Gender non-conformity and mental health

Recent evidence suggests that far more adolescents are unhappy with their biological gender than we ever thought in the past. We also know that transgender adults have disturbingly high levels of mental illness and damaging substance abuse, perhaps because of their perceived torment of being ‘born into the wrong body’. So to what extent do such feelings affect the mental health of teenagers?

Coincidentally, two US studies have come to much the same conclusions: that adolescents with gender identity issues have poorer mental health. The first was a secondary analysis of data from the US-wide Profiles of Student Life survey, which gathered questionnaire responses from over 120 000 young people aged 11 to 19 years between 2012 and 2015 (Toomey R et al doi: 10. 1542/peds0.2017–4218). Each was asked to identify themselves as female (50.6%), male (48%), transgender male to female (0.1%), female to male (0.3%), neither gender (0.3%),...

from Archives of Disease in Childhood current issue https://ift.tt/2DOR5xA