e to have a higher risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. One study found that, compared to controls, sex-reassigned individuals were about 5 times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.
- Children are a special case when addressing transgender issues. Only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.
- There is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of interventions that delay puberty or modify the secondary sex characteristics of adolescents, although some children may have improved psychological well-being if they are encouraged and supported in their cross-gender identification. There is no evidence that all children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior should be encouraged to become transgender.
The New Atlantis is published by the Center for the Study of Technology and Society and can be found at http://www.TheNewAtlantis.com.
Lawrence S. Mayer and Paul R. McHugh, “Executive Summary,” Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences, The New Atlantis, Number 50, Fall 2016, pp. 7-9.
Lawrence S. Mayer, M.B., M.S., Ph.D. is a scholar in residence in the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University.
He is a biostatistician and epidemiologist who focuses on the design, analysis, and interpretation of experimental and observational data in public health and medicine, particularly when the data are complex in terms of underlying scientific issues.
Mayer studied psychology (pre-med) at Arizona State University and Ohio State University; studied medicine and mathematics at Ohio State University; and trained in medicine and psychiatry in the United Kingdom, obtaining his M.B. (the British equivalent to the American M.D.) in 1970 from the Guy’s Hospital Medical School, although he never practiced medicine (including psychiatry) in the United States or abroad. He earned an M.S. in mathematics from Ohio State in 1969 and a Ph.D. in statistics and biostatistics from Ohio State in 1971. His dissertation was titled “Utilizing Initial Estimates in Estimating the Coefficients in a General Linear Model.”
He has held professorial appointments at eight universities (Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, Arizona State University, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and School of Medicine, Ohio State, Virginia Tech, and the University of Michigan), and has also held research faculty appointments at several other institutions (including, from 2014 to 2016, the Mayo Clinic). His full-time and part-time appointments have been in twenty-three disciplines, including statistics, biostatistics, epidemiology, public health, social methodology, psychiatry, mathematics, sociology, political science, economics, and biomedical informatics.