Shocker: New Study Identifies Dramatic Rise in Mortality for 'Trans-Women" Who Use Cross Sex Hormones

AP Photo/Eric Gay

One of the most frustrating things for opponents of alphabet ideology is that the entire intellectual framework is based on lies.

A lot of the support for treating "gender dysphoria" medically instead of through psychology is based on a belief that "experts" and physicians are authorities whom we should trust. Their judgment, after all, is based on science and not intuition, so rejecting their advice is just another example of the growing anti-science movement among conservatives. 

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It's hard to push back on this idea because the entire premise is that credentials should equal authority, and those of us without credentials have an almost impossible task overcoming the resistance of people whose faith in the highly credentials  seems unshakeable. 

That, I believe, is why the most highly educated laymen are the most difficult to dissuade from their mistaken beliefs. Well-meaning, highly educated people believe that the white coats are right and the rubes are wrong because they believe in our education system. Nothing is more persuasive to them than a "consensus" among scientists or "experts," even if that consensus is manufactured and not organic. 

Alphabet ideology is a perfect example of this. Despite there being zero actual evidence behind medicalizing a "dysphoria," a decades-long ideologically based campaign has created a false consensus among the most vocal "experts," and our elites have mobilized to preach the catechism of puberty blockers, hormones, and mutilating surgery. 

The intellectual edifice that the activists built is slowly crumbling, with (mostly European) scientists and doctors examining the all-too-sparse evidence and determining that it is crap, but unfortunately, it will take a mountain more to prove that the alphabet advocates have been lying all along. There is just too much investment that has been made in justifying and promoting policies that have been harming children, and admitting the facts will cost people money, ruin the emotional lives of parents who participated in the harming of their own children, and chip away at the authority of an Establishment whose biggest asset is unearned authority. 

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Still, the changing political environment has encouraged actual scientists to emerge from their defensive crouch and do the work of disproving the lies. 

The biggest lie, of course, is that medical treatments for gender dysphoria are safe and effective, and that they save lives. 

Any sane person would at least have doubts about this claim, based on common sense. Human bodies have evolved over millennia to work in certain ways, and even modest imbalances in hormones can wreak havoc on a body. Ask anybody with low or high thyroid-stimulating hormone, for instance, what it does to their bodies and their mood, and you will get a long list of problems they suffer from until treatment. 

My wife has low TSH, and I have hyperthyroidism. I can tell you that both have dramatic impacts on your well-being. 

The same is true for other hormone imbalances, which can wreak havoc on your body and your mood. This is why we have an entire discipline of endocrinology in the first place. 

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Alphabet ideologists insist that blocking sex hormones and reversing the balance of estrogen and testosterone will have nothing but positive effects and save lives, despite there being no evidence for this extraordinary claim. 

All the evidence is on the other side, as you would expect. 

It doesn't take a deep dive into the literature to reveal what any serious biologist could have guessed without thinking about it: that injecting men with doses of estrogen would cause serious health issues, and in this fairly deep dive, the results indeed confirm this prediction. 

I encourage you to read the paper because summarizing it would take more time than necessary to get across the point. Far from being helpful or even benign, following "Gender-affirming" treatment recommendations is a horrible idea and leads to all sorts of problems and an early death for the "patients."

Heart disease, stroke, bone loss, cognitive impairment, cancer, immune disorders, depression, suicide, and a dramatic rise in all-cause mortality are the tip of the iceberg. The increases in all of these are not small—add them all together and the risk of early death—often quite early—leaps by 50%. 

Put a man on estrogen and his brain literally shrinks. 

As you might imagine, since this is a scientific study, the tone is highly clinical, but the bottom line is inescapable: leaping into treating anybody, and especially children, with puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery is grossly unethical. The evidence base for doing so is extremely weak, and the evidence that doing so causes deadly harm is extremely strong. 

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This paper includes many reviews and observational studies of safety signals ranging from cohort control studies to case studies. Even though the latter are often criticized as weak evidence for treatment benefits, they are valuable for identifying possible harms, especially rare or severe adverse effects that may not be detected or reported in limited-duration clinical trials. Important safety signals sometimes only become apparent through case series, individual case reports, or post-marketing surveillance, rather than randomized controlled trials that focus more on detection of benefits rather than (perhaps) somewhat rarer harms (which might only become apparent only over the longer term). Even if causality cannot (perhaps yet) be firmly established, adverse effects must be reported to communicate potential risks to clinicians and patients, as part of a full account of patient experiences, and, as we elaborate below, to motivate future investigation. In addition, medical decision-making tends to prioritize avoiding harm over achieving benefit, particularly when harms are severe and benefits are modest. This risk aversion means that even weak evidence of harm, such as from case reports, is taken seriously in clinical practice. Cataloguing potential harms is thus a critical part of evaluating treatments, and as noted above, for gender-affirming hormone therapy for natal males these harms are occurring alongside an inability to identify those likely to benefit from these interventions [20].Footnote2 This focus on harms should be seen as a necessary component of patient safety and informed clinical decision-making.

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Obviously, those of us who are fighting gender ideology should be buoyed by an additional piece of evidence that we are on the right path, but if we stop there we are missing a greater and vitally important opportunity: doing the work to destroy ideologically-driven "science" and the unearned authority that white coats give activists. 

We are constantly bombarded by claims that there is a "scientific consensus" that backs up extraordinary and implausible claims driven by ideology. Whether it is gender ideology, climate hysteria, or any of a large number of public policy-adjacent agendas, activists use phony science to convince people to do great harm. 

We don't just need to win the gender ideology battle, as important as that is. We need to destroy the activist complex that bashes us over the head with phony scientistic claims that use phony evidence. 

The COVID-industrial complex that used the pandemic to fundamentally reshape society woke a lot of people up, but hardly enough. We need to point out the lies—not mistakes, but lies—and use them to destroy the credibility of politicized "experts" who are destroying our society. 


  • Editor’s Note: Every single day, here at Hot Air, we will stand up and FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT against the radical left and deliver the conservative reporting our readers deserve. Sometimes, however, we just point and laugh, and let the radical Left embarrass itself. This is one of those times.

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David Strom 10:00 AM | December 11, 2025
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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | December 10, 2025
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