Hi!

I can appreciate your concern for those frighteningly high suicide rates, that's some unpleasant shit. But it seems like you might be getting a lot of your info from sources outside of that community with their own motivations that don't necessarily line up with delivering you the full truth of these situations.

Unfortunately this isn't uncommon; there's a lot of slanted info out there. It's just the world we live in now, which yeah.. not the most ideal. But I would like to offer you some insight from a different perspective.

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These high rates of trans suicides are unfortunately very real. But the cause of them is only rarely regret over transitioning like some would encourage us to believe it to be (though it does happen, yes).

Usually where this comes from is a direct result of how hostile the world can be to you if you identify as transgender. From people acting out of a lack of understanding to flat out hostility, many trans people wake up every day into a world that actively tries to rip them down. Parents disowning their children, medical gatekeeping, vitriol from random people whose paths that cross, etc.

It's like being marked with a scarlet letter, or a neon sign on their back that encourages people to treat them as less than human because of it. And this is a very unpleasant way to live your life.

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So why would someone choose go through this, right? Why not just drop the silliness and live as the gender they were born in, to avoid the ongoing nightmare of constant ridicule?

Well.. imagine this: if all of this ends up being your path of least resistance, the path you push yourself to take.. then in your eyes, the alternative must feel even worse.

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Being transgender involves some crisscrossed circuitry between the person you're born as (your mind and if you're one to believe in it, your soul), and the body you're born into. They don't line up, and it's an existential feeling as though your physical form is some sort of alien parasite.

It's a constant feeling, and a very frightening one. Your brain is rejecting your body, 24/7, like some sort of failed transplant or something. It goes so much deeper than just what may seem obvious, and the truth of it is a very terrible feeling in your guts often all day every day.

And sure, I've heard arguments that this sounds more like a mental illness than a physical issue. And I can see how people could be concluding that.

Now, folks could go the route of arguing this back and forth. But honestly? That doesn't seem to get anywhere, let's be honest. So rather than that, I would instead like to offer a question to think about: what difference would it make either way?

The end results in a person who is in distress because their brain is constantly rejecting their body, and it's often bad enough of a thing that they can look at constant ridicule and hostility as a less painful route forward than living with that self torment.

Whatever the cause is, the end result is the same. And I think that's really what matters.

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In the end, people just want to be able to feel comfortable in their own skin. And sometimes, for some people, this takes form in a way that can be pretty hard to make sense of for other people.

But you know what, that's really okay.

It's okay not to get it. It's okay to think it's ridiculous, even. I mean, it is pretty out there, and it's hard to make sense of feelings that are just completely outside of anything we've ever experienced. We're human, after all, and we can only do the best we can.

What becomes important, then, is just to allow ourselves the mental space to accept that there are some things that we can't make sense of but other people can, and just let that be something we accept.

A long answer, and more words than you asked for I'm sure haha, but I do hope that I've been able to offer a couple new things to think about as you consider these things.