- Joined
- May 31, 2019
More and more trans suicide stories in recent years involve kids who had nothing but acceptance and love from everyone around them. In some ways, I think it drives them to despair when these traumatized, messed-up kids announce to family and friends that they hate their body so much and want to be a whole new person, and the response of everyone around them is "sure, sounds good, that other guy is DEAD now, you're someone totally new to us."
It'd be like if a wife said to her husband, "I'm worried I'm getting fat, I need to change my body" and he said, "I completely support your assessment of where your body is and needs to be, I'm here for you, I'll pay $25,000 for all the liposuction and other procedures you'd need to look the way you know you're supposed to look."
I don't think most women would feel reassured by that. I think they'd feel dismal and wish he'd either said something kind (even if insincere), or given a solution that was way less drastic like a diet or exercise. Sometimes the thing someone asks for, especially when it's a kid or teenager with poor communication skills, isn't at all what they actually want.
Someone like Jazz might have needed someone to tell him at the right time that his body really is him, that it's something to cherish and work with as it is, even if you pine for things that might have been a bit different. Function over form, all that. Or to be told that having feelings like you hate your body means maybe you could use some therapy to help you understand the changes you're going through.
The sad thing is, this isn't about "Transness: the Medical Condition" as much as it is about "How can we use Transness to push our political policies onto the general public and gain status within the wider world?" If you treat transness as anything other than a medical condition first and foremost, you're going to end up with a bunch of mutilated, suicidal people. It would be like building a nuclear reactor and, instead of putting worker safety first, you decided to spend most of your design effort on building the breakroom. ("Sure, the reactor explodes every once in awhile, but we've got a mini-fridge that looks like the Red Stapler from Office Space!")