This is a resource article addressing some of the ways well-meaning people can hurt suicidal/formerly suicidal people with dysphoria. This post does not address any identity or embodiment in particular. It is meant to address people who experience strong discomfort due to their anatomy or social gender reference. There will be no graphic content in this article. This article was written from the experience of having grown up in liberal communities and having found some of the support received to be fairly toxic. Dysphoric people are also more than capable of promoting harmful ideas to other dysphoric people.

People know that people who question their gender or feel profound alienation from their bodies have high suicide attempt rates. When people say that not transitioning is fatal, a great deal of that fatality is subtly attributed to the very hands of dysphoric people. Many falsely believe that only trans identified people are dysphoric or that medical transition is the only cure for this potential suicide risk. Many people are also not aware of how suicidal thoughts twist reality and create unrealistic future scenarios in the mind of a suicidal person.

Before we dive in deeper, I will disclose that I am not a trained mental health professional. I have never received training in how to respond to suicide threats. This post addresses both impersonal ways people enforce dangerous mindsets, the ways people violate the privacy of dysphoric people and how people enable the toxic mindsets of the dysphoric people who come to them for emotional support.

Recently I saw a tumblr post which was screenshot and shared on facebook. The post was of a father proclaiming that he’d rather have a happy son than a dead daughter. Given what parents of trans and questioning kids are told, we can presume that “dead” is not a metaphor here. This post was shared widely by both non-dysphoric people and trans-identifying dysphoric people alike.

This was also the post that made me realize that I needed to share what I have learned from having well meaning people be some of the most toxic influence in my life.

As it stands, people presume that dysphoric people are an intrinsic suicide risk. They presume that our very fundamental being makes us a danger to ourselves, that suicide is what we will naturally resort to if we do not transition as soon as humanly possible. They take our suicidal idealizations and distortions as signs of our CORE being. I have even seen people take my description of utter desperation as a romantic narrative of the will of the human spirit. The young trans woman Leelah Alcorn became (for a brief period of time) one of the most talked about trans youths purely because of her death. People not only do not know how to engage with the potential suicidal traits of the living, but are also honoring the dead more then the living. This is a dangerous cultural climate, to put it softly.

Let’s try to defuse this.

Telling dysphoric youth that people who do not transition commit suicide creates more pressure and has been known to aggravate existing suicidal tendencies.

Suicidal ideation and histories are a reality among people who are trans-identified or dysphoric. This is not meant to erase that. What does need to be countered is the notion of “transition or suicide” when either placed upon other people or promoted as a standard. People will tell parents of children who may never have expressed suicidal thoughts about the high suicide rates of dysphoric people. Parents of dysphoric children hear stories from older trans-identified people and believe that they must act quickly in affirming a desire to fully transition OR ELSE.

When the media hypes depictions of dysphoric people self-harming and killing ourselves, we tell dysphoric people, “People who have this experience all hurt themselves. It is just what you all do. It is a natural thing that can be expected. It is the only other coping mechanism if social/medical transition is not available. In fact, if you cannot transition then this is the ONLY way to affirm your will.” This is, needless to say, a highly dangerous message to send to any person. It can make self-harm seem like a stronger force then it would otherwise be to viewers. It makes the violence against our bodies into shock television for typically non-dysphoric audiences. It enforces a lack of privacy in regards to our bodies while modeling the worst coping mechanisms.

“Transition or suicide” gives a false prognosis. When people think they will not live until 21 unless they take hormones, which they also suspect will take ten years off of their lives, then they will act out of that false notion. They will give a false consent. If one was told they needed to take a hard anti-cancer drug that would knock twenty years off their life, but that they only had five years to live without it, they would consent to taking it. If that person later found out that there was a high survival rate for their cancer, then they would be angry as they would have NEVER consented to the drug knowing that information. This metaphorical scenario applies to HRT. When we hype shock narratives of dysphoric people self-harming and dying by suicide, we rob people of centering themselves before giving “consent.” (I have to put that in scare quotes after my own experience.) Being robbed of a non-panic-based mindset from which to make your major life choices is an act of social violence. Ironically, this is often promoted by those who say they want to help us.

“Transition or suicide” can directly lead to actual suicide among people who cannot transition, want to detransition, whose desired surgeries are not medically existent, among people who do not actually want to transition but have body dysphoria, or among those who have rough life patches where transition seems hard/out of reach. When you put out the idea that there is only one cure, people will respond as though this were true. They will respond with their own flesh in some cases. Feeding into these mindsets is never to be done causally. Seeing a post like the one referenced above feeds directly into this mindset. The ally may think, “Aww, what a loving father!” but the dysphoric person sees a reminder of their own feelings of trapped circumstance. The same goes for telling gender non-conforming people they are more likely to be murdered than they actually are. Feeding into binary narratives of hopelessness or medical salvation has a dramatic cost on our ability to consent and build positive future counter narratives for ourselves.

Openly and causally talking about our high rates of suicide attempts undermines our right to personal privacy.

The right to disclose actual history of suicidal thoughts or actions belongs to the individual. This does not go away because a person has had their body politicized against their will.

Many “trans parents” co-opt the mental health and privacy of their dysphoric children. They loudly talk about and OVER their dysphoric children. They release deeply private information about their child before the child can understand what it means to be marked as a suicidal person. There is a MASSIVE stigma to that and having their triggers publicly known by strangers can open them up to more personalized violence. People who are dysphoric often need to invest a lot of time and energy into our mental health needs. Putting the burden of both recovering and fighting the good fight against self-harm stigma is an evil thing to place upon a child. It places the ego of the “good parent” as higher than the privacy of the child. Dysphoric children deserve better and deserve to keep their dignity intact regardless of which route they decide.

As a teenager, I was once advised by an older trans-identified person that if I told people I had no suicide history, no one would believe me. That outing myself was not only outing myself as gender variant but as a suicide risk at the same time.

Suicidal and self-harming narratives are also used to add credibility to suffering. “I am real, I have suffered because I have tried to do x” is scarily common. When allies readily and eagerly consume our stories of self-injury, we provide incentives to people to think that self harm makes one’s suffering valid. Many people who go into the trans community need large amounts of validation for various reasons. Telling any person who is suffering that narrative is dangerous, and the strong need for validation just adds more fuel to the fire. There is a real price to romanticizing or hyping our collective potential for self injury. This price is frankly not directly paid by non-dysphoric people.

Trauma stories should be told by those with the trauma.

Many forms of trauma involve an erasure of the victim’s voice and will. Many dysphoric people have thoughts and feelings which do not match the trans-narrative. My parents didn’t know I was planning on detransition nor fully understood how serious I was until started progressing towards a legal name change. My story was held up as a successful trans story when in reality, I was gravely suffering and felt trapped. When I read parents talk over their dysphoric children, I have to at least question, “What if that kid is like me?”

Of course, this is a projection. I cannot know if that child has suffered as I have. Yet this is the core of the violence of erasure. The actual child’s voice is not seen. I cannot truly affirm the dignity and sovereignty of a narrative spoken by another over another. I can only remember that I have yet to tell my own doctors that I regret transition and wonder what lies they spread of me. I do not even know if the person referenced by the quote has ever even been suicidal or if that was just an assumption projected onto them. No matter how well meaning, you can never replace the voice of another.

This is a fact of life. Yet there is a difference between,“He seems happier now” and direct reference of something as traumatic as a suicidal history. Most people do not need this difference explained to them for non-dysphoric people. Yet it becomes an acceptable reference to this particular type of trauma.

Focusing on our self-injury teaches us that our power is in our deaths.

When you say dysphoric people need support because we have high rates of self injury, you really are saying that our means of getting help lies in visible self-harm. You do not advocate a better life because we deserve it. You teach martyrdom. That our bodies’ own strength is better put towards cries for external help over other means of pulling ourselves up.

When I first read about Leelah Alcorn, I thought “What in god’s name is so wrong with our communities that a child could be linked to tumblr, know some common community concepts, want to help raise awareness…and then believed that martyrdom was the best use of her inner power? Why did we impart these ideas and not ideas about survival above all and ways to leave bad situations?”

When we promote transition-or-suicide mindsets, we are telling more dysphoric people that their power is better spent killing themselves rather than saving themselves. If one does not see other futures for themselves, they are tempted to regain their dignity and glory in any way possible.

It centers our entire existence and mental health around gender identity or dysphoria and encourages doctors to a patient’s distorted views at face value.

It is common for suicidal people to have distorted views. We hear people sometimes say, “my life is not worth living if I can’t go this concert”, or it is not worth living if one doesn’t “have a boyfriend (at this very moment)”, or “get a date to prom”, or “wear certain clothing”. These things are sincerely important to a person who is suffering, and the fact that they have distorted views around these things does not minimize that. Yet oftentimes there will be many other factors into why a person has focused strictly on ONE thing as the life saving goal. A competent doctor should validate a person’s likes, desires and goals, while also looking for deeper issues to help.When doctors view transition as the be-all end-all treatment for suicidal gestures, they skip the second step.

The suicidal person may also believe that doctors who want to investigate further are committing medical malpractice or are being bigoted. When you are told that the answer to your suffering lies in the endocrinologist’s office, why bother seriously engaging with a therapist about your suicidal thoughts or explore other mental health issues without mentioning that? (Note: There are some really valid reasons to be wary of which doctors you speak to about such matters. The radical mental health movement and Icarus project exist for a reason.)

It also encourages allies to presume that our self-violence is due to a more foreign and subject reason. Many of us experience issues with abusive families, housing discrimination, the threat of work discrimination, and sexual/physical violence. These things have their own trauma to them and need a lot of resources to be countered. Focusing on the gender aspect can be used to overwrite the situations which existed for us pre-dysphoria or which exist in ways not directly related to dysphoria

It turns the period of healthy questioning into being viewed as a period of self-harm.

If one views the world as transition-or-suicide then one must view personal caution and questioning on the part of dysphoric people as an indirect self harm. This erases that many detransitioners exist, and openly express that we wish we were given more time and options. It ignores that most people who desisted in their desire to transition simply didn’t talk about it until recently and only those willing to risk A LOT were vocal. As mentioned before, well-meaning people can pressure a person into transition through rushing them and giving them false information. (Telling parents that the older a child gets, the harder this process will be for them IS a form of rushing and pressuring.)

What we can do instead:

Create situations of real informed consent through acknowledging detransitioned voices and experiences.

Affirm the voices of the living and do not gawk at narratives of self-harm or suicide if you are non-dysphoric.

Work on combating employment discrimination and helping people find safe housing away from abusers. (There is one organization called “hiretrans” that I still need to look into.)

Respect the privacy of dysphoric children and adults.

Do not promote narratives of hopelessness or that frame transition as the ONLY way to happiness.

Learn about trauma symptoms and how to support people who are traumatized beyond their gender issues.

Affirm stories of survival outside of medical transition. (Some people who are trans-identified also need this. Some medical conditions can make transition especially unsafe for certain people.)

Learn about and spread ways to help with dysphoria either outside medical transition or to go along with medical transition.

Do not talk over dysphoric people, and respect that for a person suffering, a transition-or-die mindset seems very real to them. Mocking them for that helps no one.

(This article is an edit of a previously existing post, spelling/grammar were the only aspects changed)