This paper, published in JAMA Surgery last week, provides important evidence of the value of providing medically-necessary care to people who are trasngender or gender nonconforming.

he primary importance of this paper is as the first study to our knowledge that broadly evaluates national temporal trends in gender-affirming surgery for transgender patients in the United States.

The importance to physicians and the people we serve is the above plus the data in Table 1: “Characteristics of Patients Who Have a Diagnosis Code for Transsexualism or Gender Identity Disorder in the National Inpatient Sample”

Of the 37,827 inpatient encounters in the sample, 14,128, or 40.5 % are for Mental Health. This dwarfs the number for actual treatment-related reasons, such as gender affirming surgery.