Suicide rates are NOT high after SRS.
That is basically a fallacy that's being perpetuated by people who are misinterpereting a handful of studies, trying to make them say things that they don't actually say because they're trying to prove that SRS is somehow ineffective.
The problem that most of these studies have is that they're comparing trans people to cis people.
Obviously, when you've spent your whole life hating your body, dealing with depression and suicidal ideation, and still dealing with societal nonsense telling you that you're somehow a lesser member of your identity gender or that you don't have a right to be you, you're probably going to still have some mental demons left over post-transition that cis people don't have to deal with.
When you compare trans people who are either pre-transition or in transition to those who are post-transition, though, instead of cis people, it shows that transition is a HUGE positive to trans people's mental health.
Here's the real numbers.
This English study was done in 1990.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2224377 It studied two different groups of 20 trans people, following them for two years... one group who was given access to Genital Reconstructive Surgery immediately at the beginning of the study. The other group of people was forced to wait until the end of the 2-year study period to receive GRS. That is pretty much the closest that we're ever going to get to a study with a "control" group where those with surgical treatment are compared directly to those who also wanted surgery but were not allowed to have it.
From the study itself: "the surgical group showed significant differences in neuroticism, social activity, and sexual activity, with benefits being enjoyed by the post-op group."
This study was done on 433 transgender people in Ontario, Canada, in 2013.
http://transpulseproject.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Trans-PULSE-Suicidality-Trans-ServiceSocial-2013.pdf It once again compares the outcomes of trans people who go through transition to other trans people who have not had access to transition treatment, not to those who were born cis. (Which, honestly, comparing cis people to trans people is like comparing cancer patients to people who never had cancer at all and concluding that somehow cancer treatment is ineffective because those with cancer still die at a higher rate after treatment. This is pretty important, since according to this study, 85% of trans people who think about suicide are thinking of suicide specifically because they're trans.)
Anyway, look at the suicide attempt rates in this study.
In the group that had not accessed any transition-related care whatsoever despite planning on doing so, 27% have attempted suicide in the last year.
In the group that is in the process of medically transitioning but is not finished with it, 18% have attempted suicide within the last year.
In the group who have completed their medical transition, that number drops to 1% attempting suicide in the last year. ONE PERCENT.
And so you know, this study was divided almost perfectly evenly between those who were pre-transition, in transition, post-transition, and unsure / not planning to transition, so that there were about 100 people from each group. Which means that out of the 100ish people in the study who were post-transition, ONE attempted suicide. ONE.
If you're worried about the Swedish study that so many people use to try and prove that transition doesn't work... they're misinterpreting the data.
Here's the study:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885The actual study, which followed trans people for as much as 30+ years after transition, had this to say about suicide attempts. Out of the 324 people involved in the study, 29 attempted suicide. That is a grand total of 9%. Which considering that the attempted-suicide rate among the general population is about 4.5%, that's not horrible by any means. And it means that 91% of trans people who are post-op do not attempt suicide.
EVERY study that has been done on trans people has shown that on average about 40% of trans people attempt suicide in their lifetimes. So at bare minimum being post-transition drops the incidence rate of suicide attempts by 75%.
And in actuality, look even closer at the data, and you'll come upon this interesting tidbit.
"In line with the increased mortality from suicide, sex-reassigned individuals were also at a higher risk for suicide attempts, though this was not statistically significant for the time period 1989–2003."
Look at that. The highest incidence of trans suicide attempts, the portion that was significantly different than the cis controls in the study, was only statistically significant for those sex-reassigned before the year 1989. Those sex-reassigned between 1989 and 2003 showed no statistical difference in morbidity compared to cis people. As surgical techniques have improved, and as trans people have become more accepted by society, unsurprisingly the success of transition has improved as well.
Transition works.
And as one final tidbit, lots of these trans-bashing articles you're speaking of cite the "studies" done by Dr. Paul McHugh, who supposedly "proved" that transition was ineffective.
Do you know some of the criteria that he used to determine whether a transition was "successful" or not?
Well, one of them was heterosexuality.
In his study, he considered a transition a "failure" if a trans woman ended up with another woman or a trans man ended up with another man.
Another one was arrests. When a trans person was arrested for any reason whatsoever, their transition was considered a "failure." And they got negative points for every single arrest on their record.
That study is a biased study done by a doctor with his own bigoted views on gender and his own bigoted views on "success" that was unfairly set up to prove that transition was ineffective with strong degrees of internal bias built into it from the very start.
Basically, the studies don't say that transition is ineffective. Bigoted people trying to make studies say things that they weren't ever meant to say in the first place are what makes it seem ineffective.
