The suicide rate among transgender people is staggering. Maybe you've heard.
The 2010 TransPulse survery showed that in Ontario, 78% of transgender people had considered it in their lifetime. 36% in just the year prior to the survey. Statistics are hard to come by, and you always fear bias.
Consider also what we know about erasure of transgender identities.
The Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20 seeks to raise awareness of how many transgender people are murdered around the world because of who they are. Trouble is, in counting those deaths, we have to wade through the headlines, even through the articles, and investigate right into their lives to find out that they were transgender, and need to be counted.
September was Suicide Awareness Month, and today I read this article, about two more deaths on September 28th.
The challenge in understanding this epidemic (yes, it is an epidemic) is erasure. Erasure of transgender identities in the media, and by families ashamed of their loved ones' true identities.
Now, erasure is a term we hear a lot in social justice circles, and not everyone might really understand what it is. Quite simply, it is when media or family choose to ignore a transgender person's true identity, and instead publish headlines and obituaries under the name and gender they were declared at birth.
In the case of media, sometimes this is because so many trans people are unable to get their documentation updated - in Ontario it's an issue of privilege. Even though we are fully "allowed" to by our government, it still costs $137 to just change our name. For a great many transgender people, that's their grocery money. So it goes unattended, and they are misnamed and misgendered quite often institutionally.
In the case of family, the rejection of their transgender identity is so strong that the family feels justified in "reclaiming" their name and gender assigned at birth, obituaries are posted that again misname and misgender. People are buried cross-dressed against their felt identities to conform to how they were assigned at birth.
Being transgender myself, suicidal ideation was something I didn't even realize I was doing, and I had no idea how prevalent it was. Working with the community, I see the truth in the numbers that TransPulse published in 2010 reflected in the people I work with.
So let me bring this together.
I don't think the public really understands how much of an epidemic suicidality is among transgender people, but they are starting to see stories emerge in the media. They see these stats like I posted above, but stats are just numbers. We see record numbers of transgender people coming forward in our Gender Journeys programming, and in groups like PFLAG. Transgender identities are still poorly understood by the public, but they are better understood now than they ever have been in the history of humanity.
And we are finally seeing some degree of compassion emerge.
As we hold the media more accountable for respecting transgender identities, and as families become less ashamed of their loved ones' true identities, I believe we will finally begin to see the extent of this epidemic.
My hope is that visibility will bring more compassion, and people will finally see what those of us working in the community have seen all along.
Transgender suicidality, and a whole array of mental health concerns, come from people not being acknowledged by their families, society around them, as who they are. Being constantly denied their identity by other people who believe they know better. Even denied institutionally by religious faiths that refuse to acknowledge and promote so-called "reparative" therapy.
Transphobia will continue to exist, as other forms of oppression like racism, but at least we have a public narrative now that racism must not be tolerated.
So when it seems that more and more transgender people are in the headlines, and suicidality seems to be on the rise, understand that it always was there, that you are finally starting to see the extent of our concern.
