When Trump got elected last year the non-profit that I’m the executive director started receiving phone calls from trans people who were scared and wanted someone to talk to. We never had calls like that before, but people were scared so this article comes as no surprise.
The article goes on to say,
Study Shows Queer Women, Trans People, Are More Depressed After Donald Trump’s WinWhy are the lesbians and gay not as “shell-shocked”
Mike Pence "doesn’t even believe I exist," wrote one respondent. "I should just kill myself now."
NewNowNext
By Trish Bendix
11/22/2017
We’ve all felt down since Donald Trump took the White House, but researchers have uncovered higher rates of anxiety and depression among queer women and trans people since the election.
Ironically, Cindy Veldhuis, a researcher at Columbia University’s School of Nursing, had originally planned on a more uplifting study.
“We thought that there would be all these positive effects from same-sex marriage being recognized,” Veldhuis tells NewNowNext, “And then the election happened and we realized all those positive effects, we just were not seeing. So we regrouped and added a bunch of questions about the election to capture that duality—both the positive effects of marriage recognition and then the potentially negative effects of the election.”
In December, Veldhuis and her team surveyed some 930 adult women who identified as lesbian, bisexual, queer, or otherwise not exclusively heterosexual, as well as trans men and women. Trump was still a month away from being inaugurated, but the effects were clear: Many participants used words like “terrified,” “scared,” and “shell-shocked.”
Cisgender lesbians felt somewhat less anxious and depressed than trans people, in part, Veldhuis theorized, because they could to “pass” better. “People with more marginalized identities were more aware of how others with even more marginalized identities were going to be affected.” She also found that participants with partners from multiple marginalized communities were more likely to report challenges in their relationships.Our anxiety is based on how well you can integrate into society, trans people who stand out fear more about discrimination and harassment. I use this slide in my PowerPoint presentation that quotes from the 2015 Transgender survey by NCTE.
The article goes on to say,
“We need to look at this longitudinally and figure out how people are doing longterm,” she says. “This is a snapshot in time, but those affects didn’t go away. It’s an ever-shifting landscape,” with Trump in the White House now. “So it’ll be hard to really capture well what has happened and how people are reacting since every day is a new policy or a new Tweet.”I don’t think the fear will go away until 2020 and even then it might continue for another four years.
Why are the lesbians and gay not as “shell-shocked”
ReplyDeleteI will say one thing, I was and remain shell-socked. As more and more crap comes along I am getting very angry. With this recent Tax thing I can only again repeat, trump is only a part of the problem. A big one yes but can be toppled. Can the whole dirty rotten system is toppled? I hope so. That is where my answer is. Hoping that enough folks realize that something is wrong with the whole damn system. What will the democrats do in 2020, Tweak, reform, tweak, reform, and then the republicans will come along and do their thing. Meanwhile we go round and round in their game. My hope is the day will come, yes not without a struggle a terrible struggle that we can as Socialist Feminist Gloria Martin said, "We have to change the system, otherwise we will be fighting the same old battles over and over. First we change our minds and move in the direction of liberation not assimilation, the we begin to understand that the system is wrong and go out from there. As long as we continue to help prop up the evil twins of Capitalism we will lose every time.