Talk About Anti-Trans Violence More, Trans Suicide Less

The decision to repeatedly center suicide in discussions about trans lives is a harmful one. Let’s talk about the causes of those deaths instead.

by Evan Urquhart

The world has lost two trans men who advocated for trans rights in recent days. Mar’Quis Jackson was a Black trans activist in Philadelphia who was found dead in a backyard a few days ago. Today reports say his death is being investigated as a homicide. Henry Berg-Brousseau, an activist who worked for Human Rights Campaign as a deputy press secretary, is dead as well. His mother, Kentucky state Senator Karen Berg, has said the death was a suicide.

These deaths are both tragedies. Tragedies for the people who knew and loved both men, and for the wider trans community who their activism lifted up. But one is a type of story, trans suicide, particularly of a white person, that is over-covered in a way that increases the danger to trans lives, and the other, the story of violence against trans people, particularly Black people, is under-covered in a way that ALSO increases the danger to trans lives.

We’ve written about suicide before, and about how and when to talk about it. To recap quickly: While trans people often experience thoughts of suicide, and while the rate of suicide is somewhat elevated among trans folks, it’s still rare. The vast majority of trans people do not kill themselves. Coverage of this suicide risks is concerning because one thing that is well known about suicide rates is that they increase due to social contagion effects. For young trans people, hearing about suicide can make it sound almost inevitable for people like them, even though this is far from true. This in turn can lead to young trans people taking their own lives unnecessarily, out of the false belief that life won’t get better and all trans people kill themselves.

Violence against trans people suffers from the opposite problem. Although murder rates are impossible to estimate accurately because accurate records of trans deaths do not exist, living trans people report vastly elevated rates of assault and sexual assault.

Elevated risks for both violence and suicide among trans people ultimately stem from the same place: Prejudice and discrimination against trans folks. These broad, systemic biases result in trans people being more likely to be rejected by friends and family, more likely to live in poverty, more likely to experience homelessness, and less likely to find or keep a job. In turn, isolation, poverty, and the stress of living with discrimination make trans people vulnerable to both external violence and internal despair.

But, unlike suicides, deaths of violence don’t increase when the news media covers them injudiciously. If anything, such coverage may lead people to take these issues more seriously and act in ways that can reduce the root causes at last. That’s why we should talk more about the root causes, and more about the threat of violence, and only talk about suicide as carefully and as seldom as we can.