A newly released Finnish study found gender distressed teenagers suffer worse mental health outcomes when they are lied to and deceived into believing they can be the opposite sex.

The study should raise serious red flags for gender ideology activists and medical practitioners in Australia.

The study, published in Acta Paediatrica, tracked over 2,000 individuals under the age of 23 who contacted specialist gender identity services in Finland between 1996 and 2019. Each participant was matched with eight population controls for comparison, giving researchers a large and nationally representative picture of psychiatric need over nearly three decades.

Before attending gender identity services, 45.7% of the gender-referred group had already received specialist-level psychiatric treatment, compared with 15% of controls. Two or more years after referral, that figure rose to 61.7% in the gender-referred group, while the control group remained stable at around 14.6%. The scale of the difference is striking and persisted across both males and females.

Among young people who went on to receive medical gender reassignment, the increase in psychiatric need was particularly sharp. Those who underwent feminising treatment saw psychiatric morbidity rise from 9.8% before referral to 60.7% in follow-up. For those who received masculinising treatment, rates climbed from 21.6% to 54.5%. These figures challenge the widely cited expectation that gender-affirming medical care substantially reduces mental health difficulties in adolescents.

It is staggering that politicians, the judiciary and the media in this country still persist in lying to and deceiving people into believing they can become the opposite sex. 

No human has ever changed sex and these kinds of studies prove how detrimental it is to persist with the lie.

Our young people deserve far more from the medical practitioners and adults in their world. No doubt many of them are suffering distress, but lies and harmful drugs are not the way forward. They need support and care that will not leave them worse off with irreversible catastrophic harm.