In yet another pointless, heartless, and cruel move by the Trump administration, a budget proposal includes a directive by the Department of Health and Human Services to cut funding for a suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth.
Let's put this in perspective. Forty percent of LGBTQ+ teenagers surveyed said they'd considered suicide within the last year. One in ten attempted it. This is four times higher than for straight teens (and those lower rates are disturbing enough). But how, exactly, are these numbers shocking to anyone? We have a government passing laws right and left specifically to deny rights to queer people. There is a vocal minority of Americans who advocate making same-sex relationships illegal; one (Pastor Dillon Awes) gained national notoriety for saying that gays should be "lined up and shot." Less overtly violent, but more pervasive, are strategies like the ones in multiple states to remove library books about the queer experience, or even fiction with queer characters.
Pastor Awes wants to kill us; but I'm not sure how much better the people are who simply want us erased. That queer youth are feeling hopeless about the situation they're facing is hardly a surprise.
But let me be completely clear, here. You people who still support Trump and his cronies -- you no longer have the right to call yourselves "pro-life." What you are is pro-birth, because you don't seem to give a flying rat's ass what happens to kids after they're born. What, do a person's rights begin at conception and end at birth? Oh, to be fair, if they're the babies of straight white wealthy Christian conservatives, you're just thrilled to pieces. But anyone else? You've advocated reducing or eliminating SNAP benefits to feed low-income children. You've voted to cut Head Start, which gives underprivileged children better access to early education. This government's ICE thugs deported three children who had birthright citizenship (which, allow me to point out, is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution), including one with stage 4 cancer. And as far as the proposed elimination of support for LGBTQ+ teenagers -- well, let me put it this way.
You fucking frightened little MAGA types, we are not trying to turn straight kids into queer kids. We're trying to make sure queer kids don't turn into dead kids.
But deep inside, you know that, don't you? You know queerness isn't a choice, because when you hit puberty, you didn't sit down and "choose to be straight." Your support for this kind of government is based on hate, pure and simple. So I misspoke earlier; Trump's elimination of a suicide hotline for queer youth isn't pointless.
The cruelty is the point.
Allow me to get personal, here. I was one of those queer kids who almost did turn into a dead kid. Twice. I attempted suicide when I was 17, and again when I was 20. There was no safety net for me, and I came damn close to succeeding. My mom felt like the appropriate thing to do was ignore it. Her take on things was a dismissive, "What do you have to be sad about?" It was never talked about; to my knowledge, no one besides her and my dad ever knew about it. Both times were during summer, so there weren't even missed school days to red-flag anyone.
But if I hadn't gotten scared, and had taken the whole bottle of sleeping pills rather than just a handful, I wouldn't be here right now.
My depression, and my suicide attempts, were not solely about being a closeted queer kid in a place and time where coming out would have put my safety at significant risk. My childhood, looked at from the outside, seemed pretty placid, but from the inside... well, let's just say that depressed people are chameleons, and so are emotional abusers. I never felt safe, not for a single moment, neither at home nor at school. And when I hit those catastrophic downward-spiral points at 17 and 20, I felt like I just wanted out, permanently, whatever it took.
If I had had someone I could have trusted to reach out to -- a counselor, a sympathetic adult, someone on the other end of a hotline -- my life would have played out very, very differently. I might not have come so very close to ending it.
And the fact that Trump and his cronies want to pull that safety net away from this generation of queer young people is cruelty for cruelty's sake.
So Trump supporters: don't you ever, ever in my presence call yourselves "pro-life" again. Not until you disavow the vicious and ugly attacks this administration is making against the most vulnerable of us. Maybe you should revisit the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, in that book you profess to care so much about: "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?' The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'"
I'm so sorry you had to go through that. I'm also so glad you survived. The United States could use a lot more people like you.
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