Let's stop depoliticising suicide, thanks.
Data in the US indicates 80% of transgender people have contemplated suicide. In 2022, over 240 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been filled. Let's stop pretending those statistics aren't related.
Content note: this piece discusses suicide, grief and anti LGBTQ+ legislation.
I am tired of my friends dying. I feel like every time I come to write one of these newsletters, it’s because I’m reflecting on a friend’s suicide.
Of the people I have known who have died, only two were ‘proper’ adults. Their deaths were hard to process, but they could be contextualised by age or terminal illness.
The vast majority of people I have lost, though, have been younger than me and almost all were suicides. I turn twenty-four in twelve days’ time, making it a decade since I first started supporting people through attempts on their lives. I’ve just learned of another friend’s death.
I get asked in interviews why I do what I do, and what started my desire to fight so hard for communities I don’t even always belong to. ‘I don’t want any more of my friends dead’ isn’t the response they expect.
It’s difficult to write any of this. Not because I find it hard but because I’ve found people get uncomfortable when I speak so frankly about suicide. It’s uncomfortable for people. People will absolutely unsubscribe from this. It’s uncomfortable to recognise that most LGBTQ+ people I know (that is to say, a lot of my friends) walk around with some of suicidal ideation or other. I won’t go into what that’s like now because frankly, I’m tired, but I will say that in Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, there’s a fantastic essay called Suicidal Ideation 2.0 Queer Community, Leaderships and Staying Alive Anyway which you should absolutely read as a matter of course.
People get annoyed when I refuse to depoliticise suicide. People will only talk in platitudes - at peace, better place - and I get it. It’s what we’ve been taught to say in the face of grief, it’s the social script we all learn. It’s easier than confronting the truth of the matter: that the world is hostile to ‘the other’ to the extent death is the only safe peaceful alternative. Data in the US indicates 80% of transgender people have contemplated suicide and 40% have tried to end their life. In 2022, over 240 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been filled and it is barely September. Those two things are related. Let’s stop pretending that they aren’t.
I get that you’re not supposed to bring politics to the cemetery. It’s not the done thing. I’ll stop doing that when political choices stop killing my friends.
Often the reason people will die is that the world will not let them live. Or at least, the people in power who run the government and write the equality law and fail to organise the sodding DWP won’t let them live. Phrases like ‘everyone has mental health’ might be true, but are not helpful in the world we live in. We can’t depoliticise suffering when it’s convenient. We can’t ignore the disastrous reality that our incumbent Prime Minister Liz Truss doesn't believe transgender women are women (counter to existing UK law), that she’s a hundred times (yes, I counted) voted against supporting welfare measures and in matters of equality and that it was her actions that empowered Kemi Badenoch in her anti-LGBTQ+ actions.
This year at the celebratory memorial of a friend - fuck, I miss them - the part that broke me into a thousand pieces was, in an exhibition of their artwork collated by our friends, their skateboard (well, one of them). They’d written ‘TRANS RIGHTS NOW’ in big white letters and down the side, an addendum: Boris & Gov are c*nts. And I could only stand in silence and sob and wonder whether they might still be alive if systems were different.
You can call it the second stage of grief, but anger is a very appropriate response to the needless deaths of friends and chosen family and community. Their deaths were not inevitable and god knows I’ll fight like hell to keep more of them alive. Most days I don’t know how, but I keep trying, keeping showing up and staying here.
Thanks for sharing this, I am sorry for your loss. In case this helps someone else, a therapist helped me reframe suicidal ideation as a desire to escape (a situation/thinking pattern/person).
I am -- truly -- so very sorry for your loss. Thank you, in your times of grief, for turning those times into action. Thank you for being angry. Thank you for being such a heartfelt and ferocious ally. And thank you for writing this even though you believe it will cost you subscribers (I hope you are wrong about that, but suspect that you are probably right).