Being Goth doesn’t drive teens to suicide; being suicidal drives teens to Goth. The same may be true of transgenderism.

by Will Boisvert

Today’s youth transgender movement bears a strong resemblance to the Goth subculture of a decade or two ago. Both take root mainly among teens and young adults, both give misfits a way to demonstrate solidarity against mainstream society, and both have a taste for lurid, sexually ambiguous fashions.

They share another crucial characteristic as well: sky-high rates of suicidality.

Transgender teens have notoriously high rates of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts. A typical 2018 study by Toomey et al found that 51.8 percent of female-to-male transgender adolescents in the United States self-reported a sucide attempt. The attempt rate for nonbinary teens was 41.8 percent, for male-to-female transgenders 29.9 percent, and for gender-questioning teens 27.9 percent.

These high suicide-attempt rates—two to four times as high as the 14 percent rate for non-transgender teens in the study’s comparison group—are taken as proof that transgenders face societal persecution, with devastating effects on their mental health. As the Trevor Project, an anti-suicide group for LGBT teens, puts it, “LGBTQ youth are not inherently prone to suicide risk because of their sexual orientation or gender identity but rather placed at higher risk because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized in society.” Those suicide risks are the linchpin of the trans-rights moral argument: unless we use transgender kids’ preferred pronouns, welcome them into their chosen restrooms, locker-rooms and sports competitions, and medically transition them to their “authentic” identities, many will kill themselves.

But that rationale isn’t the only way to explain high teen suicide rates. Consider Goths: a 2006 study of adolescent Scottish Goths by Robert Young et al found comparably high rates of suicide attempts—up to 47 percent for hardcore Goths after taking into account drug use and other confounding variables. Goths seem quite similar to transgenders in their self-harming behavior, but it’s hard to fit them into the identitarian framework that views suicidality as the reaction of an oppressed minority to bigotry. Goths, like transgenders, sometimes get bullied and ridiculed. But being a Goth isn’t an immutable aspect of the self (unless we concede that every Goth really is a vampire born in the body of a mortal). If bigotry were driving Goths to suicide, they could just stop being Goth and end the harassment.

The fact that Goth suicidality is so high suggests that the theory of suicide as a stigmatized minority’s response to persecution gets things backwards: being a Goth doesn’t drive you to become suicidal; being suicidal drives you to become a Goth. People with pre-existing suicidal tendencies feel drawn to subcultures whose manners and mores resonate with and validate those feelings. Suicide rates among Goths are high because it’s a club that people with suicidal impulses like to join and feel at home in. The same is likely true of transgenderism.

That’s one conclusion of a recent article in City Journal by Leor Sapir, who writes, “[i]t is more likely that teenagers with suicidal tendencies are gravitating toward a trans identity—perhaps believing that the fresh start promised by gender transition will solve their problems—than that some kids are born transgender and are suicidal as a result of being an embattled minority (the ‘minority stress’ theory).” Sapir notes the high rates of pre-existing anxiety, depression and other psychiatric comorbidities among teens who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Indeed, studies suggest that non-transgender teens with similar rates of psychiatric issues have suicidality rates comparable to those of transgenders.

In 2023, a misfit kid with psychological issues and suicidal feelings will be encouraged by social media, queerer-than-thou friends, teachers and therapists to adopt transgenderism as his natural home. But the underlying psychological problems don’t go away after gender affirmation any more than they do after Goth affirmation—and neither does the suicidality.

Gothism functions the same way—as a social identity that attracts troubled kids. A teenager in 2006 who was depressed, alienated, friendless, uncertain about his identity, mired in substance abuse and plagued by suicidal thoughts might turn to the Goth subculture to salve his misery. There he could trade his weak, conflicted sense of self for an emphatic, luridly-dressed identity. His alienation would be treated as a badge of honor and profundity rather than a loser’s inability to cope with social expectations. His depression and drug use would seal his bond with the tribe, and his suicidal musings would be echoed and glamorized in morbid poetry and death-metal songs. Goth is in part a suicide cult, so it’s not hard to see why suicidal teens would be drawn to it; thus the strong correlation between Goth attachment and suicide attempts.

In 2023, the popular suicide cult is transgenderism. A misfit kid with psychological issues and suicidal feelings will be encouraged by social media, queerer-than-thou friends, teachers and therapists to adopt transgenderism as his natural home. There he will find not just clear self-definition and social belonging but immense social prestige. He’ll be put at the head of the pride parade, celebrated as a civil-rights hero and allowed to lecture his elders on their pronoun usage. His suicidal impulses will be treated not as a mental illness but as the martyrdom of a noble soul battling hateful bigotry. Again, it’s not hard to see why suicidal kids would be drawn to the cult—and thus boost its suicidality rate. And with rates of mental illness and suicidality soaring among teenagers it’s not surprising to see so many of them flocking to the blue-and-pink banner, even if the causes of their distress—social-media overuse, climate doomsaying, COVID isolation, autism—have nothing to do with transgenderism.

Of course, transgender affirmation and its health-care regimen are billed as the cure for suicidality, but the research purporting to show this is deeply flawed. (The much-trumpeted Tordoff study from the University of Washington, for example, claimed a 73 percent drop in suicidal ideation—thoughts of self-harm and suicide—among young people who received puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, but journalist Jesse Singal’s trenchant debunking noted that their data actually showed that transgender-affirming treatments had virtually no effect on suicidal ideation.)

When we look at actual suicides, as opposed to suicide attempts and fantasies, we again see little benefit from trans affirmation. Suicidality short of suicide is an imperfect indicator of suicide risk, because suicide attempts are often cries for help rather than earnest attempts at self-destruction. (Strategic suicide threats, and non-serious attempts, are also part of the script of youth transgenderism, recommended by transgender social-media communities as ways to pressure parents to allow transitioning.) Unfortunately, rates of successful suicide remain very high among transgender people, even after they medically transition. A long-term study of Swedish patients who underwent sex-change surgery found that their long-term suicide rate was 19 times higher than that of controls. A study of teens who received gender-affirming treatment at Britain’s Tavistock clinic found a suicide rate of about 11 per 100,000 per year, four times higher than teens of the same age in the general population.

All this research suggests that transgenderism is a symptom of underlying psychological problems that predispose kids to suicidality, rather than a cause of—or a treatment for—suicidality. Troubled adolescents make claims of gender dysphoria and transgender identification for the same reason they once joined the Goths: to express their pre-existing sense of disaffection and suicidal impulses in terms that let them enter a social group that considers these feelings acceptable and even admirable. But the underlying psychological problems don’t go away after gender affirmation any more than they do after Goth affirmation—and neither does the suicidality.

Trans identification is growing so common and vacuous that much of it is now, like casual Gothism, just a fashion statement, with celebrities donning nonbinary identities as easily as black trench coats and gloopy eyeliner. But with adolescent gender dysphoria becoming an increasingly popular, catch-all psychiatric diagnosis, we should expect the link between transgenderism and serious psychological disturbances to grow stronger as well.

As that happens, we need to stay clear on the distinction between correlation and causation. We don’t know as of this writing whether Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale, a woman who recently began identifying as a man, was taking testosterone when she went on her rampage. If she was, the hormone may have intensified her violent impulses. But it’s likelier that the link between her transgenderism and her violence, if any existed, was correlation rather than causation—that Hale had pre-existing violent urges and was drawn to transgenderism as the handiest framework for conceptualizing her mental turmoil. And while it’s also conceivable that transgenderism’s ideological shift from psychiatric condition to liberation front contributed to her murderous militance, we shouldn’t judge a movement by a few maniacs who seize upon it to rationalize their homicidal yearnings.

But we also shouldn’t accept the trans-activist narrative that blames suicidality on society’s denial of trans rights, and uses that theory as a pretext for demolishing all the conventions surrounding relations between the sexes. There is no good evidence that social stigmatization causes transgender suicidality, or that surgically altering teenagers and letting men who identify as women into women’s private spaces will alleviate it.