Sometimes Outrage is Called For

 

Look, I avoid outrage-posting, because we live at a time in which outrage has been turned into a terrible currency, generated to glue us to our devices with indignation, which in turn generates polarization and despair.

But there is something worse than outrage, and that is the pooh-poohing of actually outrageous things.

This week, the US Supreme Court issued the terrible US vs. Skrmetti decision, holding that it is fine for states to ban trans youths from accessing as gender-affirming care he exact same medications and procedures that cis youths can and do access all the time to affirm their (cis) gendered comfort in their bodies and put off puberties that have started when they are not ready.

A large 2022 public health study found that accessing gender-affirming care reduced trans youths’ suicidal ideation by 73%. And trans adults who had accessed puberty blockers in youth have a reduced risk of suicide across their lifespans. There have been multiple related studies, but the Supreme Court said there wasn’t enough research to prove definitively that trans-affirming medical care provides benefits (ignoring what every major medical association has said). The Court also ignored the fact that all research studies on trans health that were being conducted in the US have been defunded this year by the Trump administration as “promoting gender ideology.” Ugh.

News of the Skrmetti decision has felt devastating to trans people of all ages, as it can be used to further erode trans rights for all of us. But it’s been a particular gut punch to trans youth, who have been declared in half of the US states to be deluded. Those state laws declare the proper treatment for that “delusion” to be requiring teachers and doctors and counselors to misgender them, and for any doctor or counselor who tries to provide them gender-affirming care to face legal punishment. Trans youth already face the highest levels of school bullying and parental rejection, which makes their risk of suicidal ideation terribly high—and now they face this decision on top of that burden.

On the same day that the Skrmetti decision was released, the Trump administration sent notice to the Trevor Project, which provides the suicide prevention services to LGBTQIA+ youths through the federally-funded 988 National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, to stop work. So trans young people thrown into despair by the Skrmetti decision will find the suicide hotline that is supposed to offer them aid cancelled in the same way as their hope of access to medical care.

That is terrible, as many people I’ve pointed this out to agree.

But I've also personally received substantial "oh calm down" feedback and seen a lot of the same on social media about the cancelling of the Trevor Project hotline. Here's some of the things I've been told or heard:

"This is misinformation. Nobody targeted the Trevor Project specifically; the cuts are just part of a cost reduction across the 988 service and the service will still be there, just streamlined a bit."

"This is old news from months ago. It has nothing to do with some coordinated attack on trans people. You're putting unrelated random old and new stories together and catastrophizing."

"I think cutting the Trevor Project from the national suicide prevention hotline is appalling! But in case you didn't notice, the Trevor Project serves LGBT young people. Where is your outrage about the gay and lesbian youth? Why do trans people insist on making this all about them?"

This pushback is quite disheartening, because this is absolutely a case in which outrage is appropriate. Yes, leaked documents from the Trump administration earlier did state that a cut to Trevor Project services would be coming, but the stated date was in 2026. The administration chose instead to send the stop work notice much earlier, on the day the Skrmetti decision was released—and that is no coincidence. Here is what Rachel Cauley, the spokesperson for the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, had to say about it: the Trump administration will not “grant taxpayer money to a chat service where children are encouraged to embrace radical gender ideology by ‘counselors’ without consent or knowledge of their parents.”

Trivializing a suicide hotline as a “chat service” is vile and reprehensible, as is implying that the staffers aren’t truly counselors but something else—presumably “groomers” with malicious goals. But the fundamental message is the worst part. This spokesperson is literally saying that it is better to let trans kids kill themselves than to treat them respectfully in their identified genders.

Think about that.

And yes, this is specifically aimed at trans youth, as the Trump administration announcement states that the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline will “continue to serve LGB+ youth” after the termination of the contract with the Trevor Project, under its general 988 line, using its regular hotline staffers. And yes, it is absolutely true that this is bad for cis sexual-minority youth, who are losing the counselors specially trained to help them. But the administration is explicitly saying it will serve LGB youth but not trans youth, because supposedly there is no such thing as a trans person. And it is hoping by acknowledging the existence of cis sexual-minority youth to get cisgender LGB adults to be motivated by self-interest to distance themselves from trans people (most of whom are themselves queer, mind you; only about a quarter of people who have gender transitioned identify as straight or heterosexual). Please, cis members of the Pride community—don’t let them divide us and set us at one another! Because the bigots are definitely focusing on trans people’s rights now, which must be recognized—but they’ll be focusing their destructive aims at cis queer folks in due time.

In sum, we can’t spend our lives in a continuous state of outrage, scrolling on our phones. That’s bad for our mental health, yes—but it also deadens people’s impulse to feel outrage when something egregiously abhorrent happens. We see how that has manifested this week, in people reacting to news of the cancelling of the Trevor Project’s national suicide prevention hotline services on the day of the Skrmetti decision. “This is misinformation! You’re catastrophizing by connecting unrelated new and old news items! This is a case of narcissistic trans drama demanding attention when all LGBTQ+ young people are equally harmed!”

Something truly hateful happened this week, and it is important that we treat it as outrageous—because outrage should push us towards action.

 

Some Advice to Allies Following the Suicide of Leelah Alcorn

Having listened to a bunch of conversations about Leelah Alcorn's suicide, I wanted to provide some advice to cis gender allies who would like to help advocate for children and adults who wish to gender transition.

Leelah Alcorn committed suicide because, rather than respecting her gender identity, her family rejected it, isolated her from friends and the internet, and sent her to "Christian therapists" who told her a trans identity is a sickness she must cure by faith and prayer. Her despair was built of familial rejection, societal transphobia, the pain of not being allowed to live in her identified gender, and a lost hope that she would be able to transition before puberty and her body's masculinization.

It's this last item that I want to talk about with you. Like other trans-identified children, Leelah wanted to have access to puberty-blocking drugs. (Yes, they are considered safe--doctors regularly prescribe them to children who don't identify as trans, but are experiencing "precocious puberty" at a young age. And yes, all they do is postpone puberty, which will resume if they stop taking the drugs. The fear often cited by those unsupportive of allowing children to live in identified genders other than that they were assigned at birth--that it's just a phase which they may grow out of--shouldn't justify denying trans children access to puberty-delaying medications, because if a child actually did decide not to transition, they could just stop taking the meds and their puberty would resume.) By using hormone-blocking meds, a trans child can avoid experiencing their body changing in ways that undermine their sense of self--something most trans people alive today have experienced, and can tell you is very painful.

I have heard some very well-intentioned allies arguing for trans children's access to transition services--supportive therapy and hormone-blockers--in the aftermath of Leelah Alcorn's suicide. I appreciate that advocacy a great deal. But there is an aspect of some of what I've heard that I've found very problematic, that I want to raise with you here, and that has to do with discussions of "passing."

First of all, the term itself is one I find highly problematic, as I have addressed before on this blog. In short, we usually use the word "passing" to refer to a person hiding their true identity. I am not "passing" as a man. I am not "really" a woman who is performing a successful deception on the public. I *am* a man. By reiterating the term "passing," well-intentioned cis allies re-entrench cissexism--the belief that cis people's gender identities are authentic and unquestionable, while trans people's gender identities are a performance open to question, and in some way fundamentally deceptive.

It is true that most people who identify as trans men or trans women would like to have bodies that conform to our society's ideals of what men's and women's bodies look like. Those ideals are currently based on cis bodies. Binary-identified trans people typically wish to have bodies similar to cis people's for one or both of two reasons. The first is internal--the thing we call dysphoria. People who identify as women, whether cis or trans, often feel uncomfortable with having substantial amounts of facial hair, for example, or with having only one breast, and would feel the same if they were living alone on the proverbial desert island. They want their bodies to conform to some basic female norms--again, currently defined around idealized cis female bodies. Thus, a trans girl who starts to grow a beard at puberty is very likely to experience psychological discomfort with that. That's bodily gender dysphoria.  And just as when a cis woman has a mastectomy, we view surgical recreation of the missing breast as a medically-justified reconstruction rather than cosmetic, we should view removing breast tissue from a trans man's body as medically-justified, not cosmetic.  It's a way to treat internal gender dysphoria.

But another reason most binary-identified trans people today wish to have bodies similar to those of cis women and men is social: the huge impact on our lives of transphobic gender policing. Visibly trans women in particular are subjected to huge amounts of social stigma, street harassment, job discrimination, bathroom panic, and sexualized violence. This social mistreatment of trans women is transmisogyny, and it is intensified in interaction with race/ethnicity, and with other characteristics such as disability. But even those of us with the privileges of being white and male suffer disrespect and sexualized violence when we are visibly trans gender. Wanting to avoid disrespect, discrimination and violence is rational, and we're told the way to do this is to gain access to hormones and surgery and voice training and other services so that our trans status will become invisible. We're told that we must "pass" as cis people to avoid transphobia.

Now, it is true that Leelah Alcorn wanted access to testosterone blockers so that her body wouldn't masculinize at puberty, and as an adult trans woman, she could have a body that would look like that of a cis woman. Probably, she wanted that both due to internal gender dysphoria, and to avoid social gender-policing shaming and violence. As an ally, it's fine and right that you should want to voice support for Leelah and for trans kids everywhere, and to explain why access to puberty-postponing medication is important.

But please, please, don't do it by saying something like this: "A trans person needs to pass in order to be successful. If they don't pass, their lives will be horrible. So they need all sorts of medical treatments starting before puberty."

Please bear in mind several things. First of all, the vast majority of the trans people you'll encounter today have had no access to puberty-postponing drugs. So most trans men you'll meet developed breasts and hips, and most trans women you'll meet had their voices change, their shoulders broaden, their facial hair start to grow. If you say "unless you start transition before puberty, your life will be pathetic," you're consigning all of us to a dustbin of gender tragedy.

Secondly, bear in mind that violence and mockery are not "caused" by being visibly trans gender. They are caused by transphobia. The end goal of reducing the appalling rate at which trans people attempt suicide will be met when we embrace visibly trans people of all genders. Normalizing the idea that only those who live in a binary gender and appear cis gender by valorizing "passing" is counterproductive.

I am certainly not asking allies to stop acknowledging the extreme stigma aimed at visibly trans people, especially visibly trans women of other marginalized statuses, such as trans women of color. What I'm asking is that you frame that stigma and violence as problems rather than as facts of nature. Don't naturalize the idea that trans people must "pass" to be "successful." Instead, acknowledge the force of gender-policing violence in our society, but frame it as a problem we as a society must fight. Our goal should be to live in a society in which trans bodies are not seen as deviant, ugly, lesser, or in need of massive medical revisions. A visibly trans body should be embraced as no less valid than a cis person's body.

Yes, it's good to advocate for trans children's right to be treated with love, respect, and medical transitional support. But I would frame this in terms of reducing internal gender dysphoria, not in terms of some requirement that trans people get tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical interventions if we are to be respected.

I appreciate the advocacy of all of our allies. And as my allies, I hope you will work to dismantle the ideology of "passing" rather than entrenching it in your advocacy for our access to transition services.

On Trans* People and Suicide

A person who is dear to me has been having a very hard time.  She's a trans* woman, and she's socially isolated.  Her family of origin hasn't been supportive of her gender transition. Her trans* status is visible, and she faces regular gender-policing street harassment and the everyday indignity of being misgendered.  She has trouble finding work due to transphobic discrimination, and recently lost her part-time job.

She began feeling suicidal.

I'll tell you more about her story, but first, there are some facts that you should know.

If any statistic shows how difficult life is for trans* people it is this:

The general percentage of Americans who ever attempt suicide is 1.6%.  The percentage of trans* Americans who attempt suicide, however, is 41%.

Remember, that's not the percentage of trans* identified people who "merely" consider suicide--41% of trans* Americans try to kill themselves.  These statistics are from the National Center for Transgender Equality's large survey of 7000 trans* people, which you can read here.

It's not hard to understand why a trans* person is over 25 times more likely to attempt suicide than a cis gender person.  Just consider more statistics from the full report on the survey, available here:

• 78% of minors who are trans* or gender-nonconforming report being harassed, and 35% physically assaulted, in school.
• 90% of trans* adults report harassment or discrimination at work. 
• 29% of trans* adults report being harassed by the police.

Living with the degree of social stigma and violence that are aimed at trans* people is hard.  And the very people whom we are told to turn to when we are despairing--doctors and therapists, family members and religious figures--often compound our distress instead of reducing it, due to their own transphobia.

Which brings me back to the story of my trans* woman friend.  She turned first to her small circle of friends for help, but while they were sympathetic and supportive, many of them, like her, were trans*, and dealing with their own difficulties.  She didn't want to overburden them.  So she tried posting about her unhappiness with her life circumstances on Facebook, but got a bunch of responses that were either unhelpful ("just keep on smiling and don't let things get you down!") or victim-blaming ("you're the one who decided to gender transition, so you have to deal with the consequences").

So recently, late at night, crying alone in her room, she called the National Suicide Prevention Helpline.  A man with a Southern accent answered, and asked her the standard questions, like "have you formed a plan to kill yourself?"  After several minutes, when he was talking with her about whether there were friends she could turn to, she told him she was a trans* woman, and that that had limited her social circle.

There was a pause, and then the man at the National Suicide Prevention Helpline hung up on her.

It is transphobia like this that explains that 41% attempted suicide rate.

People, it is important that we do all the positive things like celebrate trans* agency and creativity and resilience.  No, trans* people aren't mere pitiable victims.  But we can't just sit around telling success stories about how D.C. Comics now has a trans* character in the Batgirl series, and Chaz Bono is a household name, and public attitudes toward same-sex marriage have crossed over into positive territory.  Homophobia may be on its way out, but transphobia remains horrifically virulent.  We have to keep reiterating the appalling statistics about discrimination that people who are trans* and/or gender-nonconforming face every day.  And we have to keep taking action toward reducing the shockingly high rate at which trans* people attempt suicide.

About my friend--she made it through the night.  In fact, she found ironic amusement in being hung up on by a suicide prevention worker which gave her some strength, if bitterly earned, to persevere.

But we as a society have to do a lot better by our trans* gender siblings than this.