Trans people have a suicide culture. A bad one.

This is a thread about transgender suicide culture and how we talk about those of us who choose to die. As with "trauma culture" in Holocaust studies, suicide culture means a culture infested with suicidality, not endorsing it.

Problem Statement: A huge number of trans people express suicidality. Most trans people are familiar with the statistic that 41% of us attempt suicide, compared to 1.6% of cis people (NTDS 2015).

"The 41%" is I believe exaggerated but meaningful. I have been acquainted with seven trans women who killed themselves. I'm 26 years old. This is more trans women than most people encounter in their lives. Nearly all trans people operate in this social context, ex:

The question of transgender suicide *culture* is not suicide prevention -- not directly, at least. It is a much more immediate question: many of our closest sisters, brothers, and siblings have killed themselves. How shall we conceive of their deaths?

Anecdote #1: Suicide Culture & Women.

In 1963, confessional poet Sylvia Plath died of asphyxiation with her head in a gas oven. Her friend Anne Sexton had this to say: "[Sylvia] took something that was mine. That *death* was mine!"

Anne wrote two poems about Sylvia's death.

I remember an elderly lesbian at my LGBT book club told me how she found out about Anne Sexton's death. A phone call from a lover: "We've lost another one." Carbon monoxide poisoning in a car.

Adrienne Rich, stable rock, gave a eulogy: "WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH SUICIDAL WOMEN."

Women fail under patriarchy. Trans people fail under cis supremacy. We know this. But our observation can morph into Anne Sexton Syndrome: a mythical exaltation of our failure, or "negative prophecy" (ht @ShieldingC) culminating in the near religious inevitability of our suicide.

Note for trans people #1: "Trans lives are lived, hence livable." You have been abused & are being abused, institutionally, familially, & often physically & sexually. But you are a survivor. Your life does not imply suicide because suicide is the necessary conclusion of no story.

Anecdote #2: Suicide Culture and Non-Trans Sexual Minority.

In Germany ca. 1900 "suicide" was called "Selbstmord" -- self-murder, implying how grave and punishable a crime it was regarded. Yet Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay sexologist, saw his gay friends self-murdering left & right.

Hirschfeld became a lifelong queer activist. He was a deeply imperfect advocate, but his institutional study of sexology employed poor transgender people in "acceptable work" for some of the first times in modern European history.

Studies time & again explain one of the greatest enablers of suicide is family support, followed by institutional support. This is part of why, though trans suicide rates are very high, they are also high for LGBTQ generally, as well as veterans, homeless ppl, & refugees.

Note for trans people #2: We are your queer family always. You have gay & trans brothers, sisters, and siblings who will move mountains to help you thrive. We will do some *very [unjustly] illegal shit* to help you thrive. We already have been, for centuries.

Discussion: Trans People and Suicide Culture.

I'm physically sick of rhetoric from both within trans communities & without advancing the inevitability of trans suicide against immense oppression. Often it's done by advocates - I hope, unintentionally. https://twitter.com/9BillionTigers/status/1222810443112009733

Trans people in trouble need each other's support, not vicarious grief.

Trans kids suffering need queer people who will love them unconditionally everywhere their government hates them, not queer strangers & ESPECIALLY not cis allies who *expect them to die*.

Ex. for HB1057:

I am not the first person to point out the impacts of suicide in the cultures of gender communities. Here's @razorfemme in "Stop Letting Trans Girls Kill Ourselves."

Similarly, I think every suicidal trans person should read this transcription from @morganmpage & @sarahschulman3 on "Queer Suicidality, Conflict, and Repair."

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/660595/ 

I also think -- as both Kai & Morgan do above -- that suicide culture is a racially charged culture. In trans communities suicide is most common among indigenous populations, but in my limited experience the romance of trans suicide is a disproportionately white phenomenon.

I think part is that, as Julian Gill-Peterson points out, the false ideal of a "trans kid" or "trans suicide victim" is white. But I also suspect black trans women tend to confront communal suicidality differently, & we queers have much to learn from the politics of black power.

The first thing I believe we most do is actualize our politics. I think many of us are very online and alone. But when we are denied or alienated from the most basic access to cishet familial & romantic love, what does our loving each other mean? What kind of love is it?

Like Kai & Morgan, I've come into what I understand as a philosophy of radical love. For queer ppl, I think this means taking on love as a precondition, a kind of practical openness towards life's possibility. The more there is love, the harder it is to shut down this possibility

When queer people love sexually, it is radical, because we are open to a variety of sex acts outside of what is accepted as sex. When we love familially, it is radical, because we expand family beyond other people's biological constraints for it.

When we insistently define and redefine these forms of love I think we teach one another that our lives are impossible despite other's insistence of our impossibility. When suicide happens, I suspect it's often (not always) because no acceptable alternative was imaginable.

As for myself, I have a long personal history of suicidality, but I am still here.

Trans people: I will love you *even if you kill yourself*. But I will not embrace it, not again, & I will never accept its inevitability.

I know there are trans readers here reporting suicidality, histories of suicidality, or suicidality within their queer family. I have my own biography. I refuse to be a judge but will leave our collective community resources.

Trans Lifeline ( http://translifeline.org  ): 877-565-8860 (US) 877-330-6366 (CA)
Trevor Lifeline ( http://thetrevorproject.org  ): 1-866-488-7386
National (US) Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255

If you feel any resources are missing, feel free to add below.