Transgender Youth Have Better Emotional Health after Taking Hormones, New Study Finds
Hormone therapy improves transgender young people’s well-being and social relationships, but Trump’s recent executive order and state bans threaten to take it away
By Tyler Santora edited by Tanya Lewis
Suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth jumped by as much as
72 percent from 2018 to 2022 in states that had recently passed laws to curtail their rights. And President Donald Trump took this onslaught to the federal level last month when he
signed an executive order to cut federal medical care support for trans people aged 19 and younger, which
two federal judges have since temporarily blocked. These political actions affect a set of young people who already had
much higher rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide attempts than their nontransgender peers. Many of the recent state laws ban gender-affirming care—which a 2022
study suggests is a lifeline for many trans youth. In the study, those who received gender-affirming care had 60 percent lower odds of depression and 73 percent lower odds of suicidality over a 12-month follow-up than those who did not.
A
growing body of evidence supports the mental health benefits of gender-affirming care for trans youth—including
puberty blockers, hormone therapy and, in very rare cases, surgery. Now a new study adds to this evidence: it’s the first of its kind to show that hormone therapy improves overall emotional health among trans youth.
For the new study, published in January in the
Journal of Adolescent Health, researchers tracked the emotional health of 315 trans youth aged 12 to 20 for two years after they began using hormone therapy (testosterone or estrogen). Emotional health is a component of mental health that concerns feelings; it shapes how we act in relationships, react to struggles and generally behave in everyday life. The study also tracked appearance congruence, a measure of how much a person’s physical presentation matches their gender identity.
Over two years, appearance congruence (based on a validated nine-question metric) improved in tandem with all five domains of emotional health: psychological well-being; self-efficacy, or the belief that one can achieve one’s goals; social satisfaction, including friendship, emotional support and loneliness; negative social perception, or perceived hostility and rejection; and negative affect, or anger, sadness and fear.
Before taking hormones, the participants, on average, had what the authors called “clinically concerning” scores in the areas of friendship and life satisfaction. After just six months of taking hormones, however, these averages reached healthy levels. The study authors declined to comment on the findings.
“This adds to a
body of literature that’s already shown improvements in mental health outcomes and safety,” says Jae Corman, an affiliate assistant professor of health systems management and policy at Oregon Health & Science University and head of ....
Hormone therapy improves transgender young people’s well-being and social relationships, but Trump’s recent executive order and state bans threaten to take it away
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