Part ITHE STAKES
THE STATE OF LGBTQ+ YOUTH
Content Warning: youth suicide, anti-trans rhetoric, and legislation
Before we get into the work of spreading queer joy, you need to understand why this work is both incredibly important and incredibly urgent. I know you are committed to giving the kids in your care the best life you can—you’re reading this book, after all—but I need to lay everything out to show how vital this work is, how vital it is that you integrate the lessons of this book into everything you do as soon as possible, and that this work is a constant, never-ending project. Take a deep breath and bear with me through this section. There’s a lot to get through, and some of this might be hard to hear, but we have to get through the muck before we can reach the shore.
In December 2014, seventeen-year-old Leelah Alcorn in Lebanon, Ohio, left a note on her Tumblr specifically calling out her loss of hope as a young trans girl before she died by suicide as a result of her declining mental health.
In April 2019, fifteen-year-old Nigel Shelby in Huntsville, Alabama, died by suicide after being bullied for being gay.
In 2018, it was nine-year-old Jamel Myles in Denver, Colorado.
According to The Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health in 2021, “42% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, including more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth …
… 75% of LGBTQ youth reported that they had experienced discrimination based on their sexuality or gender identity at least once in their lifetime” while more than half had experienced discrimination in the past year.
“72% of LGBTQ youth reported symptoms of generalized anxiety in the past two weeks, including more than 3 in 4 transgender and nonbinary youth.
… 62% of LGBTQ youth reported symptoms of major depressive disorder in the past two weeks, including more than 2 in 3 transgender and nonbinary youth …
… 30% of LGBTQ youth experienced food insecurity in the past month, including half of all Native/Indigenous LGBTQ youth.”
According to a recent study from the Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, LGBTQ youth are 120 percent more likely to experience homelessness than non-LGBTQ youth. While an estimated 7 percent of youth identify as LGBTQ, 40 percent of unhoused youth identify as LGBTQ.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) marked 2021 as the deadliest year on record in their annual report on violence against transgender and gender nonconforming people in the United States. That report honors at least forty-six transgender and gender nonconforming people killed in 2021 alone. More than half of these victims were Black. Since January 2013, the HRC has documented more than 250 transgender and gender nonconforming people across 113 cities and 33 states who were violently murdered for being transgender or gender nonconforming.
As I write this, conservative legislatures in more than thirty states are working to pass anti-LGBTQ+ bills targeting trans and nonbinary youth’s ability to use their school’s bathroom, participate in after-school sports that align with their gender identity, and restrict their access to lifesaving gender-affirming healthcare. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s current governor, passed the “Don’t Say Gay” law through the state legislature that not only puts a blanket ban on any discussions of gender identity or sexuality in Florida schools up to the third grade but also requires teachers to out their queer, trans, and nonbinary students to their parents, endangering that child’s safety and well-being at home.
These statistics and irrefutable facts about the state of LGBTQ youth are stark. They are difficult to stomach because they are true. The stories behind these statistics are not outliers, they are the norm. The only reason I didn’t become a statistic is because I was lucky. I was an incredibly depressed and confused teenager. My declining mental health in my late teens led me to dangerous situations, substance abuse, and a sexual assault. The only reason I was able to pull myself up from rock bottom was because going away to college was a choice for me. So many do not have the privilege I had or access to wealth that is necessary for college to be an option. I made it through because I was lucky.
The mental health crisis for LGBTQ+ youth is so acute that the United States has multiple large-scale organizations specifically dedicated to addressing the issue on a daily, even hourly, basis: The Trevor Project, Trans Lifeline, and the It Gets Better Project; local organizations, like the Ali Forney Center in New York City, that provide housing specifically for unhoused LGBTQ+ youth; and BIPOC-led organizations like The Okra Project and Black Trans Travel Fund that support queer and trans BIPOC, some of the most vulnerable in our community. We even have LGBTQ+ specific advocacy and legal organizations like Lambda Legal, and an entire gay and trans-focused department at the ACLU headed up by the incomparable Chase Strangio, that fight for LGBTQ+ rights in courtrooms across America. These organizations do vital work to support a community in the midst of crisis.
This is not meant to diminish the vital need for these organizations and their incredible work, but they are Band-Aids. They jump in to help queer folks who have already entered crisis mode; they do not prevent that crisis from taking root in the first place. Media organizations like GLAAD that advocate for proper LGBTQ+ representation in television and film are on the path to this prevention mission to shift culture, build empathy, and eventually eradicate anti-queer and anti-trans bigotry, but I believe that we need to invest in true intervention. I’m talking about reaching young kids through education, and representation specifically in children’s media, including preschool television. I believe this tactic, based in early childhood media and education, will significantly improve the well-being of the LGBTQ+ community as a whole, working as a preventative strategy for healing our collective crisis. Not only will it cultivate affirmed LGBTQ+ kids and kids from LGBTQ+ families, but it will reach further in creating meaningful allies in their straight and cisgender peers—those who might otherwise perpetrate harm by parroting anti-trans and anti-queer societal biases.
Copyright © 2023 by Lindz Amer
