This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Hey, check it out! Vile scumbag Leor Sapir is loudly deriding the rate at which transgender youth are taking their own lives, yet again.
Sapir is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank that likes to publish amicus briefs (“friend of the court” supplements, typically filed by subject matter experts) in court cases where their input can do maximal harm to trans people. Sapir works with his fellow transphobic peers at the Manhattan Institute, Ilya Shapiro and John Ketcham, and even pals around with quislings like Brianna Wu sometimes.
On Tuesday, Sapir published an article in City Journal (the Manhattan Institute’s publication) in which he jumps for joy and clicks his heels together like the most insufferable court jester you’ve ever laid eyes on at the supposed dismantling of a 2024 study published in Nature Human Behaviour that suggested trans youth in states enacting a glut of anti-trans laws may attempt suicide at higher rates.
“Left-of-center media,” Sapir writes, “kicked into full gear” in response to the study. Immediately forgetting whatever left-of-center media he intended to reference, Sapir goes on to cite articles from The Washington Post, NBC and The Hill. Considering NBC Out has since been axed entirely, I don’t know if “left-of-center” is an entirely appropriate descriptor, but whatever.
Researchers in “gender medicine,” he says, “exaggerate their findings and let allied media spin the rest.” Of course, Sapir’s victory lap leans almost entirely on a methodological critique published last month in NHB. He just barely remembers to mention that the authors of the original study responded to the critique, and then suggests that you check out some analysis by his buddies over at the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine, an exceedingly biased collective of jerkoffs who have made spreading pseudoscientific drek about trans healthcare their primary goal in life.
Sapir mentions a bunch of known facts about trans healthcare (gender-affirming care is effective, the regret rate of medical transition is almost nil, and hormone replacement therapy can improve mental health outcomes), then says actually, these statements have all been debunked! Never mind that the sources he cites here are anti-trans activists with an axe to grind like Stephen B. Levine and Julia Mason, and publications like Archives of Sexual Behavior, edited by conversion therapist proponent Kenneth Zucker.
Next, Sapir says the authors of the original study can’t possibly be trusted, because they are or were affiliated with The Trevor Project, from whom they cited a study that he describes as non-representative despite having 35,196 respondents. He also adds that the study recruited their respondents from social media, like that’s a bad thing. If you know a better place to get answers from 35,196 young people, feel free to share with the class, buddy!
I think we can pretty much call it there, folks. Who’s got time to read a point-by-point rebuttal to every sentence in Leor Sapir’s latest sixty-seven paragraph screed against the idea that the policies he personally helps influence might be doing real, tangible harm to minority children? Those of us living through this attempted genocide on our community know the truth. The Trevor Project maintains a very busy crisis support line not for fun, but out of necessity. An increased rate in suicidal ideation and suicide attempts among trans youth, as compared to their cisgender peers, is simply an indisputable fact backed by a significant amount of research.
We know that transition and support can help keep our kids alive. Simply being trans doesn’t put you at risk of taking your own life. Instead, it’s the constant harassment from strangers, state-level bigotry, and lack of support at home that lead these children to feel like they have only one option left to escape the torment they experience daily.
I do want to touch on one more thing in Sapir’s insufferable article: He quotes psychiatrist and anti-trans activist Alison Clayton (unsurprisingly associated with SEGM), who said in 2023 that “focus on an exaggerated suicide risk narrative by clinicians and the media” may create a self-fulfilling prophecy “whereby suicidality in these vulnerable youths may be further exacerbated.”
It’s a disgusting statement, a built-in catchall designed to ensure that, should yet more concrete evidence of trans youth suicidality arise, people like Sapir and Clayton and their buddies at hate groups like SEGM can simply say… see what your harping has done? It is, of course, nonsense. Acknowledging a problem cannot exacerbate it. Ignoring it can.
That’s exactly what Leor Sapir wants us to do: ignore the tremendous threat our kids are facing every single day in Donald Trump’s America.
To that I say, simply, no.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
