As states continue to introduce laws that restrict access to gender-affirming care or limit protections against conversion therapy, questions have arisen about the effectiveness of interventions intended to help transgender youth. In this political climate, gold-standard evidence is more important than ever.
Prior research has been unable to tease out cause and effect between health outcomes and gender-affirming care like hormone therapy or gender-denying interventions like conversion therapy, largely because of a lack of longitudinal data or an appropriate control group. To establish whether something causes an outcome, researchers typically rely on randomized control trials – experiments that randomly assign people to a treatment or a placebo. Random assignment is a trusted way to create two equal groups to compare. However, because it is unethical to withhold treatment or administer potential harmful interventions, randomized controls trials are off the table in this case.
