New data shows surge in trans kids’ suicides following healthcare rollbacks

Content warning: suicide

For years, successive governments have denied an increase in suicides among trans youth following the withdrawal, and criminalisation, of gender affirming healthcare. And, when Good Law Project raised the alarm about rising deaths, health secretary Wes Streeting responded with a review that criticised our figures and attacked our reporting as “dangerous”.

Those of us in or close to the trans community have been to the funerals of those we love. And we have wept together for those we have been unable to save on Trans Day of Remembrance. We know the truth – we see it with our own eyes. And, to us, the decision by Wes Streeting to commission a review into suicides which downplayed the scale of these tragedies was unforgivable. His report denied the reality of trans deaths, as Streeting’s ban on puberty blockers denied the reality of trans lives.

To silence those raising the alarm on rising trans suicides as “dangerous” while ramping up the policies correlating with that rise is an act of grave moral wickedness. Good Law Project has worked tirelessly since the Appleby review to get the Department of Health to come clean. For its part, Streeting’s department has fought tooth and nail to block, often on spurious grounds, every freedom of information request. This is a continuation of a worrying trend we spotted under the Tories: the Tavistock’s own board minutes from 2021 state that their communications team has not approved FOIs asking for waiting list data due to “poor performance” and “potential reputational impact”.

Now, Good Law Project can confirm that in 2021-2022 suicides of trans children in England surged to 22, a marked increase from 5 and 4 the previous two years. This spike follows the decision by NHS England to pull down the shutters on gender affirming healthcare for young trans people following detransitioner Keira Bell’s case against the Tavistock. The judgment was overturned, and heavily criticised, in the Court of Appeal following an intervention by Good Law Project. But, under heavy political pressure from the Conservatives and now Streeting, NHS England never again raised the shutters.

This new data was released via a freedom of information request made to the NHS-funded National Child Mortality Database (NCMD). The NCMD revealed that 46 trans children died by suicide from 2019-2025: 5 in 2019-20; 4 in 2020-21; 22 in 2021-22; and 10 in 2022-23. The NCMD adds “the numbers reported in more recent years will likely be underestimated, due to a higher proportion of child death reviews that have not yet been completed”. Of course, we can never know, and often there will never be, a single reason why someone takes their own life.

Forty-four of these deaths were within the time frame analysed for the government report by Professor Louis Appleby on suicides and gender dysphoria. That’s almost four times more than the number accounted for by the Appleby report, which stated that only 12 young people (over and under 18) who were current or former patients of the Tavistock took their own lives from 2018-2024. 

The Appleby review chose to focus specifically on some – the review itself is not clear – patients connected to the Gender Identity Development Service service at the Tavistock, so would not have accounted for all 44 deaths recorded by the NCMD. 

Moreover, the number of suicides provided by the NCMD would likely have been lower when the review was written due to a lag in data, as Child Death Overview Panels can take years to complete their reviews.

Still, we are appalled that Streeting commissioned and published a report to reassure the public that there was no significant rise in suicide rates, when 22 children took their own lives in a single year: 2021-22.

Good Law Project was told by whistleblowers that, following the Bell vs Tavistock judgement, there was a significant increase in patient suicides. Our claims were dismissed and described as “insensitive, distressing and dangerous” in the government report.

But this new data shows there was a surge in suicides of trans people under 18 during the same period they witnessed on the ground at the Tavistock.

Since the Appleby review was published, the government has implemented a permanent ban on puberty blockers for under 18s. Trans people – mostly under 25s – are facing waiting lists with an average length of 25 years. Meanwhile, as the trans community knows all too well, the death toll continues to rise.

• Samaritans contact details can be found here, and TransActual mental health resources are available here.