This is what the world is coming to ….2023

Transgender children show an increased susceptibility to mental health problems and suicidality compared to cisgender children, according to research published in JAMA Network Open.

Previous research suggests that transgender children experience concerning levels of depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. However, much of the research focused on transgender youth include patients attending specialist gender clinics or patients recruited through convenience sampling.

Investigators sought to address the limitations of these studies by conducting research with representative community samples to allow for the generalization of findings. They conducted a cohort study comparing mental health outcomes between transgender and cisgender children 9 to 10 years of age who completed baseline assessment in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study.

The Adolescent Brian Cognitive Development study recruited more than 11,000 children across the United States using multistage probability sampling with the aim of obtaining a representative sample of the US population. Data were collected from the parent-reported Child Behavior Checklist.

T scores for suicidality and 6 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5)-oriented subscales, including depressive, anxiety, somatic, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant, and conduct problems were used in the statistical analyses.

The analysis included 7169 children who understood and answered the question “Are you transgender?” Of these, 58 participants were transgender and 7111 were cisgender. The mean (SD) age of participants was 10.03 (0.62) years.

Transgender children represented 0.8% (weighted) of respondents. For all 6 subscales, transgender children recorded higher mean T scores, though these were all in the reference range and the standardized mean difference in each case was small.

Researchers also determined the proportion of cisgender and transgender children who scored in the borderline or clinical range (T 65) for each subscale. The odds ratio of transgender children being in this range was increased for all 6 subscales (range, 1.57 [95% CI, 0.50-4.91] to 3.13 [95% CI, 1.46-6.71]) and for suicidality (odds ratio, 5.79 [95% CI, 2.08-16.16]).