Abstract
This study uses the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey to test how hormone replacement therapy (HRT) initiation affects the risk of attempting suicide among transgender individuals. We construct a retrospective panel of transgender people and employ a stacked event study design. Our results indicate that HRT initiation is associated with a statistically significant and substantially lower risk of suicide attempts. The ATT effect is a decrease of 5.7 percentage points in the risk of ever attempting suicide if HRT started between the ages of 14 and 17. This is a 14.4% reduction in the risk of attempting suicide relative to the pretreatment mean.