No.
[The blogpost below is adapted from a 2020 Jan video script. I have not updated it to include more recent sources. For a more recent blogpost, see here.]
Two myths about transgender suicide rates refuse to die:
First, that 40%-42% of trans people kill themselves.
Second, that this rate is higher than Jewish victims of Nazi concentration camps AND Black victims of American slavery.
These myths are usually bundled together. It's easy to find internet nobodies promoting them. For example, see this post from /r/GenderCritical:
It has always boggled my mind that apparently 40% of trans people commit suicide. Why is it that Jewish people didn’t kill themselves during the holocaust or black people during slavery[?] I’m sure some did but not at the rate that trans (apparently) are. Both the holocaust and slavery were far worse then what trans go through today.
The takeaway from these myths is clear, as the most-upvoted reply make clear: Trans people are just too crazy to be affirmed:
This belief that trans people commit suicide because regular people don't play along with their masquerade is bullshit. If it were true, they [sh]ould all be discouraged from cross-dressing because, let's face it, most of them don't pass and sooner or later someone's going to say something, either intentionally or unintentionally, and then they will have to kill themselves.
Unfortunately, it's not just internet nobodies. Steven Crowder -- extremely popular reactionary pundit and coward -- has boosted these ideas for years. For example, he promoted these ideas in a 2018 debate with trans voice actor Julie Rei Goldstein:
American slaves didn't have the same suicide rate. [....] I think it's a very unfair comparison to American slaves, yeah, I think they have it worse than transgenders in 2018.
Unfortunately, Goldstein's response is pretty damn cringe:
They didn't have the same kind of abuse from within their family. Very rarely -- from within their own family. They didn't.
Goldstein's answer was terrible. Evidence-wise, she didn't ask Crowder for evidence. Optics-wise, she failed to reject Crowder's suggestion that trans people today are more oppressed than slaves.
However, Goldstein's central claim that trans suicides mostly come from family and social rejection is true -- and helps to explain some of the odd differences in suicide rates we observe.
This post will examine four topics:
The trans suicide rate
The American Black slave suicide rate
The Jewish Holocaust victim suicide rate
Resilience theory
Section 1: The Trans Suicide Rate
background: understanding the 40% statistic
Let's begin by explaining the 40% statistic that our TERF friend has some trouble understanding.
The 40% lifetime suicide rate statistic comes from the 2015 US Transgender Survey (USTS) conducted by the National Center for Transgender Equality. 40% of respondents stated that they had ever attempted suicide:
Let's examine two key words there, "ever" and "attempted", and two concepts related to measuring suicide.
Concept one: There's a gradient between thinking about suicide and actually doing it.
Three terms are helpful here:
First, suicidal ideation is when someone vividly imagines or seriously desires suicide, regardless of what happens next.
Second, a suicide attempt is when someone attempts to kill themselves, regardless of what happens next.
Third, a suicide death is when someone attempts to kill themselves and succeeds.
Two graphs make these differences clear.
First, this graph from SAMHSA shows that most people with suicidal ideation won't plan or attempt suicide and that most people who plan suicide won't attempt suicide:
Second, this graph from the SPRC shows that most suicide attempts don't lead to medical attention, to hospitalization, or to death. Of 1,388,000 suicide attempts, just 45,000 result in death. That means that just 3.27% or 1 in 31 of suicide attempts lead to death:
Concept two: The prevalence of something is how many times it occurs within a given timescale.
For example, the lifetime prevalence of smoking is how many times you've smoked in your life, the past-year prevalence is how many times you've smoked in the past year, and so on. It should be obvious that lifetime prevalence cannot decrease while past-year prevalence can.
The lifetime prevalence of suicide attempts among trans people in the USTS was 40%, while the past-year prevalence of suicide attempts was 7%:
Armed with those concepts, it should be clear why this popular anti-trans meme is absurd:
The meme states "40% of transgenders commit suicide". This intentionally or ignorantly conflates attempt rates with death rates and fails to mention any timeframe.
If corrected, the meme would say that "40% of trans people have attempted suicide in their lifetime", which isn't quite so punchy.
Attempt rates vs death rates:
All these attempt stats are interesting, but they aren't the subject of this video, which is about trans suicide death rates and not trans suicide attempt rates.
Unfortunately, as the Department of Health and Human Services explains, no modern data exists on the suicide death rates of trans people in the USA.
However, we can do some napkin math to provide a rough range of estimates.
Take the 2015 general public suicide death rate, which is about 13 per 100,000 per year.
Assume that the ratio of [trans suicide death rates] and [non-trans suicide death rates] is equal to the ratio of [trans suicide attempt rates] and [non-trans suicide attempt rates]. (Or: Assume that trans:general death rates are proportional to trans:general attempt rates.) If true, then we can take these ratios and multiply them by the general suicide death rate.
Here's trans and general-public last-year suicide attempt rates from the 2015 USTS and the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH):
Calculate last-year ratios between trans and general public:
By age, the lowest disparity is 5 times (1% trans, 0.2% general) for 65 and older, for a death rate of 65 per 100,000 per year.
By age, the highest disparity is 10 times (7% trans, 0.7% general) for 26-29 year olds, for a death rate of 130 per 100,000 per year.
Calculate lifetime ratios between trans and general public:
The trans lifetime suicide attempt rate, as discussed before, is 40%.
Higher figure: According to Kessler 1999, the 1991-92 lifetime suicide attempt rate was 4.6%. That puts the ratio at 8.7 times higher, or 113 per 100,000 per year.
Lower figure: According to Baca-Garcia 2008, the 2001-02 lifetime suicide attempt rate was 2.4%. That puts the ratio at 16.7 times higher, or 217 per 100,000 per year.
In summary, my back-of-napkin estimate of the trans death suicide rate in the USA ranges from 5 times to 17 times higher than the general public and from 65 per 100,000 per year on the low end to 217 per 100,000 per year on the high end.
To help out our TERF friend, 217 per 100,000 per year (or ~0.2% per year) is about 1 in 460 per year. This means that it would take about 346 years for half of currently living trans people to kill themselves, giving them a half-life near that of Californium-249.
In short: Californium says trans rights.
Section 2: Slave Suicide Rates
Now that we've got some data on trans suicide rates, we can compare to the suicide rates of African and Black victims of American slavery.
Unfortunately, there isn't much data on this subject.
In her 2006 thesis titled "African American Suffering and Suicide Under Slavery", Linda Kneeland lists only three sources for slave suicide rates:
Kneeland 2006: Among a sample of slave narratives, 1.8% referred to a specific suicide death -- and not necessarily that of the slave whose narrative was being told.
Second, P. D. Escott's estimate, which found that (among another sample of slave narratives), 1.2% of slave resistance stories included suicide.
(A slave narrative is an autobiography or received/authorized biography of a current or former slave.)
Unfortunately, it's not clear whether either estimate can be generalized to the population as a whole. First, we don't know what proportion of slaves resisted. Second, slave narratives may not be representative of the experience of slaves as a whole.
(Pro-slavery writers were keen to highlight or fabricate "kind" masters and obedient slaves. Anti-slavery writers were keen to document the widespread atrocities under American slavery. The vast majority of enslaved and free Black people were not literate and could not easily write their own stories. [It would take until 1900 for a majority of Black people to be literate, as a result of crushing poverty and schools hamstrung by white nationalist Southern governments.] The slave narrative literature is a historical product, not a perfect record of the time.)
That leaves us with the third estimate:
Lester 1998, who used 1850 census data to estimate suicide rates of three populations in the US:
Enslaved Black people had a suicide rate of 0.72 per 100,000 per year
Free Black people had a suicide rate of 1.15 per 100,000 per year
White people had a suicide rate of 2.37 per 100,000 per year
It's not clear how accurate Census suicide data is. But if true, Lester's numbers paint an interesting picture. If we take the suicide rate among enslaved Black people as the "baseline", then:
The suicide rate among free Black people was 1.6x higher
The suicide rate among White people was 3.3x higher
So: It might be technically true that trans suicide rates are higher than enslaved Black suicide rates, it's doesn't tell us much -- because free Black people and White people also had higher suicide rates than enslaved Black people.
The specific reasons for low suicide rates among Black people and Western African people are controversial. Some scholars cite higher rates of religiosity among Black people, specifically a Black Protestant Christianity rooted in the holiness movement which teaches that salvation may be lost through sins like suicide. Other scholars point to low rates of suicide across Western African cultures, which often condemn suicide in similar terms.
Here's how Kneeland summarizes the scholarly literature:
The question of why African cultures have practiced suicide less and condemned it more still remains to be answered. It could be connected with the violent struggles for survival that the tribes and nations on the continent have undergone during the last 500 years, after the slave trade took root. It could come from an attitude of confronting problems and a pride in being strong in the face of adversity. A considerable amount of research would need to be done to accurately answer this complex question.
This suggests that higher oppression does not always lead to higher suicide rates. (Unless we believe that White people in 1850 were more oppressed than enslaved Black people!) Something else, more specific, must be a major cause of suicide.
We will revisit this topic at the end of the next section.
Section 3: Holocaust Suicide Rates
Compared to slaves, there's a lot more data on suicide rates among Jewish Holocaust victims, which is mostly because it's a century closer to modern statistical science than slavery.
When someone says "Holocaust victim", they might have some very different populations in mind. To cover each, I've broken it into four sub-parts.
Three of these parts also cite David Lester, who you might remember from the slave section. That's because he's the most prolific author on historical suicide rates that I could find -- and he seems to know his shit.
1: Non-deported Jewish suicide rates before and during the Nazi era
Lester 2005 shows this table of Jewish death suicide rates by region and by year:
If we average the German regions, we get a rate of 31.8 suicides per 100,000 per year. (Note that this is already 3 times higher than the 2015 American average!)
Lester 2005 then estimates that among non-deported German Jewish people from 1933 to 1945, the death suicide rate ranged from 158 to 317 per 100,000.
Let's compare this to trans people: I estimate that trans suicide rates are 5-17 times higher than the general populace, while the suicide rate of non-deported and non-ghettoized German Jewish people during the Nazi period was 5-10 times higher than before the Nazi period.
These ratios are pretty similar, suggesting that the increase of suicide among Jewish people after Nazi ascent to power (but not yet deported) is about equal to the relatively high suicide rate of trans people relative to cis people.
2: Jewish suicide in the Łodz ghetto
Lester 2001 provides estimates on the suicide rate of Jewish people in the Łodz ghetto, which was created in April 1940. The suicides were recorded in a secret Jewish journal. Lester estimates suicide death rates at 21.6 per 100,000 per year in 1941 and 84.6 in 1942:
We can compare this to the Łodz 1927 figure from his 2005 work. This gives us the following estimates:
In Łodz in 1927, the suicide death rate was about 17 per 100,000 per year
In Łodz among Jewish people in 1941 the suicide death rate was 22 per 100,000 per year
In Łodz among Jewish people in 1942 the suicide death rate was 85 per 100,000 per year
In short, ghettoized Jewish suicide rates jumped from 1.3 higher than pre-Nazi rates (1 year after ghettoization) to 5 times higher (2 years after ghettoization). Time matters.
Part 3: Jewish suicide in the concentration and death camps
This is the main group that people imply when referring to Jewish victims of the Nazi regime -- and it's an absurd comparison.
The title of Lester's 2001 article should tell you everything you need to know: "The Suicide Rate in the Concentration Camps Was Extraordinarily High".
No official data on the suicide rate of Jewish Holocaust inmates exists. Lester instead reviews several anecdotal estimates of suicide rates among Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. This is weak evidence, so take it with substantial salt.
A survivor estimates that 15 to 20 Jewish people killed themselves per day at the Treblinka death camp, which comes to around 500,000 suicides per 100,000 per year
A survivor estimates that 10 Jewish people killed themselves per day at the Mauthausen concentration camp; if we assume just 10 suicides per week, that comes to around 150,000 suicides per 100,000 per year
A third survivor estimates that one person killed themselves per day at the Treblinka death camp, which comes to around 37,000 suicides per 100,000
Lester suggests that the lower bound of Holocaust camp suicide rates is 25,000 per 100,000.
Let's compare this to trans people again. My highest estimate for trans suicide rates is 115 times lower (two orders of magnitude below) the lowest estimate of Holocaust camp suicide death rates.
Clearly, there is no comparison between these two rates.
Part 4: Jewish suicide among survivors of the Holocaust
Finally, let's look at the suicide rates of those who survived the Holocaust.
In Levav 2017's review of studies on Holocaust survivor suicide rates, all four studies found that Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had lower suicide rates than Jewish people who didn't experience the Holocaust.
Interestingly, in Lurie 2017's study of suicide rates, those who experienced only the early Holocaust before escaping had higher suicide rates than those who experienced the entire Holocaust.
To repeat that finding: Those who experienced the whole Holocaust have lower suicide rates than those who experienced only the early Holocaust.
To those unfamiliar with models of suicide, this might seem insane -- just as the lower suicide rates of enslaved Black people might seem absurd.
But sociology offers an answer, discussed in the next section:
Section 4: Resilience Theory
Resilience theory is a model of suicide. It asserts that oppressed people will be resilient to suicide if they can either [1] find meaning in their suffering or [2] find a form of meaning that avoids their suffering.
For example, Kneeland 2006 writes that slaves had three main responses to their suffering: resistance, compliance, and religion.
Slaves would work slowly or poorly and sabotage work as methods of resistance. (Meaning)
Slaves would comply with their slavemasters to reduce their suffering. (Avoid)
Slaves would mentally transcend their suffering through religious ideology. (Transcend)
When suicide was used, it was usually when enslaved Black people felt these options had failed. They could not resist, avoid, or transcend -- and left without meaning or escape, they killed themselves.
Similarly, we can look to the experience of the Łodz ghetto. In the first year after ghettoization, the suicide rate remained low because people found meaning from a shared religious community and from family bonds (meaning or transcendence). However, in the second year, as it became apparent that they were going to be deported and killed, they were unable to maintain meaning, and so suicide rates quadrupled.
As a final addition: Inoculation theory asserts that, [1] after significant and prolonged exposure to trauma [2] followed by a process of finding meaning again, [3] people emerge with a better ability to handle trauma than before. As a result, they have lower suicide rates.
For example, in their review of Holocaust survivor suicide rate studies, Levav 2017 writes that all studies found lower rates of suicide among Holocaust survivors:
[T]he findings of the four Israeli-based studies converge. They have reliably shown that Holocaust survivors have evidenced a remarkable will to live. [....] The agreement on the findings of the four studies provides further support for Holocaust survivors being a resilient group[.] [....]
A remarkable example of resilience is the fact that exposure to the maximum adversities of the Holocaust did not increase the suicide risk among adults with cancer, a reliably documented vulnerable group.
To summarize, Holocaust victims are less vulnerable to suicide than non-Holocaust victims, and those who experienced the full Holocaust are less vulnerable than those who only experienced part of the Holocaust. These studies strongly support inoculation theory.
Together, these theories can help us explain the variable suicide rates among various oppressed groups:
In general, suicide is lower among those with more social support. Social support provides people meaning. Trans people have much higher rates of isolation from family and community than the general public (and from many oppressed populations, which retain family bonds and religious bonds despite systemic oppression).
Trans people are often stuck at the first "stage" of inoculation: Many trans people experience trauma (from social rejection) without easily rebuilding a sense of meaning (which usually requires entrance into a meaningful community, such as family or religious group or other strong-bond social group).
In turn, this is why social affirmation is particularly helpful for trans people. Feeling rejected by one's family and by society is strongly associated with both feeling meaningless and feeling trapped, with no way back into meaningfulness. In contrast, affirmation is strongly correlated with lower suicide.
For example:
This study of trans adolescents found that adolescents who felt affirmed by their family had near-identical measures of self-worth as their siblings and other non-trans adolescents
This study asked trans adolescents whether they could use their chosen name in a list of four contexts (home, school, work, and with friends). For each additional context where they were affirmed, the rate of suicide behaviors was decreased by 56%
There are lots and lots of studies like this.
All of this points to a simple conclusion: to prevent suicide in trans people and in people in general, we and their families should try to accept them and make them feel meaningful.
Section 5: Conclusions and shilling
To summarize:
The suicide death rate of trans people is probably 5-17 times higher than that of Americans as a whole, with a rate of 65 to 217 per 100,000 per year versus 13 per 100,000 per year.
Slaves:
The ratio of [trans suicide death rates] to [general public suicide death rates] is much higher than the ratio of [enslaved Black people suicide death rates] to [1850's general public suicide death rates].
That's because enslaved Black people had lower suicide rates than free Black people or White people -- and explaining this requires a nuanced understanding of suicide.
This should make Crowder's assertion that oppression necessarily increases suicide sound absurd, because it is absurd.
Jews:
The ratio is about the same as that of Nazi-era non-deported Jews to the general public.
The ratio is a little bit higher than that of Nazi-era ghettoized Jews to the general public.
The ratio is ~200 times lower than that of Nazi-era deported Jews, meaning Jews in concentration camps or death camps.
The ratio is much higher higher than that of Jewish Holocaust survivors, because Jewish Holocaust survivors have lower suicide rates than other Jews.
Affirmation works: Finally, affirming trans people is strongly correlated with higher meaningfulness and lower suicidal behavior.
Before I end, let me just note that even if it were true that trans people had a higher suicide rate than Jews in concentration camps, that would not suggest that they don't deserve treatment.
If people with cancer or autism have higher suicide rates, then the solution is psychological treatment, not reviling them.
Right now, the best treatments for transgender identity are acceptance and transition.
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