Transgender affirmation surgery: Going from bad to worse

Who knew that mental health problems would be exacerbated by surgical treatment to change one’s sex organs? And that with such comes nearly a 600% rise in psychiatric morbidity as one cohort shows?

For years the public has been told that if a person claiming to have a different “gender” does not have their beliefs affirmed and have their sex organ mutilated, then such would result in a suicide pandemic.

In the end, reality stepped in and no surprises: apparently the psychiatric needs of those questioning their gender, particularly adolescents, did not subside — and in fact got worse — after medical sex “reassignment.”

First off, a Swedish study — “Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden” (by Dhejne, et al., February 2011) — was unambiguous: The study reported a 19-fold in-creased risk of death by suicide and nearly five times the risk of suicide attempts after gender transition relative to matched controls. These are catastrophic numbers.

Then a recent landmark study came, this time from Finland: “Psychiatric Morbidity Among Adolescents and Young Adults Who Contacted Specialized Gender Identity Services in Finland in 1996-2019: A Register Study” (by Ruuska, etc.; April 2026), the rigorous long-term data basically wrecked the widespread progressive narrative.

In simple terms, the Finnish study found:

• Gender-referred adolescents show high psychiatric morbidity, yet gender differences and mental health trajectories after medical gender reassignment remain poorly understood.

• Such adolescents had markedly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions — on some, they might even have a negative impact.

• Findings emphasize the need for thorough psychiatric assessment and ongoing treatment throughout medical gender reassignment.

The conclusion? “Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals. Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.”

To be clear, the latter figures compare post-transition individuals to the general population, not to their own pre-transition baseline. But that clarification does not rescue the progressive narrative. Because if medical transi-tion were truly addressing the root cause of “depression, self-harm, and suicidality,” one would expect outcomes to converge toward population norms. They do not. The need for specialist psychiatric services, i.e., those in-volving serious mental disorders, actually increased after medical transition.

Professor Riittakerttu Kaltiala (one of the authors of the Finnish study) explained: “Many developed feelings of gender dysphoria in the context of severe disorders.” And yet, “if it were the other way around, and the mental disorders were secondary to the dysphoria, those disorders would be expected to subside with medical gender reassignment, according to the Dutch treatment protocol adopted internationally.” (“Transition blues,” Gender Clinic News, April 2026; also “Finland’s Lessons on Transgender Children,” Wall Street Journal, April 2026).

This aligns with broader analyses of population-level data. As summarized in “The Crumbling Sham of Trans Medicine” (Breakpoint.org, April 2026): “The new Finnish study provides the ‘good evidence.’ Its findings on long-term outcomes, based on extremely strong data sets, don’t bode well for trans activists’ overconfident claims. Finland’s government-run medical system has an extremely rigorous tracking system containing detailed medical and psy-chiatric records on all citizens dating back to 1994. Drawing from this, the study conducted an analysis of every patient under 23 who attended Finnish gender identity clinics from 1996 to 2019 and compared them with a matched control group.

“This means their study population is uniquely comprehensive — it analyzed the entire gender treatment patient population in the country for years and years. Other studies have only included those who chose to take part, seriously undermining the validity of their claims. The Finnish school system also regularly screens students for mental health disorders. It consists of two timeframes: 1996 to 2010, and 2011 to 2019, the time when those ‘trans identity’ numbers started exploding in many countries, likely from social contagion.”

So, what can be gleamed from the two studies, particularly the Finnish one? In blunt, stark terms:

• 10% of boys who want to become girls suffer from psychiatric morbidity (a major risk factor for suicidality). But after gender change surgery — where the penis is inverted into a vagina — 60% become suicidal.

• 21% of girls who want to become boys have psychiatric morbidity. But after gender change surgery — metoidioplasty where the clitoris is turned into a penis, or phalloplasty where grafted skin is used to form a neopenis — that increases to 55%.

“So, what did this comprehensive Finnish study find? It’s a pretty direct conclusion: The whole basis of transgender ideology and practice is wrong. As the [Finnish] study revealed, ‘Gender-referred adolescents showed sig-nificantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls,’ and severe psychiatric morbidity increased substantially in two-plus year clinical follow-ups’,” said Breakpoint’s John Stonestreet and Glenn Stanton.

The foregoing essentially supports the Cass Review of gender identity services for children and young people, said the Breakpoint story, quoting: “Tragically deaths by suicide in trans people of all ages continue to be above the national average, but there is no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce this.”

Bottomline, the Swedish and Finnish studies confirm what commonsense already knew: that gender confused patients aren’t only confused but also mentally unwell. Treatments affirming their delusions just make things worse.

Jemy Gatdula is the dean of the UA&P Law School and is a Philippine Judicial Academy lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence. The views expressed here are his own and not necessarily of the institutions to which he belongs. https://www.facebook.com/jigatdula/