The Real Reason Why the Attempted Suicide Rate Among Transgender People Is So High

I know I normally debunk misconceptions related to ancient history, but, in this post, I want to debunk a dangerous misconception that I’ve repeatedly seen floating around about transgender people. I think it is important to address this because it is a misconception that has an enormous, direct, negative impact on millions of real people’s lives in a way that other misconceptions I’ve addressed—like the one about modern Anglophone Christmas traditions being of ancient “pagan” origin, the one about a certain fresco from Pompeii being a portrait of Sappho, or the one about Thoukydides being a totally “objective” and “unbiased” historian—do not.

It is widely known that there is an extremely high rate of lifetime attempted suicide among transgender people. The most commonly cited statistic is that 41% of adult transgender people in the United States have attempted to kill themselves at some point in their life. Many conservatives believe that this statistic proves that being transgender itself is a mental illness that causes people to become depressed and suicidal, and that society therefore needs to do everything it possibly can to prevent people from “becoming” transgender for their own good.

In this post, I intend to present evidence to demonstrate that this view is false and that the high rate of lifetime attempted suicide among transgender people is, in fact, the result of widespread bigotry and stigma against trans people. Please be forewarned that the following post contains discussion of suicide, anxiety, depression, transphobia, anti-Black racism, antisemitism, misogyny, Neo-Nazis, online impersonation, and harassment. Some readers, especially those who have personally struggled with mental health issues, may find this discussion disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.

The lifetime attempted suicide rate among transgender people

If you’ve been on the internet at some point and read anything at all about transgender people, you’ve probably seen the statistic that 41% of adult transgender people in the United States have attempted to kill themselves at some point in their lives. This statistic comes from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), which was released in 2011. This survey was based on a sample of 6,450 respondents and was one of the earliest surveys with such a large sample size to examine trans people’s mental health.

Almost as soon as the survey was released, the statistic of “41%” was widely reported as shocking. It has since become so widely notorious that, if you just search for the number “41%” in Google without any other specification, the very first result that shows up is an entry from Urban Dictionary that defines “41%” as “the statistic of how many transgender people have attempted to commit suicide.”

ABOVE: Screenshot from a Google search I did for the term “41%”

More recent surveys and studies have repeatedly confirmed that there are indeed startlingly high rates of suicidal ideation and attempted suicide among transgender people, especially among transgender youth. According to the Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health for 2021, 52% of transgender and nonbinary youth have seriously thought about killing themselves within the past year and 20% have actually attempted to do it within the past year.

This means that, if you live in the United States and you know a transgender or nonbinary person between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four who is currently alive, there is an overall statistical chance of one-in-five that they attempted to end their own life in some manner at least once within the past year.

ABOVE: Chart from the Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health for 2021 showing the percentages of trans and nonbinary youth who have considered or attempted suicide within the past year

The same survey by the Trevor Project found that 77% of transgender and nonbinary youth reported experiencing symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder within the past two weeks and 70% reported experiencing symptoms of major depressive disorder.

ABOVE: Chart from the Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health for 2021 showing the percentages of trans and nonbinary youth who have experienced symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder

How transphobes weaponize these statistics against transgender people

These statistics are bleak on their own, but what’s even bleaker is that transphobes routinely weaponize these kinds of statistics against transgender people. Transphobes often claim that the high rates of suicidal ideation, attempted suicide, anxiety, and depression among trans people prove that being transgender is itself a mental illness and that society needs to do everything it possibly can to discourage and prevent people from “becoming” transgender. This view has become accepted as virtual orthodoxy among conservatives and is regularly repeated by conservative pundits.

For instance, Ben Shapiro is a professional far-right pundit, former editor-at-large of the far-right media outlet Breitbart News, and host of the daily podcast and live radio show The Ben Shapiro Show. He’s famous for doing this shtick where he goes to college campuses and argues with random progressive college students. The vast majority of the statements that come out of his mouth are factually inaccurate, but he talks so fast and with such confidence that it always looks like he’s winning the debate. Then he goes and posts videos of his arguments with college students to his YouTube channel with titles that usually begin with “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS . . .”

On 9 February 2017, Ben Shapiro posted a video on his YouTube channel titled “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Transgenderism And Pro-Abortion Arguments,” which, as of the time I am writing this post, has received over five million views and counting. In this video, Shapiro argues with a twenty-two-year-old female college student about whether society should accept trans people’s gender identities.

Shapiro insists that society should not accept trans people as the gender they say they are. Naturally, he tries to cite the supposed suicide rate among transgender people as evidence that trans people are inherently mentally ill and that it makes no difference for their mental health whether society accepts them. He declares:

“The idea behind the transgender movement, as a civil rights movement, is this idea that all of their problems would just go away if I would pretend that they were the sex to which they claim, uh, to which they claim membership. That’s nonsense! The transgender suicide rate is 40%! It is 40%! And, according to the Anderson School of UCLA, it makes no difference—there’s a study that came out last year—it makes no difference, virtually no difference statistically speaking, as to whether people recognize you as a transgender person or not. Which suggests there’s a very high comorbidity between transgenderism—whatever that mental state may be—and suicidality that has nothing to do with how society treats you.”

In this brief segment alone, Shapiro makes at least four embarrassingly obvious factual errors that clearly demonstrate he has no idea what he is talking about, but no one calls him out on his errors because all the progressives in the room are college students who are ignorant about the issue and who are all too intimidated by Shapiro to call him out. Here are the four errors that anyone who knows anything about the research on this subject would easily be able to spot:

• Shapiro blatantly misrepresents the position of trans people and trans allies. No one that I know of seriously claims that all of trans people’s “problems” would “just go away” if society accepted trans people’s gender identities. Obviously, everyone has “problems,” even people who are not actively discriminated against. What trans people and trans allies actually argue is that, if society accepted trans people, then trans people would exhibit patterns of mental health more similar to those of the general population. This is a very important distinction, because mental health issues are very common in general, even among cisgender people.

• Shapiro blatantly misconstrues the statistic he attempts to cite. He claims that forty percent is the percentage of trans people who successfully kill themselves, but this is not true. Forty percent is actually a close approximation of the percentage of living transgender people who have ever attempted to kill themselves at any point in their lives for any reason.

• Shapiro tries to cite a study that he attributes to the Anderson School. The Anderson School, however, is actually a graduate school of business management at UCLA. It has never conducted any research on transgender people as far as I am aware, let alone the suicide rate among transgender people specifically. In other words, the study Shapiro tries to cite here as evidence that whether people accept trans people as their gender identity makes no difference on the trans suicide rate simply does not exist.

• Shapiro is most likely thinking of a study conducted by the Williams Institute, a research institute at the UCLA School of Law that focuses on research into sexual orientation and gender identity. This study, however, did not claim that whether people accept trans people as their gender identity makes no difference on the suicide rate. In fact, as the transgender journalist Gemma Stone has already pointed out in a post on Medium in response to this exact video, the study’s conclusion actually says the exact opposite of what Shapiro claims; it actually lists “rejection, discrimination, victimization, and violence related to anti-transgender bias” as the first of “two interrelated risk factors” that “appear to be most strongly related to suicidal behavior among transgender and gender-non-conforming adults.” Shapiro totally pulled his assertion about the conclusion of the study ex cūlō.

In other words, Shapiro misrepresents the position of the people against whom he is arguing, he misquotes a statistic as being about the suicide rate among transgender people when it is actually the lifetime attempted suicide rate, he cites a study that he humiliatingly misattributes to an institution that has never even conducted research on trans people, and he claims that the study found exactly opposite of what it actually found.

The only reason why anyone takes this doggerel of an argument seriously is because Shapiro is highly skilled at theatrics and he wisely only debates college students, rather than experts, so he is able to dominate the room using his microphone and a litany of confidently stated, but inaccurate or misrepresented, statistics.

ABOVE: Screenshot from the YouTube video “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Transgenderism And Pro-Abortion Arguments,” showing Shapiro making his nonsense assertions about the suicide rate among transgender people

Why the anti-trans position is refuted by scientific evidence

Not only does Shapiro fail to convincingly defend his argument, but what he is arguing is, in fact, entirely contrary to all currently available scientific evidence. If being transgender itself inherently caused people to become depressed, anxious, and suicidal, then we would expect to see rates of depression, anxiety, and attempted suicide among trans people at close to 100%.

That, however, is not what we see; we do indeed see rates that are very high, but the statistics I cited in the first section of this article show that the vast majority of young trans people have not attempted to kill themselves in the past year, the majority of trans people have never attempted to kill themselves, nearly half of young trans people have not even thought about killing themselves in the past year, and sizable minorities of young trans people haven’t even experienced symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder in the past two weeks. The mere existence of some trans people who are happy, well-adjusted, and not at all suicidal is evidence against the transphobic position.

On top of this, if being transgender were the problem and discouraging people from being transgender the solution, then we would expect trans people who are accepted by those around them as their gender identity and who have taken more steps in their transition to be the ones with the highest rates of depression, anxiety, and attempted suicide. We would also expect trans people who are not accepted as their gender identity by those around them and who have taken fewer steps in their transition to have the lowest rates of depression, anxiety, and attempted suicide. Once again, though, this is not at all what we find. Instead, we see the exact opposite.

The same studies that have found high rates of attempted suicide among trans youth have repeatedly confirmed that, when members of a trans person’s household support them in their gender identity, they are drastically less likely to attempt suicide. The Trevor Project’s Survey of LGBTQ Youth Mental Health for 2021, which I cited at the beginning of this essay for the statistics about suicidal ideation, attempted suicide, anxiety, and depression among transgender youth, also notes:

“Transgender and nonbinary youth who reported having pronouns respected by all of the people they lived with attempted suicide at half the rate of those who did not have their pronouns respected by anyone with whom they lived.”

If you scroll down, you can view the actual percentages this statement is based on. The survey found that 24% of trans and nonbinary youth who reported that none of the people they lived with respected their pronouns attempted to kill themselves in the past year, while 19% of those who reported that only some of the people they lived with respected their pronouns attempted to kill themselves in the past year.

By contrast, only 13% of trans and nonbinary youth who reported that all the people they lived with respected their pronouns attempted to kill themselves in the past year. This represents a dramatic difference—and one that clearly contradicts the Shapiro hypothesis.

ABOVE: Chart from the Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Mental Health for 2021 showing the percentages of transgender and nonbinary youth who reported having attempted to kill themselves within the past year, divided into groups based on how many people they lived with respected their pronouns

In addition to this, the survey also notes:

“Transgender and nonbinary youth who were able to change their name and/or gender marker on legal documents, such as driver’s licenses and birth certificates, reported lower rates of attempting suicide.”

If you look at the data, you can see that 25% of transgender and nonbinary youth who reported that they were “not legally able” to change their name and/or gender marker on legal documents attempted to kill themselves in the past year, compared to 19% who said they were “planning” to change their name and/or gender marker and 11% who said they had already changed their name and/or gender marker.

ABOVE: Chart from the Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Mental Health for 2021 showing the percentages of transgender and nonbinary youth who reported having attempted to kill themselves within the past year, divided into groups based on changing their name and/or gender marker on legal documents

The Trevor Project’s survey also found that transgender and nonbinary youth who had access to gender-affirming spaces were consistently less likely to have attempted to kill themselves in the past year than those who did not have access to gender-affirming spaces.

ABOVE: Chart from the Trevor Project’s National Survey of LGBTQ Youth Mental Health for 2021 showing that transgender and nonbinary youth who had access to gender-affirming spaces were consistently less likely to have attempted suicide in the past year

Most damning of all for the notion that trying to stop people from being trans is the solution to the mental health problems among trans people, the Trevor Project’s survey found that LGBTQ youth who were went to conversion therapy (i.e., “therapy” designed to change a person’s gender identity and/or sexual orientation to make them cisgender and straight) were more than twice as likely to have attempted to kill themselves within the past year than those who had never gone to conversion therapy.

Specifically, 27% of LGBTQ youth who had gone to conversion therapy had attempted to kill themselves within the past year, while only 12% of those who had not gone to conversion therapy had attempted to kill themselves within the past year. This means that those who went to conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to have attempted to kill themselves in the past year than those who did not go to conversion therapy.

ABOVE: Chart from the Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health for 2021 showing that LGBTQ youth who went to conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to have attempted to kill themselves in the past year than those who didn’t go to conversion therapy

Think about this. If being transgender itself were the cause of transgender people’s mental health problems and stopping people from being transgender were the solution, then we would expect conversion therapy to greatly reduce people’s mental health problems and save lives. Instead, we see clear evidence of the exact opposite. There is a clear correlation between transgender and nonbinary youth having gone to conversion therapy and them having attempted to kill themselves.

Obviously, we cannot prove using these statistics that conversion therapy causes transgender and nonbinary people to kill themselves, since correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but these statistics do clearly demonstrate that conversion therapy is not effective at improving people’s mental health.

The Trevor Project’s survey also found that transgender and nonbinary youth were twice as likely to have gone to conversion therapy as cisgender LGBQ youth. Specifically, 18% of transgender and nonbinary youth reported that they had gone to conversion therapy, while only 9% of cisgender LGBQ youth reported that they had gone to conversion therapy.

ABOVE: Chart from the Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health for 2021 showing that transgender and nonbinary youth were twice as likely to have gone to conversion therapy as cisgender LGBQ youth

Finally, the Trevor Project survey found that LGBTQ youth who reported having experienced more kinds of discrimination were much more likely to have attempted to kill themselves within the past year than those who reported having experienced fewer kinds of discrimination. Namely, 36% of those who reported having experienced three different kinds of discrimination had attempted to kill themselves within the past year, compared to only 7% of those who reported having experienced zero kinds of discrimination.

Think about what a huge difference that is. This means that those who reported experiencing high levels of discrimination were over five times more likely to have attempted to kill themselves in the past year than those who reported experiencing no forms of discrimination. That’s a very striking correlation—and, once again, one that contradicts the Shapiro hypothesis.

ABOVE: Chart from the Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health for 2021 showing that higher levels of reported discrimination are strongly correlated with an increased likelihood of having attempted suicide in the past year among LGBTQ youth

Different prejudices resulting in different oppressions

Clearly, all of this is the exact opposite of what we would expect if being transgender itself were the reason why trans people display such high rates of suicidal ideation, attempted suicide, depression, and anxiety. These findings strongly indicate that the widespread bigotry and stigma towards trans people in our society is, in fact, the primary reason why the attempted suicide rate for trans people is so high.

Ben Shapiro, of course, has what he apparently thinks is a very good response to this argument. He argues:

“. . . the normal suicide rate across the United States is 4%. The suicide rate in the transgender community is 40%. The idea that 36% transgender people are committing suicide because people are mean to them is ridiculous. It’s not true and it’s not backed by any science that anyone can cite. It is pure conjecture. In fact, it’s not even true that bullying causes suicide, according to a lot of studies. For example, in the Black community, where the idea is that supposedly America is a racist society, Blacks are bullied a lot, ok, in the Black community, the Black community has significantly lower suicide rates than in the white community.”

This objection, however, is flawed for at least two reasons. The first flaw in Shapiro’s argument is that, as I have already pointed out, his statistics are simply not accurate. Forty percent is a close approximation of the total lifetime attempted suicide rate for living transgender people, not the percentage of transgender people who actually kill themselves.

The second flaw in Shapiro’s argument is that he assumes that bullying is the only form in which bigotry can manifest and that all different kinds of bigotry affect their victims in essentially the same ways. In reality, different kinds of bigotry operate in fundamentally different ways and consequently affect their respective victims differently. Black people in the United States do indeed face bigotry, hostility, oppression, and often violence, but they face this oppression collectively as a community and they generally tend to find support and solidarity from their families and friends.

The most devastating kind of bigotry against LGBT people, by contrast, comes in the form of rejection by members of one’s own family and immediate social circle. It is one thing for people in society at large to be bigoted against a person; it is quite another thing for a person’s own parents or other guardians—and potentially other relatives, such as siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—to be bigoted against them, since these are the very people to whom a person would normally turn for support.

There are many parents or guardians who will try to force a child who is transgender or gender-nonconforming to conform to the stereotypical roles and expectations of the gender they were assigned at birth and threaten to kick them out of the house if they do not conform—even if they have no other place to live.

Parents or guardians may force their transgender or gender-nonconforming child to go to conversion therapy to change their gender identity or make their life at home a living Hell by forcing them to constantly perform stereotypical masculinity or femininity, threatening them with punishment if they do not seem masculine or feminine enough to satisfy their expectations.

If a transgender adolescent or young adult is kicked out of the house or forced to run away, they may become homeless and have to live off the streets. This will most likely severely limit their job opportunities and put them at much greater likelihood of exposure to violence. Even homeless shelters often refuse to let homeless transgender people, especially homeless transgender women, stay with them because they often view trans people as undesirable, dangerous, hopelessly sinful, or some combination thereof.

A homeless trans person may have no choice but to beg for food or money in order to survive. They may have to live in dirty, tattered clothes and sleep on sidewalks or park benches. They may have to steal, either by shoplifting or pickpocketing. They may have to become a sex worker, even if they are underaged. All of these things are likely to get them into trouble with the law. They may face violence from the police, and they may be thrown in prison for vagrancy, panhandling, shoplifting, prostitution, or engaging in any number of other criminalized activities for survival.

ABOVE: Masquerader in the Guise of a Prisoner, sketch by Leonardo da Vinci from between 1517 and 1518

Different oppression, not more

Before I continue, I want to stress something very important, which is that I am not claiming that LGBT people face greater oppression than people of color, nor am I ignoring that fact that some people are both LGBT and people of color. What I am saying is that anti-Black racism and anti-LGBT bigotry are two different kinds of bigotry that operate in fundamentally different ways.

Black people have been collectively oppressed in the United States for hundreds of years. Many of the struggles that Black people in the U.S. still face today are the result of past oppression and discrimination against their ancestors that prevented them from being able to build up wealth that could benefit their descendants in the way that white people at the time were able to.

By contrast, a person of any ancestry who is born to parents of any economic status could potentially turn out to be LGBT. This means that LGBT people as a whole do not necessarily face the kind of intergenerational oppression that Black people routinely face.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing a 1936 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation map of the “residential security” of neighborhoods in Philadelphia, showing an example of redlining, with all neighborhoods with people of color living in them classified as “declining” or “hazardous”

The intersectional nature of oppression

It is also extremely important to emphasize here the concept of intersectionality. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a Black feminist legal scholar and one of the pioneers of critical race theory, coined this term in her influential academic paper “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” which was published in 1989 in the University of Chicago Legal Forum.

Intersectionality refers to the observable phenomenon of how many different factors—including (but not limited to) race, caste, sex, gender, sexuality, class, religion, native language, national origin, citizenship status, disability, physical appearance, and even height—collectively influence a person’s standing in society and their resulting experiences of privilege and/or oppression.

Thus, people who are both Black and transgender or gender-nonconforming may face both anti-Black racism and transphobia simultaneously, with the two prejudices interacting with each other to create unique experiences of oppression. For instance, a Black trans person’s family might kick them out because they are trans, resulting in them becoming homeless. They may be arrested under any number of laws that effectively criminalize homelessness and then they may be at doubly increased likelihood of facing police violence because they are a Black trans person.

ABOVE: Photograph taken by Nolwen Cifuentes for this article in Vox of the American Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality

Why family acceptance is so important

The situations I have described above are only the beginning of the potential struggles that a trans person whose family is hostile to their identity could face. If you have any imagination at all, you can surely imagine the kinds of circumstances that could lead a trans person to attempt to kill themself. Consequently, a hostile or supportive family environment is possibly the most potent factor in determining whether a trans person is likely to consider or attempt to kill themself.

The blanket statistic about the attempted suicide rate among transgender people as a whole is somewhat misleading, because it elides the fact that trans people whose families support them and accept their identity are far less likely to think about killing themselves or attempt to kill themselves than trans people whose families do not support and accept them.

A study conducted by a group of researchers led by Dr. Caitlin Ryan, titled “Family Acceptance in Adolescence and the Health of LGBT Young Adults,” published in 2010 in the academic Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, volume 23, issue number 4, pages 205–213, studied a sample group of “53 socioeconomically diverse Latino and non-Latino white self-identified LGBT adolescents and their families in urban, suburban, and rural communities across California.”

The study assessed the participants based on their degree of family support and asked them questions about suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. The study concludes:

“Participants who had low family acceptance as adolescents were more than three times as likely to report both suicidal ideation and suicide attempts compared with those who reported high levels of family acceptance.”

Dr. Ryan’s study had a very small sample size and it did not distinguish between transgender and cisgender LGBT participants. Another study, however, titled “Family Rejection as a Predictor of Suicide Attempts and Substance Misuse Among Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Adults,” published in November 2016 in the journal LGBT Health, examines the effects of family acceptance or rejection on transgender and gender-nonconforming adults specifically and reaches a similar conclusion.

This study had a much larger sample size of 5,612 transgender or gender-nonconforming people, who came from all over the United States. The study concludes:

“After adjusting for sociodemographic factors, having experienced high levels of family rejection was associated with almost three and half times the odds of suicide attempts and two and a half times the odds of substance misuse, compared to those who experienced little or no family rejection. Having experienced only moderate levels of family rejection was associated with almost twice the odds of suicide attempts and over 1.5 times the odds of substance misuse.”

These studies line up well with the results of the Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Mental Health for 2021 that I summarized earlier.

If you look at the data, it is abundantly clear that one of the primary reasons—if not the primary reason—why the attempted suicide rate among young transgender people is so high is because many young trans people’s families do not support them in their identities.

Thus, ironically, the people who are claiming that the rates of suicidal ideation, attempted suicide, anxiety, and depression among young transgender people prove that being transgender is a mental illness and that society should do everything it can it to discourage people from being transgender are directly contributing to the very attitudes and behaviors that make those rates so high in the first place.

Neo-Nazis drawing inspiration from these statistics

Unfortunately, at this point, our discussion is about to get even bleaker. Right-wing pundits like Ben Shapiro often cite the attempted suicide rate among transgender people out of context to justify transphobia. There are, however, some people even further to the right who draw inspiration from these same statistics in an even more sinister way; I’m talking about people who want to deliberately encourage as many transgender people as possible to kill themselves.

4chan is an anonymous imageboard website with very few content restrictions. The site’s political discussion board is known as “/pol/,” which stands for “politically incorrect.” The board is almost exclusively populated with Neo-Nazis and serves as a place where they can promote hate speech without consequences and strategize about how to hurt and terrorize marginalized communities.

As I discuss at greater length in this article I wrote in November 2021 about how misogyny, homophobia, and antisemitism influence contemporary transphobic discourse, Neo-Nazis generally believe that transgender people are “degenerate,” sub-human monsters who must all be exterminated.

Neo-Nazis typically try to explain the existence of transgender people through an elaborate conspiracy theory they believe in. This conspiracy theory claims that Jewish people are secretly orchestrating a massive, global conspiracy to destroy the white race and replace white people with people of color, whom Neo-Nazis regard as naturally racially inferior.

Neo-Nazis believe that, as part of this supposed conspiracy, the Jews have somehow been secretly controlling society from behind the scenes to make it socially acceptable for white people to be transgender, so that white people will become “degenerate” and infertile and therefore not produce racially pure white offspring to further the supremacy of the master race.

As anyone who is not a Neo-Nazi can surely recognize, this is a completely insane conspiracy theory that is based entirely on racist paranoia and delusions. Indeed, according to a survey conducted in 2015 by the Williams Institute, in the United States, Black and Hispanic or Latinx people are more likely to self-identify as transgender than non-Hispanic white people, which pretty clearly undermines the notion that the existence of transgender people is the result of any kind of conspiracy to eliminate white people.

Nonetheless, what I have just described here is precisely what many Neo-Nazis believe. Accordingly, Neo-Nazis believe that transgender people are a threat to the racial integrity of the white race. They therefore believe that they need to exterminate as many transgender people as they possibly can by whatever means they can. Ever since the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS) in 2011 first reported the statistic that 41% of transgender people have attempted suicide at some point in their lives, Neo-Nazis have looked to this statistic and found inspiration.

Below is a screenshot of a post that was originally made on 4chan’s /pol/ board on 21 November 2014 that was recently shared on Twitter by the trans rights advocate Brynn Tannehill. The author of the post says: “Obviously, all tr***ies should be rounded up and slaughtered like cattle, but we can’t actually do that (yet).” He therefore notes the high suicide rate among trans people and proposes disseminating propaganda online to encourage trans people to commit suicide, calling it “the next best thing” to rounding up transgender people and systematically murdering them.

Neo-Nazis have not just talked about this as an abstract proposal; they’ve actually done it in practice. This article by Max Plenke for the online news outlet Mic reports how, on 13 May 2015, an anonymous Neo-Nazi posted on 4chan’s /pol/ board about his plans to buy advertisements on Twitter explicitly urging transgender people to kill themselves. The article quotes the Neo-Nazi as writing:

“I’m going to use Twitter Ads to send out ‘kill yourself’ messages to tr***ies. Using Twitter Ads, you can send out promoted Tweets to millions of people, and you can target specific people to receive your Tweets. Twitter doesn’t check Tweets beforehand, so I made a bunch of Tweets encouraging tr***ies to kill themselves, and I customized it so that tr***ies will be the ones receiving those Tweets. Hopefully, I’ll actually be able to get a few tr***ies to really kill themselves. The only good tr***y is a dead one.”

On 20 May 2015, someone successfully bought an advertisement on Twitter using a fake account impersonating the Australian feminist activist Caitlin Roper, urging transgender people to kill themselves. This was presumably the same person who posted a week earlier on /pol/.

On the same day that he bought the advertisements, the person made another post on /pol/ explaining that he successfully bought the ad. In the same post, he also urges fellow Neo-Nazis to create fake accounts to harass Caitlin Roper for alleged transphobia, calling her a “feminazi whore.” Plenke’s article for Mic includes a screenshot of this post:

Plenke’s article notes that advertisements promoting hate speech regularly slip through Twitter’s weak filters. According to the article, the incident of the Neo-Nazi from /pol/ impersonating Caitlin Roper and buying an ad urging trans people to kill themselves was actually the third incident of hate speech slipping through Twitter’s ad filters that month.

There are a couple of reasons why I’m mentioning this here. The first is because I think that the vast majority of cisgender people have no idea that this kind of extreme anti-trans hatred even exists, let alone the shocking extent to which it thrives on the internet. I think it is important for cisgender people to be aware of just how vicious and nefarious anti-trans bigotry can be, especially online.

The second reason is because people who think that being transgender is itself a mental illness that causes people to become suicidal and that society needs to discourage people from being transgender as much as possible are functionally advocating many of the exact same kinds of policies and attitudes toward trans people as literal Neo-Nazis who want to exterminate trans people. The only difference is that some people who support these policies and attitudes pretend they are doing it for trans people’s own good, rather than simply because they don’t want to have to tolerate trans people existing.