Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Trans (But Were Afraid to Ask)

by Brynn Tannehill

Notice a pattern here? None of these risks for suicide are about being transgender. They’re about what is being done to transgender people. And therein lies the rub. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being transgender. There is something horribly, horribly wrong with the way we as a culture treat transgender people.

Rejecting the identities of transgender youth does not help them; it only makes life worse for them. It’s not a form of “tough love” or “hating the sin and loving the sinner.” It’s causing direct harm to a child, and the research backs it up.

What happens when you rape, beat, fire, evict, reject, isolate, demonize, and humiliate a class of people on a daily basis? Would you expect a group of people experiencing this to thrive? Or would you expect 40 percent of them to try to find escape in oblivion? Leelah was right. If we want to end the scourge of suicide, it’s time we stop trying to fix transgender people. It’s time to fix society.

It’s time for us to make a conscious effort to stop devaluing anything, or anyone, who doesn’t meet some societal stereotype of perfect masculinity.

Accepting transgender women as women does not fundamentally detract from the rights, dignity, or value of cisgender women. The argument that calling transgender people women or men in accordance with their gender identities somehow dilutes or pollutes the meaning of these words is effectively the same argument used by those opposed to marriage equality.