Stories To Give You Nightmares

As the executive director of a transgender non-profit and a social worker I hear stories of discrimination that we as a community face every day. I hear stories from trans people and from therapists, some of the stories, some of the stories will just make you want to sit down and cry.

There was a trans woman who was put in a men’s shelter even though it is against the law where she was verbally and physically attacked and thrown out of the shelter. The story of a trans woman who had to go a rehab center where they questioned her about her surgical status, she showed them her birth certificate, passport, and driver license all which listed her as female. But they refused to admit her until she told them her status and when she did they then said that didn’t have a room for her. Or the case of a trans woman who was in the hospital and the staff harassed her and when her therapist complained their answer was “whatever.”

In Ami B. Kaplan blog she writes about the mental health issues that we face.

The Psychology of Stigma against Transgender Women by Men.
By Ami B. Kaplan, LCSW
July 7, 2016

There’s a particular and profound type of stigma and derision in society aimed at femininity in men (or those who are perceived to be men).  This stigma (it could also be called hate, aversion, distaste, repugnance) is very deep and very old in our consciousness, particularly among men.  A man in a dress has historically been fodder for humor and entertainment in movies and in male-bonding rituals.  There’s both an uncomfortable feeling and a forbidden fascination among men with seeing men outwardly showing their feminine side.  Why is this so?

Let’s delve into the male psyche a little to find some answers.  At some point in early development (around ages 2 to 4), the young (cis-gendered) boy must make a developmental leap in order to identify with his Father or as ‘male’. Psychologically (and unconsciously) the thinking goes like this: “I’m like you (the father), I am not like you (the mother)”.  Hence there is a sort of rejection of the mother and specifically with her femininity in the nascent psyche of the young male. (Jessica Benjamin writes about this – see ‘The Bonds of Love’, 1998).  And because this rejection happens in so young a psyche, it is correspondingly harsh and rigid and with little grey area.  Femininity must be rejected in all its forms and additionally is seen as less than and dangerous.  This is a perplexing and scary phenomenon for one so young.  And as Yoda once said: “…fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate…”  One could extrapolate from this that in some cases – this kind of dilemma in one with a weak ego or mental illness could lead to violence such as gay bashing or violence against transgender women. This, I believe is the root of pervasive stigma against men showing femininity and it could be argued that it is the root of homophobia, transphobia, internalized homophobia and internalized transphobia.

I also think that it has to do with the fear of being labeled “gay,” that if he doesn’t make fun of a trans woman he fears that his other male friend will think he might be gay so he over reacts towards the trans woman.

In another article that looks at the suicide rate of trans people and draws conclusions that shows the author’s lack of any knowledge about trans people was published in the Federalist,

The Transgender Suicide Rate Isn’t Due To Discrimination
July 7, 2016
By Daniel Payne

Chelsea Manning—who became a male-to-female transgender after going to prison as Bradley Manning for giving reams of classified information to WikiLeaks—allegedly attempted suicide earlier this week. Manning was taken to a prison hospital after an apparent attempted hanging.

This is not a surprise: “transgender” individuals have an alarmingly high suicide rate, somewhere north of 40 percent by some reliable estimates. A variety of explanations are often given for this astronomical figure, chief among them that transgender people are driven to kill themselves in such large numbers because they suffer from discrimination, bigotry and hatred.

And then the author goes on to equate the trans suicide rate to that of people of color,

There are two problems with this theory. The first is that it utterly ignores the most salient feature of transgender individuals: that they are mentally ill and need serious treatment. This is not a moral or ethical judgment. It is, rather, a fact. Individuals who believe they are a different sex than that of their biology are psychologically ill—self-evidently so—and one would quite reasonably expect a higher suicide rate from a portion of the population that suffers from so significant a mental illness (particularly a mental illness it is fashionable to indulge rather than treat).

The second problem is that the discrimination theory of suicide does not hold up when compared to other minority groups who suffer disproportionate real and perceived amounts of bigotry and negative discrimination. The Centers for Disease Control’s numbers on suicide indicate that the highest rates of suicide over the past 15 years or so belong to…white people. In contrast, in most of the years surveyed black people had the lowest suicide rate among all ethnicities. White suicide actually rose in the period 2000-2014.

He is comparing apple to oranges, discrimination comes in all forms being discriminated because of race is a lot different than being discriminated because gender identity. We do share some forms of discrimination together but there are other more virulent that the trans community faces such as being disowned by our families and having no support network. Research has shown that just by having the support of our families the rate of suicidal thoughts drops down to the level of the general population.

The author goes on to lay the blame on…

Why? Because discrimination is almost certainly a nondeterminate factor in general suicide rates. Mental illness, on the other hand, is very clearly a motivating factor in a great many suicides: the rate of successful suicide is extremely correlative with conditions of mental illness. Since transgenderism is a deleterious psychological affliction, it is wholly unsurprising to find higher rates of suicide among that class of people.

Is the author a therapist? Is he a doctor or a healthcare provider? He is a writer and writes on his blog that he is,

His spare time is spent building compost piles and reading Midatlantic colonial history.