The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Self-Hatred and Transgender Suicide

Posted on | June 3, 2017 | 1 Comment

Jane Georgia, a/k/a “Jay Griffin.”

Not long ago, my friend Cynthia Yockey and I were discussing the transgender cult when she rather casually said something that struck me as profound: Transgenderism is a sort of suicide, involving the destruction of a hated self. She just threw that idea out in the midst of our phone conversation, but after the call was over, the truth of what she had said stuck with me. After all, what is more basic to our sense of self than being either male or female? And somewhere in the bizarre psychology of transgenderism there must be a profound alienation from the patient’s authentic self. Life is tough, and anyone might become discouraged by a sense of failure, but it takes an extreme kind of discouragement to feel you are so hopelessly doomed as a male that you could improve your life by discarding yourself, so to speak, and becoming an artificial simulacrum of a female (or vice-versa). Indeed, this is a sort of suicide, and yet one of the arguments most often heard from transgender activists is to blame the high suicide rate among transgender people on their opponents. This idea — that transgender “treatment” is the only alternative to suicide — is quite frequently used to promote “acceptance” of transgenderism among children. This is simply emotional blackmail.

Anyway, what Cynthia said about transgenderism-as-suicide came to mind today when I read this genuinely tragic story from Alabama:

Just over a year after Jane Marie Georgia’s Christian parents allowed her to start living life as a boy named Jay Griffin, the troubled 13-year-old girl who was in therapy for depression, anxiety and identity issues killed herself inside her home in Trussville, Alabama, last Thursday.
Griffin’s parents, Matt and Erin Georgia, both of whom served in the U.S. Marine Corps, are grieving and now believe in hindsight that allowing their daughter to live as a transgender boy, was just too much for their oldest child who had lived most of her life as a girl until the middle of the sixth grade.
“Jay was not ready to come out to the world in the sixth grade. Jay wasn’t really ready at the end,” Erin admitted in an interview with AL.com. “It’s a very personal process, but the schools have always been very attentive.”
Erin’s husband Matt said it was a difficult process for their daughter who wanted to take things slow with how she engaged the public with her transgenderism.
“I had talked to Jay about that, asked him, ‘Who do you want to know?’ He always told me that he would tell the people he wanted to know when it came to that,” Matt explained in the interview.
They felt like they were doing all the right things in supporting their daughter and tried their best to ensure she found “safe spaces” in which to be herself.
“We were under the care of a psychologist from day one,” Erin said.
She explained that her daughter also attended group therapy, and met with a psychologist and a psychiatrist. Two months before her death, Erin’s daughter also started taking medication.
“We would have highs and lows. Who knows if that contributed? I’m not going to run that over in my head,” Erin said. “It definitely seemed to be an imbalance problem. We were still tweaking the medication, but it takes time.”
She argues, however, that Jay was never pressured about her transgenderism.
“That was a personal thing I never bugged him about. I was concerned about loving and accepting and trying [to] understand his perspective,” she told AL.com. “We’ve always just loved and accepted our children for whoever they are. I’m a very outspoken, tattooed Christian, very strong in my faith. We were just encouraging Jay. I would notice things as a mother and was like, ‘Hey, anything you want to talk to me about, I’m here.”’
Erin, who explained that she had prayed to have a boy all her life, said she also saw her daughter’s transgenderism as a gift from God. So when she and her husband found their Jay dead in her bedroom at 5 a.m. on May 25, they were genuinely shocked.
“Don’t get me wrong, I mourned the loss of a daughter but then I realized that I’d been praying for a son my whole life,” she explained. “God answered that prayer, in just a different way.”
She argued, however, that her troubled daughter . . . did not feel validated despite the support she received from their community.
“He didn’t feel validated or accepted in our community,” Erin said. “You really need a safe space of allies and advocates and people that are like you. That’s where they hear their true voices. There are no local community safe spaces that I know of, and we’ve looked. That was part of Jay’s struggle.”
She added: “As Jay was going through this journey, he would go to church with us. The church was welcoming, but there was no safe space and that is my biggest point. Me and Jay would go to different churches to find places that were safe for us. I say us because I often feel like an outsider because I just love everybody, and that’s kind of hard in a Christian Bible Belt state.”

No one would wish to see such a tragedy exploited for the sake of political arguments, but the basic problem here should be obvious. Jane/Jay suffered from mental illness, which manifested itself as a symptom in her/“his” identity crisis. Her parents put her/“him” in therapy — “We were under the care of a psychologist from day one” — but this actually compounded the problem. In fact, the antidepressants (probably SSRIs) may have been directly responsible for Jane/Jay’s suicide. The SSRI/suicide connection has been the subject of much research, which is inconclusive because it’s difficult to distinguish between the effects of the medication and the underlying problem of depression. In the same way, it’s difficult to separate general problems of mental health (mood disorders or personality disorders) from identity/sexuality problems.

Jane/Jay was a chubby tomboy. Lots of chubby tomboys manage to make it through adolescence without killing themselves. However, at the urging of transgender activists, the psychiatric community claims to “help” kids by giving them a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and encouraging kids (and their parents) to make this the basis of the child’s identity.

Isn’t it time that we stand up against this bovine excrement? Is the proper “treatment” of mental illness to indulge the patient’s delusions? Are we to suppose that whatever escapist fantasy a sixth-grader can imagine is automatically deserving of acceptance, so that telling Jane she can’t be a boy named Jay is condemned as “hate”? And do we really expect Christians to baptize this bizarre ideology, so to speak?

Permit me to suggest that parents and other adults concerned about the social contagion of transgenderism take a long, hard look at the history of so-called “sexology.” Radical feminists like Sheila Jeffreys have pointed out how proponents of the “scientific” approach to sex (e.g., Richard von Krafft-Ebing) asserted claims to expertise which look ludicrous in retrospect. Many years ago, Judith Reisman showed how the self-declared sex expert Alfred Kinsey sought to normalize pedophilia. Liberals dismissed Reisman as a right-wing fanatic, but subsequent events have vindicated her, as we see where the Kinseyite approach to sexuality has led us in the 21st century. See my article “Orgasm-Seeking Behavior” on this subject, and I will repeat here what I have said before:

Once you separate sexual behavior from its procreative function, so that “sex” is no longer about men and women forming permanent pair-bonds for the purposes of raising families, everything goes haywire. If “sex” is merely about hedonism, and if we can only discuss “sexuality” and “gender” as amorphous intellectual abstract concepts based on our emotional moods, then we can expect endless confusion and misery to follow.

People need to wake up to what’s happening in our culture. Parents especially must be aware of the kind of dangers that threaten their children. If you are a 35-year-old parent raising a 10-year-old child, you must realize that the world in which your child will become a teenager is not the same world in which you were a teenager 20 years ago. Whatever problems you had in 1997, you didn’t have Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram or any other online social media to deal with. Over and over again, we find that troubled kids are turning to dubious “friends” on the Internet to tell them how to live their lives, and the social contagion of transgenderism is only one of many disturbing aspects of this trend.

Well, I could go on for another thousand words about these issues, but I am encouraged to see that more and more people are beginning to ask serious questions about the Third Wave “gender” narrative. When radical feminists are willing to reach out to the conservative Heritage Foundation, we may be close to a genuine turning point.



 

 

Category: Sex Trouble

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One Response to “Self-Hatred and Transgender Suicide”

  1. News of the Week (June 4th, 2017) | The Political Hat
    June 4th, 2017 @ 2:24 pm

    […] Self-Hatred and Transgender Suicide Not long ago, my friend Cynthia Yockey and I were discussing the transgender cult when she rather casually said something that struck me as profound: Transgenderism is a sort of suicide, involving the destruction of a hated self. […]