Why are transgender people more likely to commit suicide?

[Rev. Rye]

Just so we're clear, here's what I meant when I compared being trans to being on the autism spectrum.

You remember Rain Man? (Don't worry, I have a point with this)



A lot of people on the higher end of the spectrum hate this movie, but I have more mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, as a portrayal of the lower-functioning end of the spectrum, it works pretty well. On the other, because autistic visibility was next to nothing before the movie came out, and this movie became so bloody popular, Raymond Babbit became the go-to example of what to expect from people with autism: savant skills in some areas and severely mentally stunted in every other.

Unfortunately, autism doesn't work like that. Even beyond seeing autism as a different point of view and just looking at how it's seen, it runs the gamut of people like Paul Dirac, a physicist whose contributions to the discipline rival Einstein's and whose personality was so introverted, seemingly staid, and literal-minded that it's hard to argue he wasn't on the spectrum, all the way to people who are far worse off than even Raymond Babbit. And on another aspect, Dirac's thinking was so concrete that he dismissed poetry, saying "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible." Meanwhile, Dan Harmon has been diagnosed with an ASD and he's responsible for a show as complicated, and, in its own way, poetic (at least by Dirac's definition), as Rick and Morty. And because autism is becoming more visible, it's becoming clear that the spectrum is so huge that it's ridiculous to just narrow it down to one idea of what constitutes autism.

And in parallel, for the longest time, I had a similar sort of singular narrative about trans people: that they'd spend most of their lives thinking that they should have been born as the opposite gender, and, either as soon as it became socially/economically feasible or they hit the breaking point where they had to transition to said opposite gender or die, they'd do so, and, of course, they'd have to have the genital surgery at some point to complete the process.

While I suspect this monomyth may be more common among trans people than Raymond Babbits are among people on the autism spectrum, in recent years, it's become obvious that the experience is so much broader than that, since it turns out a lot of people are more open to a fluid conception of gender than I would have expected (outside of the average British comedian, anyway). Not that long ago, I would have heard your identifying as "a woman with a penis" and concluded that your transition must still be incomplete or you must be a sex worker serving a particular niche. But trans visibility has made great leaps and bounds, and it's becoming clear that's not necessarily the case and that the label transgender covers a huge variety of gender- You get the point, right? ... Right?

Of course, unlike autism, I haven't lived with being trans for 30 1/2 years (or at all), so I don't know the nuances all that intimately. But at least I try to do so and recognise it's an ongoing process.