Hormone Therapy, Suicidal Risk, and Transgender Youth in the United States

Abstract

This study uses the 2015 US Transgender Survey to test how initiation of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) affects the risk of attempting suicide among transgender individuals. We constructed a retrospective panel and employed a stacked event study design to demonstrate that HRT is associated with a substantially lower risk of suicide attempt. The average treatment effect on the treated is a decrease of 5.7 percentage points in the risk of ever attempting suicide if HRT is started between the ages of 14 and 17, which amounts to a 14.4 percent reduction in the risk of attempting suicide relative to the pretreatment mean.