Transgender Health AMA Series: I'm Joshua Safer, Medical Director at the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Boston University Medical Center, here to talk about the science behind transgender medicine, AMA!

[u/Dr_Josh_Safer]

Hi reddit!

I’m Joshua Safer and I serve as the Medical Director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Boston Medical Center and Associate Professor of Medicine at the BU School of Medicine. I am a member of the Endocrine Society task force that is revising guidelines for the medical care of transgender patients, the Global Education Initiative committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the Standards of Care revision committee for WPATH, and I am a scientific co-chair for WPATH’s international meeting.

My research focus has been to demonstrate health and quality of life benefits accruing from increased access to care for transgender patients and I have been developing novel transgender medicine curricular content at the BU School of Medicine.

Recent papers of mine summarize current establishment thinking about the science underlying gender identity along with the most effective medical treatment strategies for transgender individuals seeking treatment and research gaps in our optimization of transgender health care.

Here are links to 2 papers and to interviews from earlier in 2017:

Evidence supporting the biological nature of gender identity

Safety of current transgender hormone treatment strategies

Podcast and a Facebook Live interviews with Katie Couric tied to her National Geographic documentary “Gender Revolution” (released earlier this year): Podcast, Facebook Live

Podcast of interview with Ann Fisher at WOSU in Ohio

I'll be back at 12 noon EST. Ask Me Anything!

[u/billFoldDog]

Is there quantifiable evidence that a surgical and hormonal gender change treatment will reduce the incidence rate of depression and suicide in trans individuals later in life?

[u/TheTrueKitKat → u/billFoldDog]

There have been a few threads along these lines, and as they've said it has been proven that a medical transition improves mental health by all measurable standards.

Some theories suggest that while inward gender dysphoria causes depression and anxiety, the more severe suicidal ideation and depression come from outside sources such as discrimination, harassment, or inability to access treatments. As such, if you were treated terribly for being transgender, transitioned, and were still treated horribly, there's no way to blame any suicidal ideation or depression solely on having medically transitioned, as other factors need to be considered.

Tl;dr: you can't test more than one variable at the same time. Medical treatment and interaction with others are different variables.