Anticipating edicts from trans-friendly bureaucrats, some states are trying to deal preemptively with the understandable discomfort felt by young women when their public school rest–rooms are opened to young men who “identify” as women. Tennessee legislators are working up a law that would require transgender students to use school bathrooms consistent with the gender on their birth certificates. A similar law recently made it to the desk of South Dakota’s Dennis Daugaard, but he vetoed it.
Not that the birth certificate gambit would necessarily work anyway. As Charlotte Allen noted in her cover story for this magazine a year ago (“The Transgender Triumph,” March 2, 2015), a number of jurisdictions are already allowing those unhappy with the gender on their birth certificates to have the record changed.
What makes the Tennessee debate striking is the extent to which suicide has been at issue. Pass this bill, legislators were told, and troubled young people will kill themselves.
Not so far in the past there were psychiatrists who looked at the alarming rates of attempted suicide among the transgendered as evidence that, just maybe, “gender dysphoria” is a dysfunction—a disorder—with unhappy psychological consequences. But such theories have become politically unacceptable, replaced with a trendy new victimology: The transgendered aren’t accepted, either by their families or society; they are bullied; they are ridiculed; and it is that abuse which leads to depression and ultimately violence to self.
The suicide question, far from being a psychological red flag, has become an all-purpose rebuke to anyone who isn’t racing to keep up with the LGBT vanguard. Henry Seaton, a high school student who claims to be transgendered, testified before a Tennessee house education subcommittee about the difficulty and stress of using school bathrooms when one doesn’t fit neatly into the old-fashioned male/female categories. (The teachers’ restroom has been made available to accommodate Seaton, but the student is unhappy about that segregation.) Pointing to the attempted-suicide rates of LGBT youth, Seaton said, “When you don’t have a restroom to use, that really encourages those numbers to increase exponentially.” The same argument was made by Tennessee Suicide Prevention Network executive director Scott Ridgway, who told lawmakers the bathroom bill “can actually contribute to suicides or suicide attempts among our transgender youth in Tennessee.”
Psychiatrists are often vexed by patients who use “the threat of suicide to manipulate the hospital system,” according to Seymour Halleck in Law in the Practice of Psychiatry: A Handbook for Clinicians. “Even worse, patients who begin to use suicidal threats and gestures for manipulative purposes may generalize these behaviors to gain control of many types of social situations.” Such as to control a political debate, perhaps?
