A 2026 commentary raised methodological concerns about a study linking anti-trans laws to increased suicide attempts.

A 2024 study by Lee et al. concluded that state-level anti-transgender laws increased suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary youth in the United States. However, a 2026 commentary published in Nature Human Behaviour raised several methodological concerns about the analysis.

The commentary questioned the selection of control states, noted that much of the apparent effect was driven by data from a single state, challenged the validity of the parallel trends assumption, and found that the results were not robust to alternative analytic approaches. The authors argued that these limitations weakened the study’s ability to support causal conclusions about the effects of state laws on suicide attempts.

Importantly, the study examined self-reported suicide attempts rather than suicide deaths. Suicide attempts and suicide mortality are distinct outcomes. Population-based studies of suicide mortality have found that pre-existing psychiatric comorbidities are major predictors of suicide risk. For example, a Finnish nationwide register study found that 20 of 2,083 adolescents and young adults referred to gender identity services (0.96%) died by suicide during long-term follow-up. Suicide mortality was initially higher than in matched controls from the general population, but after taking previous psychiatric treatment into account, the difference was no longer statistically significant. These findings suggest that psychiatric history, rather than gender referral status itself, largely explains the elevated suicide risk.

^{Lee, W. Y., Hobbs, J. N., Hobaica, S., DeChants, J. P., Price, M. N., & Nath, R. (2024). State-level anti-transgender laws increase past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people in the USA. Nature Human Behaviour, 8, 2096-2106. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01979-5}

^{Cohn, J., Sim, P., & Kerr, K. F. (2026). Methodological considerations for evaluating policy impacts on transgender and non-binary youth suicidality. Nature Human Behaviour. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02467-8}