The Problem with Christians

[Esquilax]

"The prevalence of suicide attempts among respondents to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality, is 41 percent, which vastly exceeds the 4.6 percent of the overall U.S. population who report a lifetime" UCLA School of Law.

With a suicide rate 10 times higher than average, the "treatment" is clearly an abject failure.

No wonder you're not giving a citation for this one. Fuck off with your bullshit and lies.

It paints a very bleak picture of how far into his own citation AJW looked, and how much investigation he expected everyone else to do on it, that he'd directly quote a line making it clear that the citation he's making comes from the "National Transgender Discrimination Survey," while simultaneously dismissing the idea that discrimination might be a factor in the suicide rate.

I honestly suspect, now that we've had two citations from this guy that ended up exactly alike, that AJW simply does not read his own citations beyond the summary on the first page, and is so intellectually incurious that he cannot envision anyone else digging even a little bit deeper. Because to be clear, the quotation he gives is from the very first sentence of the report he's getting it from, and tellingly, it isn't even a complete sentence.

Why isn't it a complete sentence? Well, if I had to speculate, I'd say it's because the part of the sentence he's omitting is about suicide within the gay and lesbian community, and suggests that this rate, too, is higher than the national average, but lower than with trans people. I think we can draw a pretty obvious conclusion from this: AJW doesn't want us to see that the suicide rate by demographic tends to rise depending on how hard his particular brand of religious zealots attempt to discriminate against that demographic. Tolerance for the gay community is higher than it is for trans people, and the suicide rate changes accordingly... but he can't have us noting that, because then the responsibility is on his group, and not the ones he's looking for a reason to look down on.

What's particularly sad is that it's blisteringly clear that AJW hasn't even bothered to read the entire executive summary, because just one paragraph later that same summary begins to list some interesting statistics suggestive of why those suicide attempts occur, and not a one of those causes is "they're just inherently mentally ill and were allowed to get away with it." He skips over, for example, how age, race, and educational status all factor into this, and that (critically) the suicide rate is elevated at a statistically significant level for out trans people, and those who cannot easily pass as their preferred gender identity. So, the suicide rate is higher for trans people if other people know that they're trans... I wonder why that could be? Why would that be the case if the reason they're attempting suicide is that transgenderism is a mental illness?

He also skips over the big section on discrimination in the summary, which is inexcusable because due to the formatting, that section is just a few inches to the left of the one sentence he bothered to half read on the page. The suicide rate, it turns out, rises significantly in correlation to facing discrimination, with bigotry from family and coworkers raising it some, and out and out violence and sexual assault raising it higher still. This is hardly surprising, but it's also a factor that AJW dismisses out of hand as not being important to the issue, so what's important is that we recognize that he's dead fucking wrong.

He's so wrong, in fact, that the conclusion he draws is directly and one hundred percent contradicted by the report that he himself is citing:

Comparably high, or higher, prevalence of suicide attempts were found among respondents who said that they someday wanted FTM genital surgery, hysterectomy, or phalloplasty, suggesting that desiring transition related health care services and procedures but not yet having them may exacerbate respondents’ distress at the incongruence between their gender identity and physical appearance. It is also possible that elevated prevalence of lifetime suicide attempts may be due to distress related to barriers to obtaining transitionrelated health care, such as a lack of insurance coverage, inability to afford the procedures, or lack of access to providers. These findings may also be related to the higher rates of reported lifetime suicide attempts among those who have undergone transition-related surgery.

It is rare that we get handed such a profound and comprehensive lack of understanding. To recap: AJW waltzes in and suggests that trans people not be allowed to transition, because that's the wrong choice from a mental health perspective. In support of this, he specifically avoids citing a study he's clearly only read half a sentence of, saying that suicide rates among transgender people are higher than average by a lot, and he asserts that this is proof positive both that transitioning is not effective as a mental health remedy, and that transgenderism itself is why they commit suicide. Actually reading the study shows that not only does his citation suggest a range of other factors are at play that AJW simply could not have known about, being that he was separated from these sections of the paper by the insurmountable obstacle of a single separating paragraph, but that it also shows that desiring transitional surgery yet being unable to get it is a large contributing factor in the elevated suicide rate. So, he cited a study, all serious and po-faced, that literally says the exact opposite of what he is suggesting.

But hey, I guess that all the things in it that disagree with what AJW already believes just don't "make sense," right?

Not that he'd even know. I mean, it's not like he read the report or anything.