What’s surprising, in light of all these quotes, is that the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false.
Among the kids who went on hormones, there isn’t genuine statistical improvement here from baseline to the final wave of data collection.
The kids in the study arrived with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems, many of them went on blockers or hormones, and they exited the study with what appear to be alarmingly high rates of mental health problems.
I wanted to double-check this to be sure, so I reached out to one of the study authors. They wanted to stay on background, but they confirmed to me that there was no improvement over time among the kids who went on hormones or blockers.
The researchers can’t offer any specific statistical evidence that the kids who went on blockers and hormones improved over time. So instead, they claim that according to a statistical model they ran that supposedly adjusted for other, potentially confounding factors, the kids who went on GAM did better than the kids in the sample who didn’t.
Overall, according to the researchers’ data, 12/69 (17.4%) of the kids who were treated left the study, while 28/35 (80%) of the kids who weren’t treated left it3. This is a massive difference.
In fact, almost every methodological choice made by the researchers would have the effect of blurring any differences that did exist.