Building a More Resilient Transgender Community

http://www.bilerico.com/2015/02/building_a_more_resilient_transgender_community.php

By Brynn Tannehill | February 16, 2015

A few years ago when I was reviewing my company's online suicide prevention training, I realized something. The slideshow had a list of "Suicide Protective Factors" listed. However, these "protective factors" are often unavailable to transgender people.

Brynn Tannehill is awesome!  And this is a tough issue for us.  Society is increasingly accepting, but it's definitely stacked against us.  "Nothing within our culture encourages people with GID to get help -- not our religion, our families, our work, or our friends."  She's exactly right about this.

Well, at least here we have one of them, community.

I had an interesting conversation with someone else yesterday.  Basically the thrust of it was that there are lots of people working on the way the outside world treats us.  Lots of people are willing to work on trans* issues if it means changing governmental policies, starting programs, etc. 

But the trans* community itself is often not very nice to its own people and there are lots of dividing lines across it.  If you don't think a certain something then you're not welcome here or if you don't "look right" you're not welcome there or only FtM people are welcome in one space and MtF people in another and neither space welcomes genderqueer folks.  And so on and so forth.

But not many people are out there working on those issues.  Yet many of the problems we face could be eliminated or mitigated if we would just do tiny things to help one another.  Not much thought is given to that.

Quote from: Dee Walker on February 17, 2015, 09:37:15 PM
Well, at least here we have one of them, community.

Amen to that.  I have truly begun to appreciate the community and what you all provide. And I am pleased to reciproKate.