While Steve was in the groomers yesterday I spent some time reading, and I also spent a good bit of time just sitting there stream of conciousness thinking, just floating from idea to idea about whatever pops in my head. One of the things I thought about was Chapell Roan, in particular when she was accepting her award and her hat fell off:
After some thought, I realized that she was talking to herself when she said her hat was falling off, and that’s ok. She’s gone through so much and is clearly a fragile person, she was saying that to herself so she didn’t lose her shit.
Chappell Roan had a very traumatic upbringing- she grew up lesbian in SW Missouri, an ugly place of bigotry and repression to the… well, I was going to say the gay community, but really it’s a pretty cruel and awful place to be anything but a white christian. It’s not much different from the kind of place that WV has become in the past few decades. Because of her talent she signed with Atlantic, got out of there, didn’t make enough money for Atlantic, so they dropped her and she ended up back in that hellhole we know as Missouri. She worked some gig jobs to keep working on her music, put in the ground work and grew her name by herself, and the rest is, as they say, history.
The reason I point this out is because the song that won for her was Pink Pony Club, a song about a woman leaving Tennesee, heading to California, and going to work at a gay strip club, and, for the first time in her life, feeling free and open to express herself as a gay person, without judgment or punishment or a lack of acceptance that is missing in so many parts of the country.
Roan has stated the Pink Pony Club is written about an actual bar, but she has also referred to it as basically her love letter to LA and California, but more accurately, it’s a metaphor. The Pink Pony Club is basically any place where our most at risk members of society are safe to exist. And not just exist, but thrive. It is very hard out there for young lgbtq folks- the nation is a very dark place for many of them, and they don’t all have Roan’s talents to get them the hell out, so there they are, stuck. Abused. Taunted. Unwanted. Unaccepted and even disowned by their family.
And again, the statistics bear out their misery:
In terms of school climate, “approximately 25 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual students and university employees have been harassed due to their sexual orientation, as well as a third of those who identify as transgender, according to the study and reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education.”[13][needs update] Research has found the presence of gay–straight alliances (GSAs) in schools is associated with decreased suicide attempts; in a study of LGBT youth, ages 13–22, 16.9% of youth who attended schools with GSAs attempted suicide versus 33.1% of students who attended schools without GSAs.[14]
“LGBT students are three times as likely as non-LGBT students to say that they do not feel safe at school (22% vs. 7%) and 90% of LGBT students (vs. 62% of non-LGBT teens) have been harassed or assaulted during the past year.”[15][unreliable medical source?]
An international study found that suicidal LGBT people showed important differences with suicidal heterosexuals, in a matched-pairs study. That study found suicidal LGBT people were more likely to communicate suicidal intentions, to search for new friends online, and to find more support online than did suicidal heterosexuals.[16]
The black transgender and gender non-conforming community has been found to face discrimination to a higher degree than the rest of the transgender community, which is due to the intersection of racism and transphobia.[17] Research has found that this community experiences a higher level of poverty, suicide attempts, and harassment, while the effects of HIV and being refused health care due to transphobia and/or racism are greater as well.[18][failed verification]
A survey by the National LGBTQ task force found that amongst the black respondents 49% reported having attempted suicide.[19] Additional findings were that this group reported that 26% are unemployed and 34% reported an annual income of less than $10,000 per year. 41% of respondents reported homelessness at some point in their lives, which is more than five times the rate of the general US population.[19] Also, the report revealed that the black transgender or gender non-conforming community reported 20.23% were living with HIV and that half of the respondents who attended school expressing a transgender identity or gender non-conformity reported facing harassment.[19] 27% of black transgender youth reported being physically assaulted, 15% were sexually assaulted and 21% left school due to these instances of harassment.
A more recent survey by The Trevor Project revealed that 21% of African American LGBT youth have attempted suicide throughout 2021. Amongst Native American youth, 31% of LGBT youth have attempted suicide, and amongst Latin American youth, 18% of survey respondents admitted they have attempted suicide in the past year.[20]
A 2022 study found that the use of gender-affirming hormone therapy in transgender and nonbinary youth was associated with a significant decrease in depression and suicidality.[21]
It’s fucking horrifying. And with transgender kids, it’s even worse:
Data indicate that 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth. Using minority stress theory and the interpersonal theory of suicide, this study aims to better understand suicide risk among transgender youth.
That’s an abstract from a study currently hosted at the NIH website. Who knows how long it will still be there?
I guess the point of this is on top of all the other things going on with this administration that is evil and awful and deplorable, they are rolling back what few protections our lgbtq community have. And they are not doing it because any of these protections were causing a problem. Not because it was too expensive. Not because they were getting special rights- they were only barely getting to enjoy the rights everyone else has. They aren’t doing it because they fucking care about women’s sports. For none of those reasons.
They’re doing it for sport. They’re doing it to be cruel. They’re doing it to codify their right to horrible fucking people. The cruelty, as always, is the point.
It’s fucking heartbreaking and I feel so fucking helpless.
