I'm so glad this isn't taking much of a toll on my daughter, who is queer, but her trans friend is getting worse and worse. It doesn't help that the school insists on deadnaming him and forcing him to use the girl's bathroom and locker room even after his parents intervened.
My husband is FTM trans and we're starting to get worried, living in Ohio. We've made the decision to move to Vermont this August because I just can't guarantee his safety anymore. His family is wholly unsupportive and mine, while not malicious, just doesn't get why we're making such a big deal out something so small. It's always "well [town name] is [town name], it's always been rednecky, you just need to hunker down and wait for it all the blow over". Not like this, and I don't want to move into one of the 3-Cs just to have the whole state go tits up. It sucks, but at least in VT he'll have access to a doctor. That and Ben & Jerry's.
I'm really sorry to hear that. It's disgusting that this country is actively working on persecuting some of its citizens whose only "crime" is knowing who they are. I hope your husband (and you, of course) stay safe!
Pretty sure in the past, nature of the world itself had a lot to do with a vast majority of the deaths. Not a lot of time to consider suicide, when disease, nature and starvation are killing faster than we breed.
These days humanity has too much time to get into our own heads. Nature never intended for an animal to be as successful and destructive as humans today.
Yeah our brains don’t stop thinking but I’m not sure we can say what the limits of “nature’s” intentions are. As sophisticated as we are, we are still “nature”, just fancier tools. I understand what you’re saying though. Our survival functions get applied to new things that they may not have initially evolved to do. We’re still evolving though.
"diseases of despair" which includes but is not limited to suicides and overdoses has been steadily on the rise for over a decade in the U.S and so far as we know suicides reached an all-time high in 2022. -I'm betting they just haven't collected and presented the 2023 data yet.
Confirms what I was thinking about rates on the rise. Thanks!
I think it’s dangerous to say that politics are causing suicides rather than “we have a mental health crisis”. A lot more reasons for previous generations of oppressed people to kill themselves , it maybe we weren’t keeping track as much then.
We definitely have supportive communities but it seems like bigotry in general has only seen a boon in recent years though violence in general is down so I don't really know. Maybe the 10% of LGBTQ+ youth are on the left coast and nothing has really changed over there.
