My #itgetsbetter Story: When Being Erased Meant Erasing Myself
So let’s not “erase” transgender people, ok?
Prescript to this (11/13/23) — looking back when I wrote this five years ago, this was the moment where I began to think I really needed to interrogate my own gender identity and think how FAR the LGBTQ movement had come (SO FAR) since this moment I describe below. Until this Trump erasure moment in 2018, I had been complacent and a little resistant to thinking of my experience as anything other than queerly heteronormative. Trump and the emboldened right-wing attack on LGBTQ rights snapped me out of this. And so now, as a non-binary person, I love that I can look back five years after writing about my “Trevor Project moment” and realize this, too, was a constitutive moment in shaping my life trajectory. FYI, this is about suicide, and I am so thankful to be here — questions or concerns, please reach out to the Trevor Project.
10/26/18
This past week, I had a triumphant return to West Lake in Hangzhou, China, the same spot where roughly sixteen years ago I decided to erase my own existence because I was queer and I hated myself for it. If you know me, you’ll know I have a flair for the dramatic, so in retrospect it’s at least somewhat amusing that where I finally broke inside happened to be in a Chinese resort area filled with delicately landscaped gardens, ponds with every shade of coy you’ve ever seen, not to mention a lake so large it disappears at the horizon line, with a surface so placid it perfectly reflects the lush trees on the shore.
At the time, though, in the summer of 2002, all I wanted to do was to stand facing away from the lake, arch into a back dive, go head first into the lake, and simply disappear. Maybe if I got lucky, no one would notice, or maybe, I thought, if I grabbed some kind of rock… and while lost in this dark reverie of plotting my own death, my traveling buddy scurried back up to me with some baked tofu treat on a stick. Not a fan, I told her, sticking my tongue out, promptly realizing how messed up it would be to off myself half a world away from home on a backpacking trip. Instead, I resolved right then, right there, that it would be more appropriate to complete this unfinished business in my dorm room and take full advantage of my growing collection of street and prescription sleep and anxiety meds.
In all this talk right now about transgender people being erased out of legal existence, I thought it was well worth sharing my story, which I’ve never done in any kind of real detail — not even with my wife — and I’m generally extremely reticent about this sort of public disclosure. But I want to share my story because I want to remind people: even if you’ve got all the love and the support you could imagine around you, even if you have a loving family who loves you for you— it’s often not enough to keep you going when the big world out there regularly tells you that a key feature of your existence is a black mark on humanity.
Obviously, whatever it was I tried a few weeks later back in my dorm room didn’t work (thankfully), a cry for help well-heeded by a friend to whom I owe a true life-debt. Time heals wounds, I suppose, and when I returned last week to this fairly unlikely spot for an American visitor, I was part of a delegation of international scholars invited by a Chinese university as part of a major conference on news innovation, where I gave a keynote speech. The place I had decided to kill myself sixteen years ago was the same place I was now visiting as part of a cultural diplomacy exchange, only now, I was a successful academic with two books under my belt and an international scholarly reputation. I’m still no fan of baked tofu on a stick (tried it again), but I am living version of that statistic you hear bandied about for queer youth — we’re five times as likely to attempt suicide, and at 19, with The Trevor Project hotline far from my radar, suicide seemed like a reasonable alternative to hating how different I felt from everyone around me and how terrible who I was seemed to be to the world.
In 2002, with George W. Bush in The White House (I had proudly voted for him), Karl Rove’s master plan to use gay marriage bans to drive election turnout was well underway. What I heard around me was that I was going to burn in hell, that I was destined to be a burden on society and would never succeed, that I was mentally ill, that it was fair game to discriminate against me in housing and employment, that I’d die of AIDS or drug abuse. And if I ever did find a life partner, the same-sex version of 2.5 kids and a dog and a picket fence was just crazy talk — gay people couldn’t get married and they certainly weren’t going to easily adopt children either.
It doesn’t matter how much you are supported, or even to some extent how much you are comfortable with yourself — regular and repeat exposure to the message that people hate you for you and that who you are is a black mark on society and shameful — it wears at you. I had every possible reason to believe that I would be welcomed by my friends, some of whom were out and proud, and I had a lot going for me: I was at Harvard, I was an editor on the college newspaper, and I had just spent the summer having an adventure at a fancy newspaper internship in Texas.
But with my penchant for perfection and success, this wasn’t enough — I wasn’t enough. Being gay screwed all of that up, it seemed, and so the best tactic seemed to be to ignore how I felt, date boys, sleep with boys, and it was fine — fun and at times, even great. I’m thankful that the guys I dated were fundamentally decent, even if on occasion the end result of garbage pail punch led to poor decisions about where to unload it. And of course, there’s nothing like the twisted college girl equivalent of feeling prettier than your college best friend after you steal her boyfriend (*sorry sorry sorry, S.)…So I was holding it together and I could make this hetero-thing work if I just focused, I thought. Until I couldn’t, and I almost crashed and burned.
I don’t really know what happened that night in early Fall 2002. I don’t remember the details all that well. I do remember telling all my friends via email to come visit me in the hospital, where I was under supervision, leaving out crucial details as to why I was there. The docs were a bit perplexed about what had transpired; people with a revolving door of friends bringing them candy and books are not the sort of people who tend to kill themselves. However, those who have regular messages about why they should hate themselves, regardless where they’re coming from, are a little bit more predisposed to imposing their own early exit.
I am lucky. I can buy into the #itgetsbetter mantra. Though this hashtag came at least a full decade after my flirtation with suicide, in 2010, I couldn’t get enough of the YouTube videos of queer celebrities telling us their stories about wanting to end it all and then finding inner strength to carry on, to have self-acceptance, and to become successful adults. I can believe the #itgetsbetter hashtag as cis-gender person (ed. note, 2022: how time changes, how acceptance is a social process); it hasn’t always been a neat upward trajectory (after marrying in 2008, I watched California voters endorse a same-sex marriage ban a few months later). But for the most part, I’ve been able to live that dream I had of finding a life partner, getting married, having a kid, finding career success and personal fulfillment with hobbies that make me happy. Our family forgets I have no genetic connection to my kid and in fact, tend to forget that two women actually can’t combine their DNA to have one (“both of you have brown hair, where did he get that blonde from?”).
Transgender people are not there yet. Far from it. And while it’s not all peachy keen for LGB folks all the time, and there’s a lot of law and a lot of people that still have big problems, by and large, I can say yes, #itgetsbetter, but I don’t know if I see that yet for transfolk, as right now, it seems #itsgettingworse. And that really, really sucks, because no amount of anyone telling me that I was enough made up for all of the external nastiness around me; this nastiness is not fair, nor is it right, nor is it any way an expression what good people sound like when they talk to each other; this hate has real life or death consequences for people.
Where does this leave us, then, now the abyss of #itgetsbetter? How can we come to have some hope that, indeed, it will get better? Generally, I wouldn’t dare close anything I’d ever write with song lyrics, but as this is a personal essay about suicide and queerness, I give myself a one-time pass. Cat Stevens’ lyrics always come to mind as an absolution for earlier misgivings about who I am and who I thought I could be — and in that cheesy way, they give me hope that while we’re at the nadir of the trans movement, that while it might get worse before it gets better, but it will get better, and then we can all cry when we hear the acoustic version of “Father and Son” …
You’re still young, that’s your fault,
There’s so much you have to know.
Find a girl, settle down,
If you want you can marry.
Look at me, I am old, but I’m happy.
I was once like you are now, and I know that it’s not easy,
To be calm when you’ve found something going on.
But take your time, think a lot,
Why, think of everything you’ve got.
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.
