When Tom Cruise made an appearance at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert in London during summer 2024, fans were left asking one question: was the Hollywood star secretly a Swiftie?

It certainly appeared that way as the Top Gun actor joined Travis Kelce in Wembley Stadium’s VIP section, where the two were seen laughing, dancing and taking in Swift’s huge live show.

Nearly two years later, Cruise, 64, has evolved from an unexpected Eras Tour guest into a wedding invitee and game-day companion for Swift. He joined her in an NFL suite on Monday to support her husband Kelce, just weeks after attending the couple’s Madison Square Garden wedding celebrations.

Their unlikely connection has sparked plenty of online speculation — and criticism in some quarters — ranging from rumors of a secret business project to a possible Days of Thunder sequel appearance, or even claims that Cruise may be trying to introduce pop’s most influential star to Scientology.

However, the Daily Mail can reveal that Cruise and Swift’s relationship is not simply a high-profile photo opportunity. The pair developed a genuine friendship following that London concert.

‘Since then, they’ve got close,’ an insider said. ‘They hang out together when they’re in the same city. On the surface they seem like they’re worlds apart, but they’re really not.’

Their friendship has reportedly grown stronger as they have found common ground in navigating the extraordinary pressures of life at the highest level of fame.

‘They have so much in common and they both get what they each have to deal with in life,’ the source added. ‘Taylor learns so much from talking to him, and Tom loves seeing everything she does and appreciates her artistry.’

Another insider put it more bluntly: the pair ‘speak each other’s language’ because they are both famous on a frankly absurd global scale.

‘They really understand each other,’ the source added.

And, as with most good Hollywood origin stories, it began with a phone call – in this case, Cruise’s team ringing Swift’s people to secure seats at one of her London shows.

‘When Taylor’s reps heard Tom’s people had called for tickets to one of her concerts in London a couple of years ago, she rolled out the red carpet for him,’ the insider said. ‘She made sure he had one of the best seats in the house.’

It appears the singer was not entirely immune to a little movie-star awe herself.

‘She admits she was overwhelmed when he came backstage after the show to tell her how amazing she was,’ the source said. ‘She grew up watching his movies and was a big fan.’

But the person who helped turn a glamorous backstage hello into a lasting friendship was Swift’s husband.

‘Travis is also a huge fan of Tom’s action movies. Tom’s a big football fan. That’s really what brought Tom into Taylor’s world,’ the insider said.

‘He knew Travis, but it was kind of from afar. They’ve now become good buddies.’

That is particularly useful timing for Kelce, 36, who has been quietly building a second act beyond the gridiron.

The Chiefs tight end made his acting debut in Ryan Murphy’s Grotesquerie in 2024 before popping up alongside Adam Sandler in Happy Gilmore 2 – and, according to the source, he has no plans to stop at a couple of cameos.

‘Tom can help Taylor’s husband Travis get a foot in the Hollywood door,’ the insider said. ‘Travis very much wants to work in Hollywood either as an actor or host, or maybe even both. He feels he has a chance and has the look for it.’

And Cruise may even be able to find Kelce a suitably fast lane.

‘Tom will open doors for Travis, and Tom may even give Travis a role in Days Of Thunder 2, which would be a great fit,’ the source added.

So, while the internet’s theories may have overshot the mark, the Days Of Thunder chatter was not entirely plucked from thin air. 

The insider said Cruise and Swift did discuss the newly announced Days of Thunder sequel, which will see the actor back as NASCAR driver Cole Trickle – this time opposite Anne Hathaway, not his original co-star and ex-wife Nicole Kidman. 

‘Their conversations were pretty innocent, but it’s almost impossible for business not to come up,’ the source said. ‘It wouldn’t be surprising if their friendship eventually became a business collaboration, with her potentially recording a song for Days Of Thunder, which was brought up in the box on Monday night.’

Even their brief televised exchange had fans trying to decode every word. 

Lip-reader Nicola Hickling claimed Swift could be seen saying: ‘It’s the structure of the entire infrastructure of the audience that’s what I love in a positive way.’

The first portion of Cruise’s answer was obscured as ESPN cut away, according to the lip-reader, who then interpreted the actor as saying: ‘You may not know it, but you do have a job.’

Still, the source suggested neither star was entirely blind to the upside of two of the most recognizable faces on the planet sitting together in an NFL suite.

‘They are friends, but of course they also wanted to be seen together because of the media attention,’ the insider said.

‘They might both find themselves nominated for an Oscar early next year, so don’t be surprised when this friendship turns into something awesome professionally for them both.’

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For Swift, that dream would be a first Academy Award nomination for I Knew It, I Knew You, the original song she co-wrote for Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story 5. 

An Oscar win would put the Grammy- and Emmy-winning star one Tony away from an EGOT – the entertainment industry’s most exclusive four-award club.

Cruise, meanwhile, is entering a very different kind of awards-season moment.

His next film, Digger, is due in cinemas on October 2. Directed by four-time Oscar winner Alejandro G Inarritu, it casts Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil baron whose own actions help trigger an environmental catastrophe.

It is a far cry from the usual run, jump and hang-from-the-side-of-an-airplane Cruise assignment.

The star has spent four decades as one of Hollywood’s most durable action stars, grossing more than $13 billion worldwide and collecting acting Oscar nominations for Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire and Magnolia, as well as a Best Picture nomination as a producer on Top Gun: Maverick.

But Digger is also a risky dramatic pivot for Cruise – his first non-franchise film since 2017, with the actor buried beneath heavy prosthetics as an eccentric billionaire. 

And there are already whispers that the $200 million gamble may struggle to win over audiences: its first trailer drew relatively modest YouTube traffic compared with rival autumn releases, while many online viewers were more fixated on Cruise’s unrecognizable new look than on the film itself. 

But Cruise is certainly doing his bit to sell the new era.

The actor stripped off for a smoldering GQ cover shoot this week, posing in an unbuttoned black shirt and jeans while promoting Digger in his first cover story for the magazine in 20 years.

A source previously told the Daily Mail that a new romance would not exactly hurt the publicity push – but, for now, Cruise is said to be flying solo.

Fresh from turning 64, the ever-youthful star has no glamorous leading lady on his arm, despite renewed whispers linking him to Russian socialite Elsina Khayrova after their brief 2023 romance.

His former flames, however, have moved firmly into their own next acts.

Ana de Armas, his most recent romance, has been packing on the PDA with musician Beto Montenegro. Katie Holmes, 47, is loved up with artist Jason Bard Yarmosky, nine years her junior. Kidman has enjoyed time in Portofino with new beau Michael Reinstein, while Penelope Cruz has been married to Javier Bardem for 16 years.

Which brings the story back to Swift – and why being seen beside her is, at the very least, an exceptionally canny bit of A-list optics.

‘Tom wants a younger fan base because there is a lot of pressure for his movie Digger to do well at the box office,’ the source said. ‘He wants it to be a success and he wants an Oscar nomination for it.’

‘So hanging out with Taylor Swift is a very savvy move because she is the most powerful star at the moment with the under-40 set. Meeting up with Taylor at the football game was a smart move because all of her fans will now look into Tom and his work.’

Swift, the source said, was more than happy to help a friend.

‘They have been friends for years, so she was happy to help him get some more press.’

But no good deed goes unpunished – particularly when it involves the internet, a Chiefs suite and Scientology’s most famous member.

Some fans criticized Swift for sharing the box with Cruise, a high-profile Scientologist. The church has long faced allegations from former members and critics involving abuse, forced labour and harassment; it disputes such allegations.

The backlash also revived discussion of Cruise’s relationship with his daughter Suri, whom he shares with ex-wife Holmes, who left Scientology following their 2012 split.

Cruise has not been publicly photographed with Suri since 2012, and longstanding reports have said the pair are estranged.

The source, however, insisted Scientology does not feature in Cruise and Swift’s conversations.

‘Neither of them talk about Scientology,’ the insider said.

Suri, 20, has adopted the name Suri Noelle, using Holmes’ middle name rather than Cruise.

The name change drew comparisons with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s children. Five of their six children have dropped Pitt’s surname; their eldest son, Maddox, was reported to have legally changed his name this week.

The family rift has remained under a spotlight since Pitt and Jolie’s 2016 split, following allegations that Pitt was physically and verbally abusive towards the children. Pitt has denied the allegations and investigators found no sign of abuse. 

That background fed a separate strand of online reaction, after fans noted that Pitt was also among the guests at Swift and Kelce’s Madison Square Garden wedding.

One Reddit user captioned a photograph of Swift and Cruise in the suite: ‘Taylor Swift palling around with Tom Cruise, Scientology’s most high-profile member, whose daughter Suri severed ties and dropped his last name. Reminiscent of Taylor inviting Brad Pitt to her wedding, whose children have also cut ties and dropped his last name.’

Pitt was not the only wedding guest whose presence would later raise eyebrows.

Cruise was also there, but any social-media grumbling appeared to be the furthest thing from his mind as he made the rounds among the newlyweds’ A-list crowd. 

‘A lot of people were surprised when they saw Tom at Taylor and Travis’ wedding,’ the insider said. ‘He was mingling with everyone and seemed like he was having the best time.’

A growing backlash is taking aim at youth sports, especially the high-pressure world of competitive travel teams — and Kim Kardashian appears ready to fuel the debate.

Kardashian will debut her new docuseries, “Team Moms: Baseball,” next week, bringing reality-TV drama to the mothers of young players at Legendary Preps Academy in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Preview clips portray heavily made-up moms and dads with outsized dreams for their sons, all while plotting against one another behind the scenes.

The show arrives after a summer of scrutiny around youth athletics: New York magazine featured the strain of children’s sports on its cover, The Wall Street Journal examined soaring expenses, and The Post has chronicled how costly and demanding club sports have become.

The Journal, characteristically, cataloged the eye-popping price of making it through “another year of Little League,” counting everything from “sleek composite bats that cost up to $450” and “the coolest sunglasses” to “gloves, helmets, elbow guards, leg protectors, arm sleeves, sliding mitts” and a long list of other items marketed as essential.

“Also, headbands. Do kids really need a headband if they are always wearing a hat or helmet? Don’t be ridiculous. Of course they do.”

No. They really don’t.

What many overwhelmed parents may be overlooking is simple: They do not have to buy into all of it.

Our youngest son was about 3 when we came to an unexpected realization: We had an athlete.

He was our third child, but the first with this kind of instinct: The ball went exactly where he intended it to go, and he could outrun everybody.

The rest of his uncoordinated family watched in awe.

By the time he was 5, he was playing flag football and soccer and, despite being small for his age, scoring most of the touchdowns and goals for his teams.

So we found him more competitive outlets for his sports — recreation leagues when they fit, travel leagues when they didn’t.

At 10, he now plays a combination of competitive rec and travel sports.

No fancy shoes or headbands; he carries his mouthguard and cleats in a drawstring bag he got for free.

The most expensive part of his gear is the water bottle he loses approximately 17 times a season.

One of the key complaints about high-level kids’ sports is that some delusional parents imagine their child will eventually go pro.

This is, of course, incredibly unlikely — even playing in college is a reach.

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It’s a bad reason to have your child in competitive sports.

But that’s far outweighed by the good reasons.

Competition, we’ve seen in our family, is great for kids: It teaches them how to be gracious in winning and a good sport when losing.

They build resilience and learn how to work hard toward goals; they figure out teamwork and work on their skills.

Organized sports also foster community, for parents and kids both.

Our son’s most intensely competitive sport, the one we watch with hearts pounding and nails bitten to the nubs, isn’t his travel soccer league but his rec flag-football league.

It’s very well-organized, led by dedicated volunteer parent coaches.

Real friendships get made on the sidelines, and game days are incredibly fun — I look forward to them all year.

The sun is setting, we’re hoping the September rain holds off, there’s a light breeze, and I’m screaming alongside my fellow parents to get that ball into the end zone.

We worry about kids today lacking community, about spending too much time on screens. A competitive sports league is the antidote to that — and you don’t have to sign up for the traveling kind to find it.

But what about the hectic schedules and endless expense of kids’ sports? Turns out most children’s activities, especially at higher levels, cost money and require effort.

Our daughter’s robotics team might be the most time-consuming of all our children’s pursuits. Nobody tells her she probably won’t be building robots when she grows up; we encourage her to spend time doing what she loves to do.

Our middle son participates in history competitions that have taken our family to international matches in places like Rome and Paris. He’s probably not going to get regularly quizzed on the Napoleonic era later in life — yet there we are, rooting him on to slam that buzzer first.

Kids are expensive, even the ones who don’t play competitive sports. The main thing parents must remember is that they are in charge — and if your child’s sports don’t work for your family, say no.

Competitive sports are a boon for our son, no $450 bats or reality-show catfights required.

“Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean you should,” we tell our kids — and that’s a lesson for parents, too.

Karol Markowicz is the host of the “Karol Markowicz Show” and “Normally” podcasts.

Evening settles over our farmhouse as I sit down to dinner with my husband and teenage daughter. As he usually does, he has made the meal: shepherd’s pie followed by apple crumble with custard. Afterwards, I’ll stack the dishwasher while our daughter clears and wipes the table.

To anyone looking in, it could be an ordinary Sunday evening. But my husband and I finalised our divorce three months ago. Our daughter is seeing a doctor about anxiety. And I have been in another relationship for more than a year — one that leaves me feeling cherished, joyful and understood, yet burdened by overwhelming guilt.

The tension is so intense that, during dinner, I feel like fleeing the kitchen. On my way out I would pass the photographs of our family on the wall, including our wedding portrait, its glass fractured after I hurled it at him. Sometimes, the emotional strain makes me want to turn that anger on myself.

For now, we have no choice but to remain under the same roof as we attempt to sell the house in a slow property market.

Living in separate rentals is beyond our means, so we continue to move through the well-worn routines of the life we once shared — while both of us ache for the moment we can finally move on.

I sleep in the former marital bedroom, which looks out across the garden. Inside the wardrobe, my wedding dress remains in pieces after I ripped it apart. Even so, I am not ready to get rid of it.

He retreats to the small pink bedroom at the rear of the house, sleeping in a single bed dressed in the childish bedding that once belonged to our daughter. She has since moved into a larger bedroom with more adult-looking sheets, but he has stayed where he is.

I suggested he take the bigger guest room, but he refused. I cannot help reading that as something personal: proof, in my mind, that he has no interest in being happy and perhaps never has — that he denies himself anything good, and does the same to everyone around him.

At night, I switch off the lamp and scroll or read on my phone in the darkness. I do not want him to come into the room and start a conversation on his way to bed, as he did in the earliest days of our separation. I try not to revisit the excitement we felt when we bought this home 10 years ago — the optimism, the dreams, the plans. Or the way our marriage unravelled: gradually at first, then all at once.

We had known each other at university, when I was wild, and he was shy. But we didn’t marry until we were in our mid-30s.

I was in a disastrous love affair with a married man – to be fair, I did not know he was married when we began – who I could not give up. Then one day I realised the yearning for a baby would not go away and I had no future with him. I think now I wanted to prove I could have a real relationship with someone who could be there for me.

I bumped into my soon-to-be husband again while shopping in central London after not seeing him for more than a decade. The first year was glorious. He was constant. He was loving. He was funny. It didn’t matter that he smoked – despite a heart condition – and had almost no income as a freelance writer. I had a good job and he would get one.

With what seemed like the luck of the gods, I got pregnant very quickly. That’s when it all began to fall apart in earnest.

I had a terrible labour, and instead of pulling together we shouted at each other on the ward – the nurses were appalled – and I came home shell-shocked.

In the first few years of our daughter’s life, I would scream at him, looking for a reaction, for anything – but he retreated into himself. He left the house looking like a bomb site every day, earned almost no money and spent compulsively. When I lost my good job in marketing, we were broke.

There were happy times with our daughter, of course, but that happy, functional life you dream of when you think of marriage – the thing you build together – never happened. We had lived on hope, and that had gone.

I retreated from him physically after the birth. I would lie beside him willing myself to reach out to him. But I couldn’t, and our marriage began to die.

We almost never had sex, because I felt he was a stranger. It was as if something was removed from me when I had our daughter.

Perhaps trying to paper over the cracks, we moved to the ‘dream house’ in the country. I took all the work I could find, and he didn’t work at all, though he looked for admin jobs.

I felt helpless and trapped but I swallowed those feelings. After all, where could I go, what could I do? I was in deep denial.

‘We have a great love,’ I told him, hugging him. I told myself that we had a beautiful house and a perfect child. Isn’t this love? So what if we don’t sleep together – ever? So what if I work all the time and you never? (He did have a job as an administrative assistant for a bit. But then he got into £15,000 of debt that year, as if to punish us for having something.) So, what if on quiet Sundays I want to scream that this cannot be my life?

I think we did a reasonable job of pretending in front of our daughter. She never noticed, or she pretended she never noticed, our unhappiness. We tried to keep our fights away from her, waiting until she went to school. So, when we broke up, it was much more of a shock for her.

He broke before I did. Three years ago, he came home, burst into tears and said he was in love with someone else. Why, I asked stupidly. ‘Because she wants me,’ he replied. He then told me they had been sleeping together.

My response was sequential: utter shock that he would do this to us all; terrible grief that it was over; then furious rage at his behaviour; then nothing much at all.

That kicked off two years of hell. He wanted us to stay together and said that we should ‘try’.

I was broken and agreed from shock. I couldn’t imagine having the gumption to do anything as powerful as leave. But he was always on the phone to her – even on my 50th birthday. He would tell me about it and call it honesty.

I cried every day as soon as our daughter left for school – for her, for myself and my broken dream of a perfect marriage, and for him. I wonder now if I had ever really loved him as he wanted or deserved to be loved.

We never talked about our feelings; it was too painful.

After a few months, his affair petered out. He said he wanted us to stay together and it didn’t matter that we had no romantic life. I tried to reignite us by kissing him one night when he came home from the pub.

‘You’re taking advantage of me,’ he said, and pushed me away.

I was mortified, and felt gaslit: he was always saying my lack of lust killed our marriage.

We had separate rooms by then: I had moved into the box room days after he admitted the affair, and we swapped a few weeks later. When my daughter asked why, I put it down to my snoring.

The following year, my old boyfriend – the one who was married – got in touch. He begged me to meet him in London.

In a coffee shop, he told me he was separated. I felt a vague longing, but I walked away. I was no longer the sort of woman who was loved or made love to. So, I went back to my usual dead life. One day in spring 2025, besieged by emptiness, I followed my husband’s ex on Instagram. He went quiet for a few days. Then, on a Sunday – it’s always a Sunday, my day off – I could sense he was seething.

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‘Go on. Out with it,’ I said.

‘She wants to know,’ he snapped. Then he shouted at me, sneering, ‘“Why is your f****** wife following me on Instagram?”’

All my remaining loyalty to our marriage drained away in that one moment. I was done: I knew he didn’t love me any more, if he ever did. Walking to the park, I telephoned my ex-boyfriend and told him that my husband had slept in the spare room for two years.

‘Your marriage is over,’ he said, before adding: ‘I don’t want to die without holding you in my arms again. And I promised myself that if you ever rang me again I would tell you that.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I stuttered, to which he simply replied: ‘It’s always been you.’

‘I wanted you so much it frightened me,’ I said.

He shot back: ‘What makes you think I don’t feel the same?’

Two weeks later, we met in London. I don’t really have words to describe my feelings, but I can say that, if true love lives anywhere, it lives in cheap hotels near Paddington Station. I laughed a lot and I cried a lot, and love songs made sense to me at last.

Last year was, as Dickens wrote, the best of times, the worst of times. I have never felt such an incredible combination of erotic charge and deep trust.

I looked so happy the facial recognition software on my phone didn’t work and, on my monthly trips to London, we had so much sex I put my back out. With my husband, I had always felt like a woman doing penance: like I was being punished for some non-specific sin. Here I was known and forgiven.

But, of course, I would always have to go back, catching the train home like Persephone returning to the Underworld.

My boyfriend tried to cheer me up and keep me safe, as much as he could: he bought me pillows and a duvet to keep me warm at home. The guilt was terrible though. My husband has always made me feel like I am the cause of all his pain, and I have always struggled to disagree; and I have hurt our daughter.

Before I was reunited with my ex-boyfriend, I had told my husband that I didn’t want ‘to try’ any more. ‘I believe you when you say our romantic life is over,’ I said. ‘You can see other women. I don’t mind.’

A few months later, I told him I had someone else. ‘Is it him?’ he asked me. (He knew I left a married man to marry him.) Yes, I confirmed simply, to which he sighed.

My husband had two ways of being with me. The first is patient martyrdom. The second is silent rage. The first makes me feel like the worst person in the world; the second frightens me.

He was furious I had a boyfriend, which I didn’t really understand. I would scream at him: ‘What do you care what I do?’

I thought we could tell our daughter the usual story: it’s a mutual decision to separate, but we love you, and that will never change. But he wouldn’t give us that, instead making me take responsibility. When I was away, he told her I wanted to end the marriage, but he didn’t, yet he accepted my decision.

She rang me in tears, begging me to change my mind. ‘We’ve always been so happy,’ she sobbed, ‘Daddy wants you to stay.’ I told her, ‘I can’t’ – also in tears.

She is studying for her GCSEs, her grades have got worse and she has put on weight. I held her and told her I was sorry. But I cannot give her childhood back.

Mostly, she doesn’t talk about it, though she asked to see a therapist a few months ago, and I found her one. She goes once a week, but she doesn’t talk about that either. She has gone into herself, and I fear for her.

The day our divorce came through, I cried in my husband’s arms. I will always be grateful to him for letting me. Part of me cannot stop loving the part of him that is vulnerable and sweet and very young. But I also need someone who can take care of me, and that is not him. He cannot take care of himself.

I eventually told my daughter I have a ‘friend’ – I couldn’t say ‘boyfriend’ – because I don’t believe in secret lives. Now I wish I hadn’t. She doesn’t want details, and she doesn’t want to meet him. So my secret life goes on. It feels like part of my punishment.

To sell the house, we have lowered the price repeatedly, eventually cutting it by £150,000. Still we have few viewings.

Meanwhile, I slowly demolish the material structure of our marriage, as if by stealth.

I take pictures off the wall – the oils he bought on our honeymoon; the still life his godmother painted – and hide them. I throw out travel guidebooks for journeys we will never take now. I put the boardgames in a cupboard: we spent lockdown playing them, when I thought we would be together for ever.

I feel him watching me, noting it all down in some invisible ledger of my crimes against him.

We almost never fight now. There is nothing left to fight over… or for.

Sometimes I feel OK. I tell myself that all living under one roof is best for our daughter – meals and games and Saturday night television is bearable.

He says that if we sell, he will move away to find work, and leave me with sole custody as it is ‘less confusing’ for her. This made me weep with anger, because she needs him.

Sometimes I want to clutch my head and scream. I tell myself I am trapped here, that I will die here, he will never let me go.

I fear I will never have my new life, that the path before me – a pretty cottage in the West Country, visits from my boyfriend and his children – has disappeared.

My boyfriend tells me to be calm, that I can bear this. He is not going anywhere, he soothes, and I must be patient. There is no other option.

It is the start of autumn now: three years since my ex-husband’s affair, and a year since mine. I told myself I couldn’t do another winter in a rural farmhouse with him, but it seems I must. I will stack up the woodpile and wait for another spring.

Pippa Richmond is a pseudonym. Names and identifying details have been changed.

“You can have a living son or a dead daughter.”

Parents across the country have encountered versions of that frightening message from doctors, professional medical groups, news coverage and activists online.

The warning is often framed this way: If a child believes their sex does not match their body and is denied gender-transition medical treatment, the child faces an elevated risk of suicide.

For many families, no argument has been more influential in decisions involving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or, in some cases, surgery.

It has also weighed heavily on legislators debating limits on transgender medical interventions for minors.

Yet a new report argues that the suicide warning does not hold up.

According to the report’s findings, policies aimed at shielding children from transgender treatments do not lead to higher suicide rates.

Suicide risk is undeniably higher among young people who identify as transgender, a painful fact that calls for serious attention and support.

Children who say they were “born in the wrong body” often experience significant mental-health challenges, including depression and anxiety, both of which are associated with increased suicide risk.

The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 72% of transgender-identified high school students said they had experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.”

The commonsense explanation is that such challenges preceded and even led to their gender confusion — with the encouragement of authority figures and sympathetic social-media voices exacerbating mental-health dangers. 

Yet activists and their allies say the real issue is the failure to medically “affirm” these children’s chosen gender identity.

That failure, they say, leads to alarming numbers of suicides among trans-identifying teens.

To justify this claim, they point to studies purporting to show that sex-change treatments improve mental health, and that restrictions lead to worse mental health outcomes, including suicide.

Yet these studies uniformly fall short of scientific standards.

They generally rely on self-reported mental health surveys — a low reliability method. 

One of the most widely cited, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, doesn’t include an untreated comparison group, making it impossible to discern what caused changes in mental health. 

Meanwhile, a study published in JAMA Network Open suffers from enormous attrition from the control group, preventing the comparisons required for reliable results.

Other subpar studies abound — all of them repeated ad nauseam by the media.

Enter our study. 

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We are the first to analyze the real-world effects of state restrictions on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries, using CDC data on actual teen suicide rates. 

That research is only possible because, starting in 2022, 23 states — with 47% of the nation’s transgender-identifying youth — restricted all or some trans treatments for patients under age 18. 

These states have in effect provided a natural laboratory, allowing for direct comparison of teen suicide trends with states that haven’t restricted sex-change treatments.

If the activists are right, suicide rates for children would have increased in states with restrictions.

But we found zero evidence that state policies led to increased suicide rates, period.

To start, we calculated changes in the suicide rates of minors who were and were not covered by state restrictions.

We also examined national trends in teen suicide rates, to gauge a potential increase as more trans-identifying youth became subject to restrictions. 

At every stage, we controlled for a wide variety of factors, including suicide trends among young adults who are barely old enough to avoid state restrictions.

This approach separates trends that affect youth suicide rates in general from the specific effects of state restrictions.

Our results were the same across the board: No rise in teen suicides when transgender treatments are banned. 

Activists and their allies may object that our findings neatly conform to our organization’s goal of ending transgender medicine for minors. 

That’s why our report carefully details our methodology — and even contains the data and code we used in our statistical software.

We made our results, our methods and our data completely public so that others can conduct their own analyses to validate our findings.

Transgender activists will continue to use the threat of suicide as a means of bludgeoning society into accepting invasive, irreversible medical interventions for children. 

But unless they can produce evidence for a relationship between state restrictions and suicides, their tactics should be called out for what they are: A manipulative bluff.

Parents and policymakers, armed only with common sense, can’t be blamed for buckling when confronted with a dishonest nightmare scenario. 

Now they have the facts they need to protect children at home, at school and by law.

Evidence, not emotional appeals or baseless assertions, is essential when our kids’ health and well-being are on the line. 

If we’re going to lower the suicide rate among deeply confused teens, we should at least begin with intellectual honesty and genuine compassion — not activism masquerading as medical expertise.

Jay Greene is Director of Research at Do No Harm, where Ian Kingsbury is Senior Director of the Center for Accountability in Medicine.