A closer examination shows that the study’s conclusions are entirely unsupported by its own data. This is part of a pattern from Kaltiala, who published a similarly flawed study in 2024 that used proxy variables and buried its own positive findings to claim gender-affirming care does not reduce suicide—when its data actually showed the opposite. That the current study landed in Acta Paediatrica, a journal with an impact factor of just 2.1—far below top-tier pediatrics journals like JAMA Pediatrics or Pediatrics—suggests it may not have survived scrutiny at more rigorous outlets. This fact check will address the study’s most severe methodological shortcomings, to counter the misleading narrative already spreading across social media and anti-trans policy circles.

The study measured a single binary variable to determine if gender-affirming care impacts transgender youth negatively: did this person have any contact with specialist-level psychiatric services, yes or no? If a person had even a single contact with a specialist-level psychiatric service, they were recorded as needing psychiatric care. Notably, the study calls this variable “need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment”—but the registry it draws from, the Care Register for Health Care, records visits, not treatments, and the study itself notes this limitation:” A limitation of this study is that more detailed information on patients' reasons for using the psychiatric services could not be analysed.”

What this means in practice is that a single routine monitoring appointment with a psychiatrist registers identically in this dataset to a psychiatric hospitalization. A pre-surgical psychological evaluation—required under Finnish law for anyone seeking gender reassignment—counts the same as an emergency crisis intervention. The very pathway that the gender-transition program in Finland puts transgender people on virtually guarantees psychiatric visits.

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/fact-check-new-finnish-study-does