RedRockRun said:
That being said, I believe that it should be treated as a mental illness and not normalized, as the studies I have read suggest high rates of suicidality in transgender people regardless of background or personal experience. In other words, suicide rates are not mitigated by gender reassignment and hormone therapy.
It is a mystery to me why mental health is still a taboo subject in this day and age of legal gay marriage - more so when it's seen as socially acceptable for children to undergo gender reassignment.
OP, I suggest you go to Psychology Today and look for a therapist who has experience helping people with gender dysphoria and later, a psychologist who can administer a psychological evaluation to determine a diagnosis which will aid a psychiatrist in prescribing medication.
The statistics show that you have at least a 1/5 chance of attempting suicide, and though I don't know you, I do not wish to see you add to that statistic.
You also don't know what you're talking about. After all, the studies that are there have also said gender reassignment and HRT is effective treatment of gender dysphoria to trans people that want it. More conclusively, it is the social implications when one comes out that heighten their instances of suicidal ideation. In the same way the suicide rate spikes during periods of high familial rejection.
But then again, no one would say being gay makes you inherently suicidal. It
might have something to do with an abusive parent or colleagues, or social rejection from former friends...
For starters, 90% of depression cannot be appropriately treated with medication. It requires a plethora of psychological services depending on the underlying triggers or cause. Such as PTSD in soldiers, you can't throw drugs at them to make them better. Hence why the cost of rehabilitating soldiers spirals.
Drugs are inevitably cheaper than paying psychologists to run through CBT or IPT. Moreover, many of the triggers for high suicide rates amongst soldiers involves things like banks foreclosing on homes while on duty, break up of marriages, returning to towns with little psychological resources to implement. After all, 70% of soldiers came from poorer, smaller towns and cities like in the MidWest.
Not from large urban communities.
But then again, no one would say being a soldier makes you inherently suicidal.
People who run your argument seem to neglect social rejection and isolation have reportedly caused suicide since time immemorial, and by pretending like the problem has specifically to do with trans people
inherently it's almost as if people can dust their hands off from pretending socialor environmental triggers for depression do not exist.
After all, 90% of depression cases is environmental and social in origin. Those 90% of depression sufferers, if left untreated (simply throwing drugs at them), have a high rate of suicide as well. If you are one of those non-melancholia depression sufferers (and you overwhelmingly are likely to be), your doctor simply throwing drugs at you isn't helping you.
That's not to say drugs can't ease the problem, but for the grand majority of depression sufferers drugs alone is a crutch without systematic behaviour review. Rather you start feeling as if it is the status quo. That it can't be treated, but in truth they aren't providing appropriate services to treat the problem to begin with.
Speaking from personal experience, the only time I wanted to kill myself as a trans person was when I was thrown out on the street at 16 for coming out to my parents. Not since then when I found myself employment, and since lead a charmed life of financial and academic success. Of course, my example of a charmed existence is not the status quo of your average person, much less trans people. Who are overwhelmingly more likely to suffer crippling poverty and social rejection.
And if you speak to any trans person somewhere. When you come out and start transitioning is rife with discord. You lose friends, you lose contact with family, and you lose employment ... youget treated like garbage in hospitals, and
yes even in Australia and other places of the supposedly enlightened West... not just the U.S. Being trans doesn't make for an easy life, and the statistics show that regardless of where you are. There is also plenty of conclusive studies to show things like financial stress have a significant statistical correlation to depression and suicide.
I can attest to that well enough. After all, being trans and yet not once having suffered depression and suicidal ideation barring one event in life.
That says a lot, don't you think?
Miraculously that cleared up when I had a job, and people were telling me I was good at it. When I could build a savings pool. Use that to further invest, go into academia... it's amazing what social inclusion and economic security can do to improve one's sense of empowerment and belief that one can thrive.
Now one can write that off as me simply being
amazing, but a more honest interrogation of events is a combination of luck, the right support at the right time, and the right people I could call friends and associates. Something many times less 'lucky' than if I wasn't trans.
(edit)You're talking about a group of people who are over three times more likely to be living under the poverty line in the U.S. And they're people from a multiplicity of socioeconomic levels to begin with. Given such an outrageous degree of iniquity and hardship, do you honestly expect it to be merely a case of financial stress or
no real stressors at all?
Or is it fundamentally more likely that the level of iniquity suffered by trans people is directly relevant to the degree of their likely exposure of multiple forms of iniquity in interpersonal relations in general?
After all, I came from a wealthy parental background ... still wanted to kill myself when people threw me out on the street. How exactly do you think that will be written up if I became a statistic? I'msure someone like you would pretend that me in those statistics is 'evidence' that trans people are somehow inherently suicidal despite their apparent socioeconomic background.
Regardless of the
realities of looking at the lives of trans people and the reasons they commit suicide.
Rich people get depressed and sometimes want to commit suicide, it's just that they can usually afford
decent therapists so that they don't do so.
That means fuck all when you can't be open with why you're depressed, nor if you do so face social and familial rejection for it. After all, once again, most forms of depressive disorders have environmental and social issues that reinforce low moods. You having to hide being trans because of social and familial rejection both confounds treatment for depression, moreover the erosion ofsupport structures if you do come out has a similar effect on reinforcing cyclical depressive events.
After all, I wasn't mentally unwell for being trans ... I was unwell because I was depressed that my family and friends responded poorly to me coming out. Hence why it's
gender dysphoria. It doesn't makethe argument you will alwaysbe dysphoric. Some trans people will be, others won't be, but in both situations HRT and gender affirming surgery can be incredibly effective treatment when sought by the person in question.
HRT and gender affirming surgery alone cannot cure depression. Because that is more akin to the psychosocial effects of having gender dysphoria.
Just like how you don't blame the surgery you do get not also treating the subsequent golden staph infection
because of the surgery.
It's two separate issues requiring two separate solutions, and one of those may never be realised due to the parties involved. But that doesn't make the assumption the initial surgery
wasn't worth it. It might of saved someone's life even if the infection later on takes it.
After all,
we have evidence of the positive outcomes when treatment is performed ethically... in terms of relative success of HRT and gender affirming surgery for the grand bulk of receivers who want it in treating gender dysphoria, it's actually one of the downright best complicated treatment regimens available in medicine for the treatment of any complex issue.
Treating a headache with paracetemol is statistically more likely of providing poorer outcomes for the patient. I don't see right-wingers denouncing Tylenol.
So it's beyond the skeptics' disapproval of it as a treatment regimen, but then again no surgery or medication will stop
people being awful to someone for being trans.
It's like blaming innocent black people for being outside, and thus 9 times more likely of being shot by a cop.
Clearly the problem is that they'refree and outside in the first place? Or maybe there should simply be
less racist cops?
