Vijaya Gadde on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1258
“looked at the number of transgender youths that were committing suicide. It's an astronomical, I'm sorry, I can't find it right now in front of me. It's a really, really high statistic. That's like 10 times what the normal suicide rate is of normal teenagers.”
What the evidence says
Gadde claimed research (citing the American Academy of Pediatrics) found transgender youth suicide rates roughly 10 times the rate for "normal teenagers." The best-matching contemporaneous study, published in the AAP's journal Pediatrics in 2018 (Toomey et al., N=120,617 adolescents), measured lifetime suicide attempts, not completed suicides, and found rates of 50.8% for female-to-male transgender adolescents and 29.9% for male-to-female transgender adolescents, compared with 9.8% for cisgender male and 17.6% for cisgender female adolescents. That is an elevation of roughly three to five times the cisgender rate depending on subgroup and comparison sex, not ten times. Other research, including CDC and Trevor Project survey data, similarly documents substantially higher suicidality (ideation and attempts) among transgender youth than cisgender peers, but no widely cited AAP-linked figure establishes a clean 10x multiplier, and none of these studies measure completed suicide rates, which are tracked differently and are far rarer than attempts. The underlying direction of the claim (markedly elevated suicide risk among transgender youth) is well supported, but the specific "10 times" figure attributed to AAP research appears to be an imprecise recollection rather than a documented statistic.