Hormone Therapy, Suicidal Risk, and Transgender Youth in the U.S.

Abstract

This study uses the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey to test how hormone replacement therapy (HRT) initiation affects the risk of attempting suicide among transgender individuals. We construct a retrospective panel of transgender people and employ a stacked event study design. Our results indicate that HRT initiation is associated with a statistically significant and substantially lower risk of suicide attempts. The average treatment effect on the treated effect is a decrease of 5.7 percentage points in the risk of ever attempting suicide if HRT started between the ages of 14 and 17. This is a 14.4% reduction in the risk of attempting suicide relative to the pretreatment mean.

Note:
Funding Information: No funding was received for this work.

Conflict of Interests: The authors declare they have no conflict of interest.

Keywords: Transgender, Hormone Therapy, Mental Health, Suicide

JEL Classification: I14, I18, I31, J15