Nearly a million young people. Twenty-nine studies. One conclusion that forces us to look at the mental health of transgender people with different eyes. A newly published meta-analysis finally quantifies the real size of suicide risk in transgender adolescence and young adulthood: ideation multiplies by more than two, attempts by almost three and completed suicide by nearly five compared with the cisgender population.
The authors, from Aswan University (Egypt) and the Faculty of Medicine of Suez State University, reviewed 29 studies published between 2015 and 2024 that added up to 957,163 participants: 29,041 transgender people and 928,122 cisgender people. It is by far the largest analysis carried out on this subject so far.
The figures speak for themselves. Suicidal ideation affected 52.2% of transgender men and 49.5% of transgender women, compared with 18.1% of cisgender men and 22.4% of cisgender women. Suicide attempts appeared in 48% to 51% of transgender youth, compared with 18% to 22% in cisgender youth.
Translated into relative risk, transgender youth had a 2.38 times higher probability of having suicidal thoughts, 2.85 times higher of attempting suicide and up to 4.80 times higher of completing it, compared with their cisgender peers.
The authors insist, however, on a necessary caution. The heterogeneity between studies was very high (above 90%), which indicates that the results are not uniform and must be interpreted with care. In addition, the publication-bias analysis suggests that the raw figures could be overestimated: when that bias is corrected statistically, the relative risk of ideation falls to 1.25.
One additional relevant finding: no significant differences were found between transgender men and women. The vulnerability is common to both groups, and points to one and the same backdrop —the distress of gender incongruence and the weight of the social environment— rather than to a feature specific to either of them.
The researchers close by calling for more high-quality longitudinal studies. The message, in any case, is clear: gender dysphoria in young people is not a minor phenomenon, and monitoring it should be a health priority.
Source: Suicide Risk Among Transgender Adolescents and Young Adults: A Meta-Analysis of Nearly One Million Participants. Hassan NAIF, Toraih EA, Shebl MA, et al. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research 2026;35(2):e70077. DOI: 10.1002/mpr.70077.
Read the publication: International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research.
Article published on dosier.es. Image generated with artificial intelligence (marta ai → marta.syf.es).
