In recent months, anti-trans activists have targeted gender-affirming care, asserting that the evidence supporting it isn’t high quality according to the Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) system’s standards — a system that places a premium on randomized clinical trials. However, scientific experts and federal court judges have found the use of the term “high quality evidence” to be highly misleading. In fact, roughly 90% of all medical care lacks “high quality evidence” based on this system, but there are no similar calls to ban those medications and procedures. This discrepancy largely stems from the fact that randomized clinical trials are often impractical or unethical for many medications and conditions. Now, researchers in Melbourne, Australia, recently conducted the first randomized clinical trial to study the impact of gender-affirming care on transgender individuals. Their findings showed that gender-affirming care led to a reduction of suicidality in 55% of the treatment group receiving hormones, compared with just 5% in the control group. Researchers in Melbourne, Australia, studied 64 transmasculine individuals who sought testosterone. Participants were randomly split into a treatment group and a control group. The treatment group received their gender-affirming care within a week, while the control group waited three months. Both groups were evaluated for suicidality, dysphoria, and depression. Three months later, they were assessed again. The findings showed that suicidality scores halved for the treatment group, but remained unchanged for the control group.
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