Trans People Should Think Twice About Gun Ownership

Cravenly exploiting a tragedy to further dehumanize and endanger trans people, the Trump Administration’s Department of Justice now argues that because the perpetrator of the Annunciation shooting was trans, all trans people are mentally incompetent to own guns. In a rare display of unity, groups from GLAAD to the NRA, and even reliably anti-trans periodicals like The Independent and the New York Post, have thoroughly rejected the DOJ’s trial balloon.

Understandably rattled by these frightening developments, many trans people are now asserting their right to own guns—but as a mental health therapist specializing in serving the trans community, this gives me pause. While I am in favor of trans people taking steps they need in order to feel safe, I am also aware that a gun owner is far more likely to use that weapon to end their own life than for their self-protection: in fact, gun owners are 44 times more likely to use that gun to kill themselves than to protect against a home invader.

Let me be clear about where I stand. As a therapist who primarily supports marginalized groups, and as a trans person myself, I understand the immense importance of a person’s right to autonomy. As long as an individual is not actively choosing to harm themselves or others, I will always, wholeheartedly support their right to make their own decisions. This includes the decision to own a gun.

But as a therapist who frequently works with suicidal clients, I also know that a gun greatly elevates one’s suicide risk. In 2020, Stanford released the results of a 12-year study of 26 million Californians, finding that men who own guns were 8 times more likely to die by self-inflicted gunshot, and women were a staggering 35 times more likely.

The reason gun ownership increases risk so much has to do with the psychology and epidemiology of suicide. As a therapist, I’ve been trained to understand these factors to help support clients struggling with thoughts of suicide. When I work with those clients, it falls on me to operate with delicacy in order to enable my clients’ autonomy while also maintaining my responsibility to protect their safety.

In order to do this, I assess their risk to themselves, evaluating them based on the following three questions: Do you have a plan to end your life? Do you have the means of carrying out that plan? Do you intend to use those means to complete your plan? If a client answers yes to each of those questions, then they present a danger to themselves, and I am ethically and legally obligated to intervene.

This is high stakes stuff. Sometimes, intervening can mean persuading them share their suicide risk with someone else, or getting them to remove their means of suicide so that they can’t do it. But other times, intervening can be more extreme—it might mean breaking confidentiality to tell a parent, sibling, or close friend that they’re suicidal. In rare situations, it could even mean calling for an involuntary hospitalization.

These are things that I never want to do to a client, particularly since trans people tend to have negative experiences with emergency psychiatric hospitalization. I fiercely support my clients’ confidentiality, independence, and their ability to make their own decisions—particularly for trans people, who have historically experienced so many devastating limitations on their fundamental right to autonomy.

When assessing a client’s risk, I am in part considering the lethality of their means of suicide. If a client tells me that they intend to end their life by stabbing themselves with a spoon, I can rest a little easier, because I know that’s virtually impossible to do. Guns on the other hand are extremely lethal: Although they account for only 5% of suicide attempts, over 50% of deaths to suicide are gun deaths. All in all, more than 90% of those who attempt suicide with a gun complete their attempt.

The extreme lethality of guns plays into the fact that suicide tends to be an impulsive decision. It most often occurs when individuals are intoxicated with drugs or alcohol, when they have experienced an acute precipitating event, or when they are going through a mental health crisis. Suicidal individuals will be much more likely to ride out such storms if their means of suicide is less lethal, more difficult to carry out, takes longer to achieve its aim, or is more prone to error. Guns, unfortunately, are none of those things.

This is why I have such mixed feelings over trans people owning guns, as we know that the trans community is more likely to abuse substances, experience mood or anxiety disorders, and to experience adverse shocks, such as job losses, rejection by friends and family, and political persecution. These elevated risk factors, caused by discrimination and the stress of living it, mean that trans people are more likely to attempt suicide—having the lethal means to do so sadly makes us more likely to succeed.

With all that said, I still support the decision of any given trans person to own a gun. My belief is that I can best support the mental health of my clients by empowering them to make their own choices. Yes, this does involve presenting them with alternatives and discussing the risks and benefits of any given course of action, but at the end of the day I don’t think I will ever do anyone any good by telling them what they should do. As long as they know the risks, they get to make their own choices. (Again, provided that they are not telling me that they mean to harm themselves or someone else.)

To conclude, a word about the current political situation. Understandably, many trans people right now feel extremely threatened by the Trump Administrations, and so they desire to own guns as a means of resistance and self-protection. I appreciate where they are coming from, but this is inconsistent with how authoritarian regimes actually end. Research by Erica Chenoweth (who themselves identifies as nonbinary) has found that authoritarian regimes have been far more likely to fall by nonviolent civil resistance than by violent insurrection. The most powerful thing we can do to bring about the end of the Trump Administration probably isn’t to purchase a weapon but rather to get out and protest this debasement of our democracy—and share the stories of how policies like his attempt to strip trans people of guns are harming us, and all Americans.

Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.