Originally a comment by Artymorty on Why not indeed?

I don’t think we’re really seeing a wave of trans suicides in Scotland. But it’s plausible that some people with trans identities may commit suicide as they reckon with the new reality, which is that their invented identities are not going to be accepted across society and law.

People with transgender identities are typically already in very poor mental health, and the suicide rate has always been high with that group. I have a lot of sympathy for such troubled people, especially the ones who were misled into doing irreversible damage to their bodies. Some of them surely will end up dead. I’m obviously far less sympathetic to the chancers — the straight men who invaded women’s spaces just because they could get away with it.

But the inevitable burdens on mentally ill people with trans identities that will result from rolling back trans entitlements are not a sign that “terfs” are evil; they’re a sign that the transgender subculture should never have gotten this far out of hand in the first place. The trans movement is dependent on a cultural ecosystem that perpetually reinforces the lie that “gender affirming” body modifications are good and necessary, rather than harmful and entirely unnecessary. The irreversibility of such procedures serves as a kind of cultural blackmail to keep the system going: on some level, almost everybody knows it’s a big lie and that “sex changes” don’t remotely work as advertised. But consciously or not, what they’re really thinking is: What are we gonna do with the people it’s aready been done to? Let’s just keep letting it happen so that we don’t have to reckon with them. The fact that they’re already mentally vulnerable, plus the fact that so many of them have already had irreversible procedures, plus plus the fact that the activists are shouting that it’s helping people (despite all evidence showing it clearly isn’t)… This gives people a sense that doing the right thing isn’t worth the trouble.

(There are some parallels with the medical profession’s complicity in the practice of FGM in Northeast Africa.)

You could say the same about any unhealthy situation that society needs to roll back: the people already caught up in it are going to face some hardship. Phasing out tobacco with sin taxes puts a burden on nicotine addicts, but we can’t just keep letting more and more people die of lung cancer. Phasing out coal negatively affects West Virginians and rural Pennsylvanians, but we can’t just keep on cooking the planet. Heroin addicts struggled after it was banned in the 1920s. On and on…