News of Youth Suicides Devastate the Trans Community. Is Anyone Listening?
Viral stories of tragedy are what the cis mainstream wants. For the trans community these stories take a deep emotional toll, and it’s not clear if they will have a broader impact.
by Evan Urquhart
Over the weekend, a post on twitter.com describing the death of a young trans boy, went viral. The story, which claimed to be shared by his mother, Rita, whose bio listed her location as London, is currently unconfirmed. It described the death by suicide of Corei at 14-years-old, after the child had been subjected to anti-trans hate online. Much of the virality seems to have come from the responses of anti-trans accounts blaming Rita for the death of her child.
The intense harassment towards Rita over her tweets about Corei ultimately led her to delete the posts, and then to make her twitter account private. Unconfirmed claims that Rita had been doxed by anti-trans activists circulated widely, as did expressions of grief and support for Corei and his family.
screenshot from twitter.com
The full story of who Corei and his family are, and what happened, currently exists in the special limbo viral stories on social media experience between being widely disseminated and confirmed (or exposed as untrue) through reporting. However, Corei’s is only the latest in a series of viral moments associated with deaths by suicide of young transgender people. Eden Knight, 23, died by suicide after being isolated from the trans community and forced to detransition and return to Saudi Arabia. Onyx John, 13, died by suicide after relentless bullying at his school in Australia. Henry Berg-Brousseau, 24, died of suicide after working as an activist for trans rights—his mother recalled him being relentlessly bullied for his identity as a child. The suicide of Alice Litman, 20, after being unable to access gender-affirming care for years due to long wait times at England’s NHS, has been the subject of a recent inquest that found a lack of timely treatment contributed to the death of the young woman.
Each of these stories have devastated the wider transgender community. They exist besides the smaller, more personal tragedies many trans people have also experienced losing trans friends or partners to suicide. For those of us in the tiny trans press, such stories represent a dilemma. Suicide narratives are themselves a danger to the mental health and safety of our community. Normalizing suicide as a response to the intense discrimination and hatred trans people are subjected to is almost certain to lead more people to consider it, and a (mercifully) small number of those who do will themselves die by suicide. On the other hand, it’s impossible not to notice that these stories are able to attract mainstream attention and concern like few others. As the mainstream gives a collective shrug at the prospect of inhumane treatment bans, forced detransition, and forced outing already impacting trans kids and adults in much of the U. S., stories of children and young people losing their lives have a potential to break through the indifference and draw attention to the worst possible result of the ongoing attacks on the transgender community.
The sympathy dead kids engender in anyone with a heart makes anti-trans activists very angry, as evidenced by their shocking response to the (purported) mother of a recently deceased trans child. In addition to attacking grieving parents, an ongoing campaign seeks to discredit the medical evidence that gender-affirming care is beneficial to the mental health of trans people by focusing on the fact that suicide itself is quite rare, and therefore can be quite difficult to study or draw firm conclusions about.
screenshot from twitter.com
Saying it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about rare events in very small populations with multiple stressors isn’t the same thing as saying that gender-affirming care doesn’t decrease the risk of suicide for patients who need it. There are at least two common sense ways that access to care would logically be expected to reduce suicide risk. First, and most obviously, treatments likely reduce suicide risk by reducing gender dysphoria (an intense psychological distress many trans people feel over incongruity between their birth-assigned sex and their gender identity). Gender dysphoria has been linked to higher depression and anxiety, and treatment has been shown to reduce both, though not to the level of the cisgender population. People who feeling less anxiety and depression are less likely to kill themselves!
However, that’s not the only way that treatment might impact suicide rates. Treatments like cross-sex hormones treat gender-dysphoria by altering the secondary sex-characteristics of a trans person. Having a visibly gender-nonconforming appearance marks a person for social stigma and discrimination. Being discriminated against and hated on for one’s appearance is a stressor that could reasonably lead to all kinds of harms, including increased risk of suicide. Therefore, gender-affirming care might reduce suicide rates by reducing the amount of hatred a trans person receives, because their appearance is less hate-inducing among cisgender people.
Common sense aside, though, it’s a hard question to study. Very few people kill themselves! Although trans people are at a higher risk than cis people, they’re not at such a high risk that it’s actually common for trans people to kill themselves. While it’s possible some master study will settle this once and for all one day, the rarity of suicide and the complexities that go into who dies in that way makes that hard to imagine.
The research we do have on trans people and the things that help or harm them includes includes a large number of small findings that paint a blurry, but still very consistent picture. One recent randomized controlled trial showed that transmasculine adults’ gender dysphoria was radically reduced by testosterone, as was their depression and suicidality. Another study found depression was significantly reduced in trans youth after treatment. Another found socially transitioned children in supportive families experienced similar levels of depression and only slightly higher anxiety than cisgender controls. Yet another foudn depression and thoughts of suicide were significantly lower in adults who had accessed treatment, compared to those who wanted treatment but hadn’t accessed it.
There are many more, each looking at a slightly different part of the picture, none finding a harm or increased risk of suicide among trans people who receive treatment, most finding a benefit, sometimes modest, sometimes more substantial. One consistent complicating factor is that early, strong family support is very consistently associated with the best outcomes, and trans people are much more likely to be able to access treatment when they have such support. This means teasing out the effect of the support vs the effect of the treatment is a real challenge.
Challenges or no, there’s a consistent picture in the reasearch for those willing to see it. Trans people greatly benefit from family support, community support, and access to medical treatment. They are in turn harmed by family rejection, community stigma and prejudice, and being denied access to desired medical transition options. Virally sharing tragic cases of individual suicides likely does more harm than good for the living members of the trans community who read and grieve for lost siblings they’ll never know due to the tragedy. However, as long as the mainstream continues to be indifferent to the great many other harms of transphobia, such as unemployment, homelessness, poverty, violence, and poorer health outcomes, the focus on suicide as the be-all and end-all of this discussion seems likely to continue. Only time will tell if there’s any good for trans people that ever comes out of it.
