Within days of the Obama administration announcement of the repeal of the ban on transgender soldiers serving openly in the military, Chelsea Manning, the transgender soldier who was convicted of leaking more than 750,000 classified and unclassified documents to WikiLeaks, tried to commit suicide in her cell at Fort Leavenworth’s prison. Manning, who is serving a 35-year sentence for violating the Espionage Act while serving in the Army as Bradley Edward Manning, successfully sued the U.S. Army for the right to transition from male to female in prison. She began hormone replacement therapy in early 2015.
During her more optimistic days in prison when she began her early transition to female last year, Manning sent an open “thank you” letter to the 17,000 individuals from Amnesty International activists who sent her letters and cards during their global Write for Rights campaign. Writing that “I finally began my prescribed regime of hormones to continue my overdue gender transition in February. It’s been such an amazing relief for my body and brain to finally come into alignment with each other.”
Sadly, it seems that body and brain may not have been quite so well aligned after all. In her suicide attempt, Manning joins the more than 41 percent of those identifying as “transgender” or gender nonconforming who have attempted suicide, compared with 4.6 percent of the overall U.S. population who report a lifetime suicide attempt. It is also higher than the 10-20 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual adults who report ever attempting suicide. These data come from a study by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and UCLA’s Williams Institute, which analyzed results from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. More than a dozen other studies since 2001 have found similar results for alarmingly high rates of suicide for transgender individuals like Chelsea Manning.
In 2013, a 44-year-old Belgian female-to-male transsexual chose to die by euthanasia after expressing his unhappiness with his sex change operation. Claiming that the surgery had turned him into a “monster, doctors assisted him in ending his life on the grounds of “unbearable psychological suffering.”
While some have suggested that the reason for the high suicide rates for the LGBT and transgender communities is due to the stigma and discrimination they have faced, the reality is far more complex..
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6 comments:
"..41 percent of those identifying as “transgender” or gender nonconforming who have attempted suicide..also higher than the 10-20 percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual adults who report ever attempting suicide"
What telling statistics these are. Nothing more needs to be said.
I would do with a "Tranny", in my squad just like we did with Gunho LT. in Viet Nam, they get shot and killed real fast, sometimes within the first 5 minutes of an engagement!
Our idiot LT. was fraged when he got stupid. Just sayin.
It is a mental illness. Depression which is frequently the cause of suicides is a mental illness. Doesn't take a genius to connect the dots!
It's deep seated. There's much more to it than sexual identification or gender confusion. We've come to a point where the science is far behind understanding the concepts, perhaps not even recognizing the concepts. Most of the rest of us just wonder, and others lay claims that are not understandable by anyone.
3:48
No its fairly simple, like 3:23 indicated.
This person is messed up in the head and requires help.
It is too late to fling his head into the school locker, so now a doctor will have to be involved.
Most likely he won't survive. If he has already maimed himself, then he will probably kill himself.
Eventually sanity arises from the deep recesses of self inflicted psychosis.
What a complete and utter little idiot.
Be thankful for what God gave you and live your life man.
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