stop letting trans girls kill ourselves / not a poem
in the past few months, i have been approached several times to provide various forms of support and intervention to or around young trans women who are feeling suicidal. this has happened in a few different capacities, both personal and professional. of course, the professional gets pretty personal sometimes when one is a member of the population that one is “working with” in a social service role. in all of these situations, i’ve noticed a recurrent theme articulated by both the suicidal individual and some of the communities surrounding them that’s frightened and disturbed me: the idea of suicide as an act of personal agency that should be upheld and supported by “the community.”
as in, if a trans girl wants to kill herself, and she’s thought it through, and she says she sees no other option, and that this is what she had decided, then we should not intervene in any way. and if she asks for help in making her suicide plan more effective, less painful, or aesthetically pleasing, then we should provide that help.
my understanding is that there are a few different threads of “radical politics” that get drawn into this perspective, which did not, clearly, develop in a vacuum: consent culture and the politics of body sovereignty is the most obvious. people have the right to do what they want with their own bodies and health decisions, including self-harm and ending their lives. if they do not consent to life-preserving intervention, the community does not have the right to interfere.
woven into this is a certain strand of mad pride and anti-ableist thinking (which itself highlights some issues with conflating all types of mental health struggle/illness/dis-ease with disability in general) that critique the power dynamics involved with enforcing saneist, rationalist, and/or institutional perspectives that living is better than death on folks who are suicidal.
and there is also a broader critique of suicide intervention philosophy/practice as a victim-blaming manifestation of a society that constantly attacks and degrades trans women (and all marginalized people to various degrees) and then medicalizes/shames/further violates them for suicidality. in this vein, suicidality is a natural, understandable, and even politically powerful response in the face of a society that transforms life into a degradation.
the last argument is the one that i am the most viscerally affected by, and a few years ago, i went so far as to write and publish an article expanding on this perspective and arguing that the community (or rather, society in general) is responsible for driving individuals to suicide, refusing to offer them adequate support, and then blaming them for their deaths.
although i still stand by that article, and the sentiment that suicide is a politically charged, understandable reaction to suffering - both political and personal – i am now deeply uncertain about the responsibility of having published such a thing in a climate in which suicide among trans women and queer folks more broadly is an epidemic that continues to haunt us. there is not a single queer or trans youth i have worked with who has not considered suicide at some point, and the majority have actually planned suicides or attempted them.
i am uncertain – i have regret – because i think underlying all of the apparently political arguments for supporting the suicides of trans women are powerful aesthetic and emotional undercurrents that reflect our (queer, trans, racialized) communities’ trauma histories and deep ambivalence toward relationship building and care. in other words, i think that this idea that we need to support trans women’s decisions to die – in other words, let them die – comes from the ways we understand and feel about love.
the argument around body sovereignty and consent is, to me, clearly rooted in a mis-conceptualization of what it means to provide care (the action of giving help) and caring (the feeling of being cared about). both body sovereignty and consent politics come, after all, from movements around medical care and sexual/romantic intimacy.
the predominant (white, colonial) queer/trans narrative of “proper” consent to being cared for goes something like this: someone expresses that they are in pain, or you happen to see that they are. you offer them help. if they refuse, you back off, no questions asked. any further attempt to help could be a considered a violation.
this narrative holds a lot of resonance for me, but i believe it comes from a traumatized place: it is rooted in queer and trans experiences of abusive families and intimate partnership in which we are not allowed to refuse, we are not allowed to leave. our reaction is to swing the other way in the extreme: we encourage people to leave, we don’t question the refusal of love, even when it is clearly needed.
as a social worker/psychotherapist in training, i was pretty self-righteous and very vocal about enforcing this model of consent/care among my peers. it broke down when i started to work as a family therapist in a totally non-queer psychiatric hospital setting (the antithesis of anarchist queer community settings).
in my work with families, i often met very young children (as young as 4 years old) who were extremely angry and emotionally dysregulated due to trauma or other stressors. i mean, so angry that they would damage furniture and physically/sexually harm their peers. these children frequently expressed hatred for themselves, as well as the desire to die. in therapy sessions, they often told their parents that they were going to “run away forever.”
more often than not, these parents were concerned and loving but did not know how to respond. they asked me what they should say. from my own place of both clinical training and queer narratives, i suggested that they tell their children that it was okay to be angry, that they were allowed to be angry, and that if they did indeed run away, that they would always have a home to come back to if they wanted. i believed that this was consent, was the secure attachment that is so prized in child psychology.
my supervisor (therapist instructor) agreed with my intervention, but also suggested that i had missed an important element: i should also tell these parents to say that if their child ran away, they would go out and find them and bring them home.
the emotional effect this had on me was profound. this was not something i had been taught to believe in queer community – that love and care might mean following someone even after they have rejected you. that it might mean reaching out, and failing, and then reaching out and failing, again and again.
that abandonment and rejection by a person in pain – child or adult – might be way of finding out just how hard someone is going to work to help you not just stay alive, but change your life for the better.
this is where the anti-ableist facet of the “support suicide” argument breaks down as well – it may be ableist to dismiss someone’s rationale for dying, but it is equally ableist to expect that everyone in a crisis of pain will express or even know their needs in a perfectly linear, logical sense. it is ableist to assume that simply asking for consent to intervene once or even twice is sufficient to determine whether or not someone might not want or need help.
and on the level of considering trans women’s suicide within a transmisogynist social system, i do not believe that “supporting the agency of suicide” is actually a legitimate refutation of that social system. rather, it is the ultimate expression of disposability culture. it allows us to disguise inaction in the face of mass suffering and death with a pretense of compassion and radicality. it is not radical to “support” trans women in dying when we are already being murdered regularly. it is not revolutionary to simply accept that society is so terrible that trans girls might as well kill ourselves.
we are the society that surrounds trans girls and sends them the messages about whether or not life might be worth living after all. it is our responsibility to change the stakes, to offer different options, to keep reaching out and sending the message that we will never stop trying, never stop caring, never stop loving.
if a trans girl decides to die, that is her decision and i will not shame or pathologize it. but there is big fucking difference between not shaming or pathologizing a suicide and being complicit in it.
and the truth is, given even the slightest chance of something changing for the better, i think that most of us would choose to live.
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