The Washington Stand
By Dan Hart
On Tuesday, news broke that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded a study on mostly minors who purported to identify as transgender, in which they were given cross-sex hormones over the course of two years. Two of the study’s participants ended up committing suicide, and 11 more experienced suicidal ideation. Lawmakers and doctors are expressing outrage that taxpayer dollars were used to fund a study that caused death and irreversible harm to children.
The study, entitled “Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones,” was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in January and was conducted by the Boston Children’s Hospital, the University of California at San Francisco, and the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago under a $477,444 five-year grant from NIH. It studied 315 participants aged 12-20 who identified as transgender or nonbinary, 240 of which were minors.