When Is Suicide Murder?

Reflections on the dismal state of trans politics

After the medical examiner determined that nonbinary teen Nex Benedict’s death was in fact a suicide by drug overdose, trans “journalist” Ari Drennan posted on Twitter that “every trans suicide is a murder.”

Why would she post just an obviously insane take? Because, apparently, as the theory goes, the only reason why a trans person would ever decide to kill themselves is as a rational response to transphobia.

On this logic, the world is transphobic, this is too much to bear, and thus, trans people are “driven” to suicide by the supposed transphobia of society. And because they are “driven” to suicide by transphobia, it is the transphobes who are responsible for the suicide, which makes it a murder, not a suicide.

Somehow this logic only seems to apply to transgender people. You don’t see this in any other context or identity group. If a man gets fired from his job, feels desperate and hopeless, and then kills himself, we wouldn’t say that his job “murdered him.” Instead, we would classify this as a death of despair. It was the man’s own sense of despair and hopelessness that caused the suicide, not the external circumstances which motivated the despair.

If a schizophrenic is psychotic and kills themself because a stranger said something weird to them, we wouldn’t blame this on the stranger, we’d blame the schizophrenia.

If a solder with PTSD kills himself, we wouldn’t say the military commanders that sent him to war “murdered him,” we’d say he died as a result of the underlying mental illness. We might consider this to be a causality of war and rightly see it as tragic and perhaps condemn the warmongers as immoral, but to say the death was a murder is a gross distortion of the moral facts.

If a lonely man killed himself because he perceives his life to be not worth living, we wouldn’t say the people who socially rejected him “murdered him”; we’d say his depression and poor mental health caused him to commit suicide.

So, what makes trans suicide any different? Studies have long demonstrated that the LGBT community has comorbid mental health issues. Let’s imagine that you have two trans teens who both experience bullying and only one of them kills themselves. It seems plausible to say that the relevant causal factor is that the one that killed themselves had worse underlying comorbid mental health than the one who didn't. So just like all the other examples, it seems like the underlying cause of suicide is poor mental health, not “murder,” which by definition requires some degree of intentionality by an external party.

Furthermore, we already know that suicide can be socially contagious, and that suicide can cluster, particularly in teenagers who already suffer from poor mental health, so Ari Drennen’s claim that “every trans suicide is murder” is incredibly irresponsible because it turns every trans suicide into a political act, which could form the basis of a social contagion that fuels trans suicidality, increasing the number of trans suicides rather than diminishing them (which presumably is Drennen’s goal in “raising awareness” about this issue.)

The logic is this: if you are a trans person and come to believe that the entire world is deeply and systematically transphobic in some incurable way, and that part and parcel of being trans is to be hated by everyone around you, you might come to believe that your life can be given purpose and meaning by engaging in a liberatory struggle for trans rights, and furthermore, you might come under the (false) impression that committing suicide in response to this systemic transphobia is a rational response that will “raise awareness” for the plight of trans people, and thus serve the greater good.

We already saw with the case of Aaron Bushnell, the leftist activist who self-immolated in protest of Israel’s actions in Palestine, that suicide can be politically motivated. And it’s also obvious to any thinking person that valorizing such suicides and turning these victims into martyrs might encourage other mentally ill people to transform their suicidal thoughts into political action out of a desire to “fight the good fight” for [insert political cause.]

I believe this is actually quite common for trans suicides. I know in real life multiple trans suicides that were directly caused by a desire to make their deaths a political protect against the perceived injustices of transphobia.

This is why “journalists” like Ari Drennen and other trans activists are so dangerous. By saying things like “every trans suicide is murder,” they are directly adding fuel to the mental health fire whereby the perception that trans suicide is inherently political actually motivates more trans people to commit suicide instead of seeking out mental health services.

Why go to therapy and deal with your problems in a mature way when you can become a glorious political martyr for the cause of fighting systemic transphobia?

So, no, every trans suicide is not “murder.” Trans suicide, like all suicide, is a complex psychological phenomenon influenced by poor mental health, which is often comorbid and thus preexisting in many trans people.

Thus, it is not that the perception of transphobia necessarily causes the worsening of mental health, which then drives you to suicide, it’s the preexisting poor mental health which causes the perception of transphobia to then worsen their mental health even more to the point where trans people then take their lives. Without that underlying preexisting mental health issue, the perception of injustice would not spiral into actual suicidality. Thus, to frame this issue as anything other than a mental health crisis is deeply irresponsible. Trans people need mental health services, not to be made political martyrs.

Suicide is not a rational response to the perception of transphobia. Why? Because rationality is defined relative to which values are being maximized in the rational calculus and the only way in which suicide could come out as a rational response to suicide is if politics is considered more valuable than life itself. But since life is infinitely valuable and thus priceless, suicide can never be a rational action because no utility calculus could outweigh it.