There is no reason to believe that SRS will "cure" your depression. Suicide rates stay just as high post-op. Many people undergo the procedure only to find it did not help them at all.
Oh, I'm well aware of that, though it's a good addition to the discussion. The thing about transitioning is that it's a long process, there are many points where you can turn back if it's not working, and not everyone takes the same steps anyway.
For some people, "The Surgery", (sometimes called Sexual Reassignment Surgery, but many people prefer the term Gender Confirmation Surgery, or just "bottom surgery", as opposed to breast implants which are "top surgery"), is the main thing, but for an awful lot of people, it isn't -- even though most non-trans folk seem to think of it that way. For a lot of trans people, living day to day life as their real gender is the important thing, and they're not so hung up on what's between their legs. For some people, hormones help them feel like they're "supposed to", and that's the main thing. For others, they hate their chest, and top surgery is most important. While others may think that Facial Feminization Surgery (FFS) is the most crucial -- not least because for many trans women, FFS is the difference between passing and not passing, which makes an enormous practical difference in day-to-day life and often even in terms of personal safety.
For me, I've read a lot about this, including many personal accounts, and heard a number of first hand stories from a group I've started attending. I honestly don't know how things will work out for me if/when I start transitioning. I've heard enough horror stories to go into the process with the appropriate level of fear and caution.
But at some point when your life becomes one big well of depression that doesn't respond to medication and you start to lose your ability to function in day-to-day life, there's really nothing left to do but start trying to explore the remaining options. So, I'm not transitioning, but I'm looking into it and trying to figure out what the hell I'm going to do.
Replying to yourself to take a snipe at someone else, with no data of your own, is pretty weak. Especially when you are wrong. In just 30 seconds of searching, I found a 2011 long term study conducted in Sweden that concluded the "overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher... particularly death from suicide".
I have no stake in this discussion, and if anything, am generally opposed to the topic/lifestyle/whatever. But I have empathy for anyone going through such depression that they ultimately take their own lives. When the primary end goal for many is SRS/GCS, and when the data suggests that leads to higher suicide rates, I find it deplorable that anyone would try to suppress that information.
Some might even say that is good example of cocksure, willful ignorance.
I'm not sure what you mean by being "opposed" -- if you don't think there should be people who are unbearably unhappy with the gender they got stuck with at birth, we agree. If you think people shouldn't play around at being the other gender, that's not what we're talking about, because I can assure you that those of us with this problem are deadly serious about it, and a lot of us would be quite happy if we could find a way to go through life in a functional way without having to make the kind of enormous, life-altering changes involved in transitioning.
I have heard lots of studies on trans folk kicked around, but some of these things have inherent methodological problems. In particular, I think we're all aware that the gold standard for medical efficacy studies is double blind studies, and it's pretty obvious that a double blind study on SRS is impossible, right? Worse yet, in this study they're not even comparing SRS patients with other trans folk who didn't have an operation, they're comparing them with the general population of people of their original assigned birth sex.[1] We already know that trans people have an enormously high suicide rate already, so this comparison tells us absolutely nothing about a before/after comparison, never mind what we really want to know: what happens to the same population if they do/don't get surgery.
"The overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up (aHR 2.8; 95% CI 1.8–4.3) than for controls of the same birth sex, particularly death from suicide."
So trans people are at an increased risk of suicide compared to cis people of the gender the trans person transitioned into.
The original claim was that trans people are at increased risk of suicide post-op relative to pre-op transsexuals!
You're "generally opposed" to a medical intervention that has dramatically improved the lives of many thousands of people over the last 50+ years? You're "generally opposed" to something that I know for a fact has dramatically improved my own life?
Go fuck yourself. I'm not wrong, you misrepresented the study and you're a bigot.
