition interventions.
According to Ian Kingsbury, senior director of the Do No Harm Center for Accountability in Medicine, an examination of the highly disputed contention that restrictions on pediatric procedures for gender dysphoria patients will lead to self-harming behavior inexorably leads to the conclusion that such claims are bogus. In his view, the “transgender industrial complex” has weaponized spurious studies to victimize vulnerable children so that they undergo irreversible sterilizing procedures.
Perhaps in response to the data, European countries such as Finland and the United Kingdom allow only adults to receive surgical sex changes. “In Sweden and the Netherlands, minors cannot receive genital surgeries, but teenagers can receive chest surgeries once they reach 16 years old. Fewer than half of the states in the United States prohibit transgender surgeries for minors — but the number of states banning such procedures has increased substantially over the last few years.”
As more and more empirical evidence surfaces, it is imperative to remember the courage of Valerie Kloosterman, who treated every patient at University of Michigan Health-West with the same steady care. But when she asked for one religious accommodation — to skip a mandatory training that required her to make affirming statements about gender identity that conflicted with her Christian faith—hospital officials responded by calling her into a room and, according to her lawsuit, told her she was evil.
Kloosterman was told she could not bring her Christian beliefs into the workplace and was accused of contributing to suicides among patients with gender dysphoria. She sued, and a lower court tossed her case in 2023, but the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling in 2025.
This year, University of Michigan Health-West agreed to pay $410,000 in damages and fees and, for the first time, to write an actual religious-accommodation policy. First Liberty Institute, which represented Kloosterman alongside co-counsel, announced the settlement in late July. It appears that the empirical data have now vindicated her courage. In addition, the data suggest Americans have been gaslit all along.