The trans suicide myth, recently punctured at the Supreme Court, proves it.
The trans suicide myth, recently punctured at the Supreme Court, proves it.
T en years ago this month, a troubled teenage boy stepped in front of a moving truck on a highway north of Cincinnati, ending his life. It emerged only after his death that Joshua Alcorn had come to believe he was a girl and wanted his death to be taken as a sign that he had been insufficiently affirmed in his supposed identity.
I thought of the Alcorn story earlier this month, when ACLU attorney Chase Strangio (a woman who identifies as a man) participated in oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of a Tennessee law restricting the use of puberty blockers and hormones by minors. Strangio did not mention Alcorn. But she invoked the specter of suicide in a way common for transgender activists over the past decade. In doing so, she helped demonstrate how those activists have achieved so much during that time. But she also exposed fundamental moral defects in their approach, defects that may doom it.
By outward appearances, Joshua Alcorn was a relatively normal teen. He worked at King’s Island, a popular amusement park near his home. Few had a sense of his tempestuous, online-driven inner life until after his death. That’s when a post he had scheduled to be published on Tumblr went live. “The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights,” it read. “My death needs to mean something.”
Elites nationwide quickly picked up these cues — which some of them had doubtless helped inspire in the first place. LGBT activists were a few months away from successfully getting the Supreme Court to change the definition of marriage (at the behest of Jim Obergefell, another Ohioan), which would embolden them. The Alcorn story became an alleged portent for what would happen if distressed youth who believed themselves to be a different sex from what they were born as were not completely indulged.
The Alcorn family was unjustly subject to immense ridicule. For a time, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the humble daily of a fairly conservative metropolitan area, went all-in on the transgender cause. An editor justified its extensive coverage of the Alcorn suicide (and subsequently of related stories) because it raised “important issues we hope will prompt conversations in families throughout our region.” And all of this fed into the swirling toxic stew online, where many confused teenagers ultimately take refuge.
The transgender suicide extortion may not have originated entirely with the Alcorn story. It would not have happened if the germ of the idea had not already existed in the online world he sadly inhabited. Implicitly or explicitly aided by many in the commanding heights of American culture, however, it began to take on its modern, powerful status thereafter. As the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir has reported, the ACLU was a chief culprit in mainstreaming this insidious notion. One can perceive its seductive logic. Appeals to one’s truer, inner self, potent in themselves, receive reinforcement from life-or-death stakes — concerning children, no less. How could even the most hidebound parents resist steps that would prevent the death of a child?
But there’s a problem with that narrative: It’s not true. As far back as 2019, National Review alumna Madeline Kearns, who was fearless on this issue at a time when it was much more difficult to be so, rightly argued that “with transgenderism, the complexities of suicidality are simplified and politicized.” The passage of time has provided yet more evidence of Kearns’s wisdom. So when this extortionism traveled, courtesy of Strangio, from a suburb of Cincinnati to the chambers of the Supreme Court, it unraveled.
“Do you maintain that the procedures and medications in question reduce the risk of suicide?” Justice Samuel Alito inquired of Strangio during oral arguments. “I do, Justice Alito, maintain that the medications in question reduce the risk of depression, anxiety, and suicidality, which are all indicators of potential suicide,” Strangio responded. But, as Sapir pointed out, this elides suicide and suicidality: The latter describes thoughts of suicide, not the act itself. And Strangio had nothing but prevarication to offer when confronted by, among other data, the blunt conclusion of the Cass Report, a broad study of transgenderism released in the U.K. earlier this year, that “there is no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce suicide.”
This is not to deny that the youth in question have problems and deserve our sympathy. They do, of course. But many transgender activists have spent the past ten years trying to leverage the natural sympathy that people have for troubled youth into fodder for their reality-denying cause. Never in their agitation have they considered that gender confusion is one of many concerns afflicting the minors in question; that disrupting puberty and mutilating their sex organs is not the proper treatment for a condition that research indicates many grow out of (as Kearns, again, pointed out years ago); and that their attempt to seize the moral high ground on this issue has contributed to the immiseration of those on whose behalf they claim to speak.
Joshua Alcorn did indeed deserve better. He and others like him deserve better than the likes of Strangio. In Ohio, they are getting it, thanks in part to recent legislation. If oral arguments are any indication, Tennessee will get it, too. Likewise in the U.K. In the tumultuous decade since Alcorn’s death, it has become obvious that the future of troubled minors depends on the defeat of transgender activists.