Anti-trans attitudes, words, and policies cause measurable harm to trans people's mental health and survival. The Trevor Project found that 65% of trans and non-binary people had thought about ending their life in the past year. Being trans does not cause that. Rejection, exclusion, and hatred do.
What do the statistics actually show?
The numbers are clear, and they are shocking, and they are tragic. According to the Trevor Project, 65% of trans and non-binary people had thought about ending their life in the last year. Fifty-one percent had thought about harming themselves. These are not estimates or projections. They are what happens when you simply ask trans people: how are you? How is this affecting you?
And yet, every time I raise these figures, some people push back. They dismiss them, dispute them, or simply do not care. It is extraordinarily difficult to watch people look at those numbers and shrug. These are real people. These are real lives.
Being trans does not cause this, hatred does.
This is the part that too many people miss, either because they have not thought it through or because they would prefer not to. Being transgender does not make a person self-harm. Being transgender does not make life feel unbearable. What does that is the absence of acceptance, the absence of understanding, the absence of basic human warmth.
Trans people who feel genuinely loved, genuinely welcomed, genuinely safe, do not face this crisis at the same rate. The crisis is caused by isolation, by being told you are dangerous, by being called a groomer or a fetishist, by being turned away from a swimming pool or a school trip or a girl guide group because someone has decided you do not belong there. Every single one of those rejections leaves a mark. And they accumulate.
Human beings are strong. We can absorb a great deal. But day after day after day of being unwanted, unbelieved, unloved, that kind of sustained pain takes a toll that eventually becomes unbearable for some people. And something, always, is the final straw. The question I want to leave with every person who has ever liked, shared, written, or applauded content that demeans trans people is this: how do you know your contribution was not that final straw for someone?
Who carries responsibility for this?
Some of it is obvious. There are people who have built platforms, podcasts, YouTube channels, and media careers around the project of excluding trans people. They are easy to identify, and they know what they are doing.
But responsibility does not stop with the people at the front of the camera. The people in the comments below them are culpable too. The people who hit like, who share, who add their voice to the chorus, they are part of this. And then there are the people who do it quietly: who sit behind office doors and draft guidance, write policy, and design protocols that exclude trans people from services, spaces, and protections. They cause harm too, even when they believe they are being reasonable, even when they frame what they are doing as careful or considered.
There is an old saying: sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me. I have never believed it, and the evidence shows it is not true. Words hurt enormously. A joke, an online comment, a newspaper headline, a policy document that tells a trans child she is not a real girl. These things carry weight. They land. They stay.
What the accusations get backwards
Trans people are regularly portrayed as a threat: to women, to girls, to children. The statistics do not support that framing. What the statistics show is that it is trans people who are at risk. They are at risk from themselves, in the sense that they are pushed towards crisis by the conditions they live in. And they are at risk from other people, from the hostility, the violence, and the exclusion that is aimed at them every day.
Calling trans people groomers or predators is not a neutral observation or a reasonable concern. It is a smear that contributes directly to the climate that produces those crisis statistics. It makes trans people less safe. It makes the people around them less likely to offer support. It turns public opinion against a group of people who are already struggling to survive the conditions we have created for them.
What changes the statistics
I do not raise these numbers to make anyone feel hopeless. I raise them because the same evidence that shows us what causes this harm also shows us what reduces it. Acceptance works. Inclusion works. Being believed works. A trans young person with a supportive family is dramatically less likely to be in crisis than one without. A trans adult who feels welcome at work, in their community, in their family, lives a different kind of life than one who is persistently excluded.
This means that the power to shift those statistics is not held only by governments or clinicians or policy-makers. It is held by every single person who chooses, today, to do things differently. To not share that article. To push back in the comments. To welcome a trans colleague, neighbour, child, friend, or family member as they actually are. To refuse to laugh at a joke that treats someone's existence as a punchline.
Diversity is not a problem to be managed. It is the reality of being human. Not all people are the same, they never have been, and celebrating that rather than punishing it is not a radical position. It is the basic condition of a society where everyone has an equal opportunity to be loved, to be warm, to be safe, to have dignity, to live a life that is genuinely their own.
A word about equality
Rights are not a finite resource. Equality does not mean that some people gain rights at the expense of others. It means that every person, trans or cis, has the same right to food, warmth, safety, privacy, dignity, work, friendship, and the simple pleasures of fresh air and a life that is peaceful. There are enough rights to go around. There always have been. The idea that protecting trans people somehow reduces the rights of anyone else is not just wrong, it is the argument that has been used, historically, to justify the exclusion of every marginalised group that came before.
So my ask is straightforward. If you have contributed to any degree of bias or discrimination or hatred, today is the day to stop. Not because I am asking you to love trans people, though I would welcome that. But because the alternative is a measurable, documented contribution to a mental health crisis that is killing people. And you have a choice about that, right now, today.
Let's work together to get those statistics down. Let's build towards a world where the crisis rates for trans people are no different from those for anyone else, and then let's keep going from there.
If there is a topic that you would like me to cover, just let Sammy know.
Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, and advocate for trans rights and gender diversity.
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