I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. [ . . . ] That’s the gist of it, that’s why I feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me. [ . . . ] My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please. Goodbye.
—LEELAH ALCORN, suicide note
THE DEATH OF LEELAH ALCORN, a young American trans girl, and her poignant suicide note, cited above, generated many reactions in queer (or LGBQ) and trans (or T) communities.1 Her death radicalized suicide prevention agendas aimed at LGBTQ people, who, as many studies have shown, are overrepresented in suicidal ideation and suicide attempt statistics.2 While rates of suicidality among LGBQ people are quite high compared to those of their heterosexual counterparts (Centre for Suicide Prevention 2019; Lytle et al. 2018), statistics comparing cis and trans individuals are even more striking (Centre for Suicide Prevention 2020b; McNeil, Ellis, and Eccles 2017; Trujillo et al. 2017). A 2016 study of more than twenty-seven thousand trans people in the United States shows that “40% have attempted suicide in their lifetime” and that “7% attempted suicide in the past year, nearly twelve times the rate in the U.S. population (0.6%)” (James et al. 2016, 10). A Canadian study in 2017 by Jaimie F. Veale and colleagues (2017, 8) conducted among 923 trans youth indicates that “transgender 19- to 25-year-olds had almost eight times the risk of serious suicidal thoughts.” In 2013, Greta R. Bauer and colleagues (2013, 39) conducted a study of 433 trans people in Ontario, Canada, and found that “77% of trans people in Ontario age 16 and over have ever seriously considered suicide [ . . . ]. A very high proportion—43%—had ever attempted suicide.” The Trans pulse Canada Team led a pan-Canadian research project in 2020, gathering data on the trans and nonbinary Canadian population over fourteen years old. The study included 2,873 respondents and showed a high prevalence of suicidality once again: “1 in 3 had considered suicide in the past year, and 1 in 20 reported attempting suicide in the past year” (Trans pulse Canada Team 2020, 8). These North American statistics are quite representative of those for LGBTQ populations in other geographical contexts.3 While suicidal ideation and suicide attempts are more frequent for LGBTQ people compared to the rest of the population, insufficient quantitative data exist to determine whether they are overrepresented in rates of completed suicides, as sexual orientation and gender identity are not included in death records (Dyck 2015; McNeil, Ellis, and Eccles 2017).4 The importance of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts should not be dismissed, but the data do not seem to support the “moral panic” surrounding youth suicide and LGBTQ youth suicide. Statistics indicate that most suicides in North America are completed by people over forty (Beattie and Devitt 2015; Canetto 1992; Stefan 2016; WHO 2014; Wray, Colen, and Pescosolido 2011). Although the issue of LGBTQ youth suicidality is certainly serious, young people are underrepresented in completed suicide statistics, while older adults are overrepresented. My goal here is to warn against alarmist discourses that claim that there is a suicide “epidemic” among LGBTQ youth because the ageist focus on tragic young deaths has the potential to overshadow the high rates of suicide among older people (Canetto 1992; Centre for Suicide Prevention 2020a). That being said, suicidality rightly remains a key concern when it comes to LGBTQ populations.
Following Alcorn’s death, activist/scholar Jake Pyne (2015, last para.) writes, “Leelah asked for us to fix her world. We couldn’t do it in time. [ . . . ] ‘Don’t be sad,’ Leelah tells us [ . . . ]. But it’s too late for that. We’re sad Leelah. And many of us are angry too. Leelah Alcorn’s death is a wake-up call to stop fixing trans kids, and start repairing their broken worlds.” As a trans, bisexual, Mad, disabled, and suicidal man in a society that seeks to “fix” my identity and bodymind instead of targeting heterosexism, cisgenderism, ableism, sanism, and suicidism, I cannot agree more with Pyne’s call for social and political action and his criticism of conversion therapies, which may push some trans people, including Leelah Alcorn, to suicide. While I agree with researchers and activists in queer and trans circles who adhere to a social justice model of suicidality that insists on the social, cultural, political, medical, economic, religious, and legal factors influencing suicidal ideation and suicide attempts in queer and trans communities, and while I applaud their contributions to our communities, I also question what is at stake when there is unmitigated adherence to the suicidist preventionist script discussed in Chapter 1. Denouncing heterosexism and cisgenderism to eradicate suicidality among LGBTQ communities is another iteration of the preventionist discourse put forward by other models of suicidality, yet this time from a social justice angle. Rather than calling out the potential problems in discourses on LGBTQ suicidality, since I believe in the relevance of that scholarship and its positive impacts, I would like to ask the following questions: What or who is missing from social justice conceptualizations of LGBTQ suicidality? What can we learn from these absences? How might new understandings of suicidality using an anti-suicidist framework help us avoid reproducing forms of oppression toward suicidal people within queer and trans circles?
This chapter calls for a queering and transing of suicidality.5 Unlike the work of some scholars, who claim to queer suicide but limit their analyses to queer and trans communities, this chapter intends to go a little bit further and to queer and trans suicide in a broader sense, namely by queering and transing the methods, theories, epistemologies, and prevention strategies related to suicidality. Queering is about refusing norms, assimilation, and judgments regarding what is considered (ab)normal. Queering is reappropriating, recoding, and resignifying certain terms, identities, interpretations, or events. To queer is to question, blur boundaries, and refute binary categories. In a similar fashion to the transforming of the noun queer into the verb to queer (or queering), the noun and adjective trans is also used as a verb: to trans (or transing).6 Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore (2008, 13) are the first to propose a broadening of the word trans- with a hyphen to expand its significance beyond the one made in relation to sex/gender categories. They call for a transing of categories and borders:
“Transing,” in short, is a practice that takes place within, as well as across or between, gendered spaces. It is a practice that assembles gender into contingent structures of association with other attributes of bodily being, and that allows for their reassembly. [We] have become familiar [ . . . ] with queering things; how might we likewise begin to critically trans- our world?
Similar to queering, transing involves transgression and disobedience in relation to the straight and normative paths traditionally carved for us. For me, queering and transing suicidality means allowing suicidal people to change the normative discourses on suicidality based on their own perspectives, needs, and goals. Queering and transing suicidality blurs the boundaries between good and bad decisions about life and death, between the rationality and irrationality of certain actions, between positive and negative affects and feelings—and it means questioning the usefulness of these binary categories altogether. To queer and trans suicidality makes it possible to resignify the negative meanings automatically attributed to it to allow different narratives to emerge; the fact that a position such as mine is not presented in the literature on suicidality reveals that such different narratives do not exist or are censored (or smothered) in public space. Queering and transing suicidality offers alternatives and “resistant imaginations” (Medina 2012) to the epistemic injustices and death to which suicidal people are condemned. Queering and transing suicidality also means deemphasizing the importance placed on sexuality and gender identity in research on LGBTQ suicide. As brilliantly demonstrated by some authors in critical suicidology, such as Rob Cover (2012, 2016a, 2016b, 2020), Katrina Jaworski (2014, 2015), and Katrina Roen (2019), continuing to (over) associate LGBTQ communities with suicidality, even from an anti-heterosexist and anti-cisgenderist perspective, creates the danger of trapping LGBTQ people in a pathological discourse with potentially performative and constitutive effects. As Jaworski (2014, 146) rightly points out, “The focus on sexualities [and I would add gender identity] is normalized in queer [and trans] youth suicide.”
In this chapter, I illustrate that the discourses on LGBTQ suicidality put forth by some anti-oppression scholars/activists who endorse the social justice model of suicidality may be understood as forms of somatechnologies of life, terminology I have used in my earlier work. Following Michel Foucault’s work; Teresa de Lauretis’s (1987, 2) definition of “technologies” as encompassing “institutionalised discourses, epistemologies, and critical practices, as well as practices of daily life”; and Nikki Sullivan’s (2007, 2009) and Susan Stryker’s (Stryker and Currah 2014, 187–190) notions of “somatechnics” and “somatechnologies,” I view institutional apparatuses, social policies, laws, practices, theories, and discourses governing suicide and its prevention as somatechnologies of life that construct dead and living suicidal subjects (Baril 2017). As discussed by Sullivan (2009; Sullivan and Murray 2009), somatechnics implies that bodies are inherently transformed and constituted by various forms of technologies. In other words, technologies are not imposed on a preexisting body or used by preexisting subjects, but bodies and technologies are always intertwined. The notion of somatechnics breaks the boundaries between bodies and technologies and interprets them as interdependent. Additionally, somatechnologies are not inherently oppressive; they can also be liberating, and new forms of somatechnologies may be deployed to resist and counteract other forms of somatechnologies. In sum, they may have positive and negative impacts on marginalized groups. As explained in Chapter 1, the normative aspect of the suicidist system, compulsory aliveness, as well as its various mechanisms, such as the injunction to live and to futurity, are constitutive parts of these somatechnologies of life. Indeed, compulsory aliveness is not simply the result of an instinct to protect life but something formed through biopower and a vast array of norms, discourses, techniques, laws, and practices—in sum, technologies that construct life as something to protect at all costs.7 Therefore, the compulsion for life and the unintelligibility of suicide are framed through these somatechnologies of life and are rarely acknowledged or questioned. Scholars such as Ian Marsh (2010) and Katrina Jaworski (2014) have demonstrated the performative aspects of discourses surrounding suicidality; such discourses not only assume descriptive functions but construct suicidal subjects. Along those lines, I argue that these performatively constructed subjects are also targeted by somatechnologies to stay alive. Urged to live or forcibly brought back to life by legal, medical, institutional, and social systems, suicidal subjectivities/bodies, be they queer, trans, or not, are constructed as lives to preserve.8
By freely mobilizing an array of conceptual instruments from the queer theoretical toolbox, such as the “logic of reproductive futurism” (Edelman 2004, 17), the “moral injunction” to happiness (Ahmed 2010, 35), the “queer art of failure” (Halberstam 2011), the “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011), and the “injunction to stay alive” (Cvetkovich 2012, 206), and applying them to the topic of suicidality from a critical suicidology perspective, I am able to point out some of the limits of certain anti-oppression narratives of LGBTQ suicidality and to highlight the underexploited, heuristic value of concepts in queer and trans theory that may help us think about suicidality differently. Like the pressure to achieve happiness pointed out by Sara Ahmed, which has increased negative impacts for marginalized communities, compulsory aliveness brings specific barriers to the lives of marginalized groups, including LGBTQ communities. As I explore in this chapter, the somatechnologies of life enacted in some discourses on LGBTQ suicidality represent forms of cruel optimism in a suicidist system, through a promise of a better future stemming from interventions that often make life worse for marginalized subjects.
This chapter is divided into three main sections. The first aims to present scholarly and activist anti-oppression discourses surrounding LGBTQ suicidality, paying particular attention to trans suicidality, since, too often, scholarship on LGBTQ communities tends to tokenize the T and erase its specificity (Namaste 2000; Serano 2007). After analyzing how these discourses constitute somatechnologies of life in a suicidist system, in the second section, I turn to some radical alternatives that refuse to rely solely on prevention strategies and have been put forth by trans groups and organizations working with trans suicidal individuals. The examination of their arguments, in opposition to nonconsensual “rescues,” demonstrates the extent to which we need to rethink (or to queer and trans) our approach to suicidality, particularly in relation to marginalized communities that experience greater negative impacts from coercive prevention strategies. However, as I demonstrate, even such cutting-edge initiatives still do not promote positive rights for suicidal people. In the third section, by mobilizing queer conceptual tools, I propose a queering and transing of suicidality, showing how the potential of those tools remains undermobilized when discussing suicidality.
2.1. Discourses on LGBTQ Suicidality as Somatechnologies of Life
Ambrose Kirby, a community activist interested in the intersections of cisgenderism and ableism, represents the position endorsed by many activists/scholars in queer and trans movements/fields of study regarding suicidality. Kirby (2014, 174–175) explains:
Trans people are disproportionately told that there’s something wrong with us. And most of us end up in a relationship with psychiatry. Whenever the numbers are that high, there’s something to be extremely concerned about. That suicide is such a viable option is not just sad or tragic; it’s a sign of a bigger political and social problem. Like indigenous youth, trans people aren’t born wanting to die—we live in a world that actively resists our existence and seeks to control and contain us. We don’t need psychiatry, we need solidarity and justice. We need room to live.
While I agree that we absolutely need to create better living conditions for trans people to reduce suicidality within trans communities, I argue in this chapter, contrary to Kirby, that suicide is not seen as a viable option by most LGBTQ people or by LGBTQ organizations, activists, or scholars, who strongly support prevention. In the gray and scientific literature on LGBTQ suicide, activists/scholars identify heterosexist and cisgenderist oppressions as the culprits of high suicide rates in LGBTQ communities and aim to prevent suicidality through sociopolitical change. In reaction to the medical model of suicidality, which historically identified sexual orientation and gender identity as risk factors of suicidality, many research teams nowadays endorse other models to explain LGBTQ suicidality, including the public health and social models. Some rely on the social determinants of health to explain high rates of suicidal ideation and attempts, using the minority stress theory (King et al. 2018; Seelman et al. 2017; Trujillo et al. 2017). Other research teams adopt a more political approach by using the social justice model of suicidality to illustrate how heterosexism and cisgenderism affect LGBTQ communities and how countering high levels of suicidality involves instigating social, political, legal, and cultural changes (Bauer et al. 2015; Dyck 2015; McDermott and Roen 2016). Bauer and colleagues (2013) identify a series of measures designed to reduce some of the factors that may increase suicidality for trans people—namely, forms of violence, erasure, stigmatization, and exclusion. The adoption of a social justice perspective among queer and trans activists/scholars interested in suicidality has become the new gold standard. The following pages feature selections from activists and researchers who have written about queer or trans suicidality, beginning in the early 2000s to the present, texts appearing in books that focus on LGBTQ issues, suicidality, or both. I present them in chronological order to demonstrate that, despite a growing body of literature that critiques the reductionist view of LGBTQ people as a population “at risk,” as well as the negative consequences of these discourses of risk for LGBTQ individuals,9 some activists and researchers dismiss this scholarship and continue to embrace the discourse of risk in which heterosexism and cisgenderism, among other oppressions, are seen as the sole or primary causes of suicidality.
Scholars Michel Dorais and Simon L. Lajeunesse’s 2004 book, Dead Boys Can’t Dance, is a good example of reflections focusing on suicidality and queer issues. The authors frame oppressive systems, such as heterosexism, as forms of “social cancer” (7) that lead to higher rates of suicidality among queer people: “They have had to endure the little-known, highly destructive social cancer that undermines self-esteem, faith, and trust in others, and the desire to live. This cancer is intolerance. Intolerance kills” (7). Like Kirby, Dorais and Lajeunesse (105) highlight the fact that queer suicides represent a materialization of the animosity, violence, abuse, and erasure imposed on queer subjects:
Their suicide attempts, completed or not, reflect the punishment they are inflicting on themselves, the result of the socially induced self-hatred and shame they have been made to feel simply because they were “not like the others.” Homosexual and bisexual male youth suicide problems are the direct and predictable consequence of our society not having made any space for these youths. Most of or maybe even all of us have somehow conspired to produce the same message: we would prefer that they not exist. Some of these young men have behaved accordingly. They are now dead.
Suicidality is conceptualized as a form of internalized oppression to be eradicated through structural remedies. These authors adhere wholeheartedly to the suicidist preventionist script discussed in Chapter 1. Dorais and Lajeunesse want “to give to all young people the will to live” (114). While I have much admiration for Dorais’s crucial work on queer issues in French Canada and recognize that the book was written almost twenty years ago, I believe that the discourses and strategies on suicidality proposed therein constitute forms of somatechnologies of life to keep suicidal subjects alive at all costs. These discourses are quite representative of those we still find today that explain suicidality through heterosexism and cisgenderism. Let me be clear: The issue with such interpretations is not their insistence of the key role of those oppressive systems in LGBTQ suicidality but rather their adoption of a causal stance explaining suicidality through an unidimensional factor: heterosexism and/or cisgenderism.
Kate Bornstein (she/they),10 a trans author, activist, and artist, wrote Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws in 2006, a book dedicated to suicidality. This book is the first to highlight the now-famous slogan “It gets better” in relation to LGBTQ suicidality.11 While the book title suggests that it is addressed to youth, the book offers alternatives to suicide that could apply to adults as well, which is why I have chosen to analyze it here, despite my book’s exclusive focus on adults. My examination of their book is not a critique of their invaluable contributions to our queer and trans communities; rather, I aim to point out some invisible legacies in relation to suicidal people. In this book, Bornstein does not try to convince the reader that suicide is a bad choice but proposes solutions to counter the wish to die. However, despite a disclaimer about not framing suicide as a bad choice made in the first few pages, in the rest of the book, she implicitly casts suicide as something to avoid or as a nonpossibility, instead offering more than a hundred alternatives to death. Bornstein (2006, 76) repeats several times that suicidal ideation is normal: “Over the years, I’ve learned that the urge to kill myself isn’t bad or wicked.” Nevertheless, I argue that by casting suicide as a nonviable solution and by exhorting suicidal subjects to do anything but kill themselves, Bornstein is reproducing the silencing dynamic discussed in Chapter 1. Indeed, while a growing body of literature promotes the depathologization of suicidal ideation and attempts, as well as honest conversations about suicidality, as Bornstein does in her book, this depathologization and those conversations about suicidality simultaneously come with a subtle form of condemnation of suicide. Like Bornstein, several authors present a similar paradox, including scholars Elizabeth McDermott and Katrina Roen, who, in their 2016 book, Queer Youth, Suicide and Self-Harm: Troubled Subjects, Troubling Norms, brilliantly succeed in depathologizing suicidal ideation and self-harm but simultaneously insist on denying suicide as a valid option. Suicide is often cast, in such discourses, as a negative act of violence turned against oneself:
More and more kids are turning to violence on themselves or others. There are those class freaks who, after years of being bullied, ignored, left out, and humiliated, react violently and with the same mean spirit with which they’ve been treated. Outsiders fought back violently and inexcusably, for example, in Columbine High School and Thurston High School, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. By leaving no options for an outsider in the world, a bully culture engineers its own destruction. (Bornstein 2006, 51)
It is interesting to note that Bornstein not only frames suicide as an act of self-destruction but also establishes links with other forms of killing, such as mass shootings. She is not the only author to highlight the similarities between suicide and murder (see, for example, Kalish and Kimmel 2010; McCloskey and Ammerman 2018). I believe that this alignment between suicide and murder, presenting them as two forms of violence on the same continuum, one turned against oneself, and the other turned against another person, is detrimental, as it feeds misconceptions and prejudices about suicidal people (e.g., impulsivity, irrationality, selfishness, or dangerousness), which lead to further stigmatization and encourage surveillance to control such “dangerous” individuals. This discourse of risk, danger, and violence surrounding suicide fuels the suicidist regime that tries to justify forms of incarceration and inhumane treatments inflicted upon suicidal people, based on their supposed uncontrollability. In sum, while offering invaluable tips to suicidal people who wish to cope with their suicidal ideation by using a harm-reduction approach, Bornstein nonetheless casts suicide (and, therefore, suicidal people) in a negative light. As a result, in its exhortation to try everything else except suicide, 101 Alternatives to Suicide functions as a powerful somatechnology of life.
In a chapter focusing on LGBTQ suicidality in a volume in critical suicidology, Vikki Reynolds (2016) situates her work within the social justice model of suicidality, stating her belief that suicide is a misleading term, which obscures the fact that deaths by suicide are forms of murder based on hate. Like other authors examined here, Reynolds frames suicide as a form of destructive violence turned against oneself. Reynolds (2016, 184) depicts suicidality as an internalization of the desire for society to rid itself of undesirable subjects, such as LGBTQ people: “As change agents, I believe we need to ‘belong’ people who have been told by hate that they do not belong on this earth, and we need to participate in delivering justice to them and to all of us. [ . . . ] Social injustice, hate, stigma, and oppression create the conditions that make the horrors of suicide possible.” Once again, in addition to portraying suicide as the result of oppressive systems and depicting LGBTQ populations as particularly at risk and vulnerable, Reynolds uses negative terminology (e.g., “horrors of suicide”) that casts suicidality as unilaterally negative. By imploring activists/scholars to collectively mobilize their energies to transform the social, political, legal, cultural, and economic contexts in which suicidal people live to eradicate suicidality, her discourse constitutes a somatechnology of life that exhorts suicidal individuals to stay alive while waiting for a better world to be created through sociopolitical revolution.
In a similar vein, Kai Cheng Thom, a well-known Canadian activist, writer, and social worker, proposes social revolution to abolish suicidality. Thom has published numerous texts discussing the suicidality of marginalized groups, particularly trans women of color. The importance of her writing on the topic of suicidality justifies the extent to which I refer to her work in this chapter. While Thom makes invaluable contributions to improve the lives of trans and racialized communities, I contend that, like the other authors presented in this section, she takes a position on suicidality anchored in the logic of compulsory aliveness, potentially unintentionally contributing to the further marginalization of suicidal subjects. For this analysis, I focus on her 2019 book, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World, and a 2015 blog post for Everyday Feminism, titled “8 Tips for Trans Women of Color Who Are Considering Suicide.”
In I Hope We Choose Love, Thom spends four chapters discussing suicidality. Revealing her own complex relationship with suicidality as a trans woman of color, Thom self-reflects critically on her earlier discourses on suicidality and how her thoughts have evolved from a form of resignation and acceptance to a radical refusal of suicidality. Like other authors discussed here, Thom (2019, 142) insists that, for marginalized communities, “this world is a terrible and painful one to live in” and suggests that it is “social environments that make us suicidal” (39). The book includes a 2014 essay in which she comments on Robin Williams’s death by suicide, a text from which she now takes a radical departure. In that earlier text, she offers a nuanced conversation about the “complex reality of suicide” ([2014] 2019, 37) and expresses the need to be more supportive of suicidal people’s voices, too often erased by the living through forms of sanism and interpretations of suicidality imposed upon suicidal subjects after their death. In this earlier text, Thom denounces the fact that suicidal people are cast as “abnormal” and “crazy” (38) and calls out the urge for society to cure them. Without explicitly saying that we need to support suicidal people, as I do herein, she argues that we need to stop individualizing, pathologizing, and reducing suicidality to mental illness, and she invites readers to respect the decisions of suicidal people (39):
So let us continue to tell stories about suicide—but instead of seizing the stories of others and imposing on them a preconceived understanding, let us listen to the complexity, the tension, the horrible human messiness that come with them. Let’s listen to it all, and accept that we can never fully understand the forces that drive someone to live or die. Let us honour and respect the choices of those struggling, and those who are now beyond struggle—even if those choices took them from us. And let us keep on working, listening, loving, laughing [ . . . ] in the hope that, someday, no one ever need make those choices again.
As this passage illustrates, even though Thom’s ultimate goal is to improve the social and political structures that create and accentuate suicidality among marginalized groups, she calls for accepting “choice” regarding death and for not imposing our views on dead suicidal people, a position that shares similarities with the one proposed in Undoing Suicidism. One year after the original publication of her 2014 essay, Thom published a blog post providing a glimpse of the position she would later endorse—one that insists on support, love, and hope for suicidal people and the necessity of not giving up on them in a society trying to get rid of them. Thom (2015, para. 14) asks, “Where do we find hope in a world that’s trying to kill us?” She points out the sexist, racist, cisgenderist, and ableist “broken world” in which we live that places trans women of color “more at risk than the general population” (para. 24) regarding mental health issues and suicidality. In a moving cry from the heart, she exhorts trans racialized women to stay alive because they need to be supportive of one another to survive in such harsh contexts. The rest of the text is dedicated to sharing eight tips to stay alive.
This turn toward care, love, support, and hope is at the heart of the chapter in Thom’s (2019) book titled “Stop Letting Trans Girls Kill Ourselves.” This chapter represents a criticism of her previous position on suicide. She questions her previous perspective and its effects on the trans communities and discusses what she calls a “recurrent theme” among LGBTQ communities regarding the support toward suicide (42):
I noticed a recurrent theme articulated by both the suicidal individual and some of the communities surrounding them that frightened and disturbed me: the idea of suicide as an act of personal agency that should be upheld and supported by “the community.” As in, if a trans girl wants to kill herself, and she’s thought it through, and she says she sees no other option, and this is what she has decided, then we should not intervene in any way. And if she asks for help in making her suicide plan more effective, less painful, or more aesthetically pleasing, then we should provide that help.
Having thoroughly searched English and French literature on LGBTQ suicide, I have not seen this trend in LGBTQ gray and scientific literature. With a few exceptions, such as the work of Bee Scherer (2020), briefly discussed in the next section, and that of T. Anansi Wilson (2016), discussed in Chapter 1, I have not found any other activists/scholars in LGBTQ circles who publicly defend suicide as a possible radical choice and support suicidal people through active measures to pursue their quest for death as I propose in this book. As I demonstrate in Undoing Suicidism, while many authors, including some writing about queer and trans communities, insist on the importance of destigmatizing conversations about suicidality and even denounce discriminatory treatments reserved for suicidal people (e.g., Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018; Wright 2018), none seems to defend the position Thom is depicting.
Thom (2019, 45) calls for a strong interventionist approach, founded on hope and love, to prevent people from completing suicide:
This was not something [to keep reaching out] I had been taught to believe in queer community—that love and care might mean following someone, even after they have rejected you. That it might mean reaching out, and failing, and then reaching out and failing, again and again. That abandonment and rejection by a person in pain [ . . . ] might be a way for them to find out just how hard someone is going to work to help them not just stay alive but change their life for the better.
Somatechnologies of life at play in Thom’s 2019 work on suicide could be understood as part of compulsory aliveness, the normative component of the suicidist system that functions through a series of social, political, and moral injunctions, such as the injunction to live and to futurity. Thom exhorts people to “never stop trying, never stop caring, never stop loving” (46) and counts on things improving, for her and for her sisters. Through the power of love and optimism, she believes “that things will get better, that we will live long and happy lives” (142). Thom’s perspective, as is true of Alcorn’s suicide note, supports the investment of considerable time and resources in social transformation. While I cannot agree more, I also want to insist on the request by Alcorn to respect her reasons and decision, a request that often remains unintelligible or overridden in queer and trans circles and is not translated into concrete support, as we see in Thom’s work, which seems to deny such support. Although Alcorn asked us to “fix society,” she did not ask us to force her to stay alive while we wage a revolution for social change.
Before elaborating further on my critiques of somatechnologies of life embedded in discourses on LGBTQ suicidality, I would like to borrow the words of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018, 235), an activist working on transformative justice at the intersection of queer, trans, antiracist, and anti-ableist perspectives: “What if some things aren’t fixable? [ . . . ] Believing that some things just aren’t healable is anathema to most everyone, radical and not. We believe that with enough love and wonderful techniques and prayer, anything can transform. But what if some things can’t?” It is from this pragmatic and realistic perspective that I approach suicidality. In an ideal world, no one would ever want to die or self-harm because of oppressive systems, and, on this point, I completely agree with Thom and many other authors discussed in this chapter. But we do not, and we might never, live in this world. Meanwhile, we need to find more effective solutions than waiting for the revolution to arrive because, as Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) points out, fighting to change the world does not make us magically feel less suicidal—at least, it doesn’t help me or any suicidal people I know. Of course, solidarities and friendships experienced in activism might help us break isolation, support us in coping with trauma, or give us strength to face a harsh world, but these relationships cannot, for some people, eradicate the desire or the need to die. If we want to make the world accountable to queer and trans people and other marginalized groups, we also need to do the same work for suicidal people, a task that has not yet been tackled in queer and trans circles. To begin this work, the next four subsections propose critiques of discourses on LGBTQ suicidality.
2.1.1. Stereotyping of LGBTQ Suicidal People
Scholars Audrey Bryan and Paula Mayock (2017, 66) show how the literature on LGBTQ suicidality, despite its best intention to identify the social structures that contribute to suicidality, paradoxically endorses a “suicide consensus” regarding populations declared at risk, such as the LGBTQ population. They not only contest LGBTQ suicide statistics, repeatedly employed by activists/scholars to denounce the structural factors at play in suicidality, but also claim that these statistics contribute to casting LGBTQ individuals as vulnerable victims. The stereotypical depiction of LGBTQ people in relation to suicidality may have detrimental impacts. Indeed, casting LGBTQ individuals as vulnerable, rather than focusing on heterosexist and cisgenderist systems, may produce vulnerability in these subjects, as a few critical suicidologists such as Cover (2012, 2016a, 2020), Jaworski (2014), McDermott and Roen (2016), and Roen (2019) have demonstrated. When hopelessness, loneliness, victimhood, suffering, pain, isolation, misery, and minority stress are associated with LGBTQ people, little room remains to conceptualize other features related to these identities, such as resilience, coping strategies, or solidarity.
In addition to these discourses’ reiteration of stereotypes associated with LGBTQ people, explanations of LGBTQ suicidality tend to reproduce certain forms of heterosexist and cisgenderist violence, such as reducing LGBQ people to their sexuality and trans people to their transness. People in queer and trans communities are often reduced to a one-dimensional aspect of their identity based on dominant norms and structures—namely, their sexuality and gender identity—thus erasing the complexity of their identity and their experiences of intersecting oppressions. Therefore, interpreting queer and trans suicidality through the prisms of heterosexism and cisgenderism is founded upon a nonintersectional reading of identities and oppressions. Indeed, although queer and trans people can experience violence in relation to their sexuality and gender identity, the difficulties most powerfully affecting their suicidality may be related to racist, colonialist, classist, ableist, or ageist discrimination. Additionally, queer and trans suicidal individuals belonging to more privileged groups might also experience limited structural violence (Whiteness and other privilege mitigates heterosexist and cisgenderist violence), in which case their desire for death may be entirely explained by other factors. Furthermore, the role of suicidism is a crucial factor that seems to be forgotten in relation to queer and trans suicidality. When activists/scholars adhering to the social justice model of suicidality insist on the fact that LGBTQ people remain silent and do not reach out because of the heterosexism and cisgenderism inherent in suicide prevention services, and they interpret LGBTQ people’s fears to talk as stemming from the fact that they do not fit the norms in terms of sexuality and gender identity, they overlook the fact that these forms of self-silencing and testimonial smothering might sometimes have more to do with suicidist oppression than with heterosexism or cisgenderism. Reducing queer and trans people’s suicidality to their queerness or transness not only erases much of their lives and identities but also provides a one-dimensional explanation of a multidimensional phenomenon.
2.1.2. Oversimplistic Explanations of LGBTQ Suicidality
In the spirit of Cover (2016b, 97), who critiques the “simplistic depiction of ‘oppression’ that problematically presents suicide with a single, linear (albeit social) causality,” I believe that the discourses founded on the idea that hate kills, be it heterosexist, cisgenderist, colonialist, racist, or ableist violence, rest upon unproblematized reductive explanations of suicidality. As other authors demonstrate, most LGBTQ people are not suicidal (Bryan and Mayock 2017; Cover 2020). Therefore, by focusing on the sociopolitical dimensions of queer and trans suicidality, such discourses tend to dismiss the complexity inherent in suicidality. While social, political, economic, legal, and normative structures may play key roles in an individual’s emotional and psychological state, suicidality cannot be explained exclusively by social structures. If this explanation were the case, a large majority of queer and trans people would be suicidal. Therefore, individual and subjective reasons (linked, nevertheless, to social structures) lead some people and not others to consider suicide. In short, identifying heterosexist and cisgenderist systems as the sole or principal causes of suicide is reductive and overlooks other factors. As scholar Jack Halberstam (2010) points out in his critical analysis of the It Gets Better campaign, “just because a teen is gay and kills himself, does not mean that he killed himself because he was gay.” Bryan and Mayock’s (2017, 73) study shows that many LGBTQ suicide attempts are not linked to sexuality or gender identity:
The survey data revealed that less than half (46.7%) of those who had attempted suicide on at least one occasion felt that their first suicide attempt was related directly or primarily (“very related” or “very much related”) to their LGBT identification (n = 92), suggesting that a complex constellation of factors were involved, which often included, but was not limited to, one’s LGBT identification.
In sum, while heterosexism and cisgenderism may trigger suicidal ideation, the majority of queer and trans people neither attempt nor complete suicide; therefore, interpreting their suicidality as being caused by oppressive structures and ideologies overlooks the complexity of this multifactorial phenomenon. It also stems from a nonintersectional analysis of identities and oppressions. These facts invite caution in our conclusions and call for broader thinking about suicidality and suicide intervention strategies and recommendations.
2.1.3. Incomplete Solutions to Help Suicidal People
Activists/scholars adhering to the social justice model often understand suicidality as a “horrific” reaction to oppression. One of the consequences of focusing on oppression is that the resulting recommendations are primarily, if not entirely, based on eradicating or “resisting hate, practising solidarity, and transforming society to be inclusive” (Reynolds 2016, 184) of LGBTQ people. I give here three examples of recommendations focused on LGBTQ identity and heterosexism/cisgenderism rather than on suicidality itself and suicidism. First, while Bauer and colleagues (2015, 12) are nuanced in their conceptualization of trans suicidality and avoid the mistake of providing a causal explanation based on cisgenderism and cisnormativity, they insist on the importance of acting on what they call “intervenable factors” in trans suicidality: “Our findings provide evidence that social inclusion (social support, gender-specific support from parents, identity documents), protection from transphobia (interpersonal, violence), and undergoing medical transition have the potential for sizeable effects on the high rates of suicide ideation and attempts in trans communities.” The same team presents projected statistics of reduced suicidal ideation and attempts if trans individuals were, for example, less targeted by administrative violence (through legal ID) or by cisgenderist violence, or if they had access to trans-affirmative health care or social support. Second, “Recommendations for Suicide Prevention,” a chapter from Dorais and Lajeunesse’s (2004, 90–105) book, divides recommendations along three axes: (1) increasing support to reduce queer people’s isolation, (2) promoting equal rights and social acceptance to reduce queer people’s shame, and (3) valorizing diversity to reduce the stigma of queer identities. The third example comes from a report from a summit on LGBTQ youth suicide (Dyck 2015). Among its twenty recommendations, it is striking that almost every single one is focused on LGBTQ issues. From the implementation of specific LGBTQ social policies (recommendation no. 2), to the development of LGBTQ cultural competencies and knowledge (recommendation no. 3), LGBTQ curricula in schools (recommendation no. 7), or LGBTQ suicide prevention toolkits (recommendation no. 18), the recommendations put forth in this report, while invaluable, nevertheless tend to overlook other solutions that go beyond sexuality and gender identity or heterosexism and cisgenderism. Regarding all three examples, while I wholeheartedly concur with the relevance of such measures aimed at eradicating heterosexism and cisgenderism, I am left wondering what they have to offer to LGBTQ suicidal people for whom their sexuality or gender identity is not at the heart of their suicidal ideation. Those recommendations also offer few concrete tools for suicidal people at the individual level; while attempting to change the world through activism might help in many ways, it does not guarantee the disappearance of suicidal ideation or necessarily make everyday life more bearable for suicidal people. In sum, these proposed solutions, while relevant and revolutionary for queer and trans communities, are incomplete for suicidal people and from an anti-suicidist perspective.
In addition to these recommendations, to better understand suicidality, we must engage in an analysis of suicidism and focus on suicidal people’s voices, regardless of their sexuality or gender identity. Such an analysis may reveal the crucial nature of other undertheorized factors in current conceptualizations of LGBTQ suicidality. As in other models of suicidality, many activists/scholars who adhere to the social justice model seem to presume to know what is best for suicidal subjects and assume that the solutions and recommendations they put forth to decrease suicide rates will best serve suicidal subjects, while this assumption may not be the case. Despite numerous initiatives targeting queer and trans suicidal individuals, these individuals continue to not reach out, even to LGBTQ organizations working in suicide prevention. A study by Megan C. Lytle and colleagues (2018, 1923) shows that “among participants who reported suicidal ideation/behavior, a large proportion did not seek help (73.1% of gay men, 33.3% of bisexual men, 42.9% of bisexual women, 14.3% of lesbian women, 41.2% of queer individuals) when they considered or attempted suicide. Among those who sought support, reaching out to a friend was most common.” These numbers are shocking but confirm other studies’ findings on suicidality among various groups, not only queer and trans people. As discussed in Chapter 1, suicidal people tend to not reach out, particularly when they want to complete their suicide. While recommendations regarding LGBTQ suicidality would undoubtedly benefit queer and trans communities because they propose structural transformations necessary for improving the living conditions of marginalized groups, I am not convinced the proposed changes would reduce LGBTQ suicide rates or drastically increase the number of people who reach out before carrying out their suicidal plans, since those recommendations ignore the key role of suicidism. In sum, we must dedicate more energy to listening to suicidal individuals, asking them which services they would find beneficial, and finding out what kind of social, political, cultural, medical, spiritual, and legal initiatives should be put forth to support them. Any recommendations regarding suicidality should be primarily based on suicidal people’s needs and take suicidist regimes into consideration. Excellent examples of interventions that focus on suicidal people’s needs and voices, such as community-based interventions and peer-support groups, are presented later in this chapter.
2.1.4. Sanist and Suicidist Treatment of Suicidal LGBTQ People
Despite good intentions and invaluable contributions to highlight the role of oppressive systems in suicidality, queer and trans activists/scholars sometimes reproduce forms of sanism and suicidism. As I have shown in the past, in their legitimate quest for recognition and depathologization, queer and trans communities have mobilized ableist and sanist narratives (Baril 2015). Slogans such as “Queers are not sick” or “Trans people are not mentally ill” are used abundantly in queer and trans activism and scholarship to depsychiatrize sexual and gender identity diversity, yet this language only serves to push disabled/sick/ill/Mad people back to the margins. Additionally, the pathologization of sickness, illness, and disability is left unexamined. While literature at the intersection of queer and disability studies12 and the intersection of trans and disability studies is growing,13 many discourses surrounding queer and trans issues remain tainted by forms of ableism and sanism, including in discussions about suicidality. Mental illness is demonized, lacking analysis through a critical disability/Mad lens, and is often cast as a reality from which queer and trans people need to be dissociated. For example, McDermott and Roen (2016, 11) write that “it is crucial to find other ways of thinking about emotional distress, suicide and self-harm that refrain from linking marginalised sexual and gender identity categories directly with mental illness.” This example is one among many found in the literature on LGBTQ suicidality. In fact, from a social justice perspective, it is almost hard to find references that do not clearly dissociate LGBTQ suicidality from mental illness, as if mental illness is itself so bad that we need to purge it from LGBTQ communities.
In addition to these forms of ableism and sanism, activists/scholars discussing LGBTQ suicidality also reproduce suicidism. Suicidism is present in this literature in three main forms, previously discussed in Chapter 1: (1) portraying a negative image of suicidal people, (2) silencing suicidal people, and (3) endorsing coercive suicide prevention strategies. First, the negative image of suicidal people appears in a subtle form through the depiction of suicide as only a problem to “fix,” thus casting suicidal individuals as people who are broken and in need of repair. The negative vocabulary surrounding suicidality and the stereotypes associated with suicidal people (cowardly or selfish people or those opting for an easy way out) are implicitly or explicitly present. For example, in Thom’s (2019, 142) reflection that “it would be so very easy to go there” (i.e., to complete suicide), some vestiges of the view of suicidality as an easy choice are clear, while continuing to live is depicted as the more courageous option. The idea that living your life as a queer or trans person, in the current violent context, is brave and revolutionary runs through the sources analyzed in this chapter. Thom (2015) claims that “every breath we take is another step toward the revolution.” Bornstein (2006, 54) uses the term brave to describe those who resist the urge to complete suicide. More worrisome than those implicit messages is the attribution of some characteristics to those who confront oppressive systems and refuse suicide versus those who “fail,” internalize them, and turn their hateful messages against themselves. Dorais and Lajeunesse (2004, 37), for example, introduce four “adaptative scenarios in response to [heterosexist] rejection. [ . . . ] These scenarios are the Perfect Boy, the Token Fag, the Chameleon, and the Rebel.” The authors identify the first two types with a refusal of sexual orientation, the third with a mixed response toward sexual orientation, and the fourth type with an acceptance of queerness and refusal of heterosexism. These rebellious queers are depicted as combative and as having healthy coping mechanisms, great survival skills, a great sense of humor, and the creativity to find solutions other than self-harm and self-destruction. Let me be clear: None of these authors explicitly describes suicidal people as cowards or as pathological. However, upon reading their descriptions of those who decide to stay alive, reject suicide, and fight oppressive systems as courageous survivors, I am left wondering how suicidal people who attempt or complete suicides are implicitly depicted as the opposite of these rebellious and healthy queer and trans people.
Second, discourses on LGBTQ suicidality contribute to the silencing of suicidal individuals. In research projects analyzing LGBTQ suicidal people’s discourses, participants are often quoted discussing the fears, difficulties, and hurdles they encounter when it comes to talking about self-harm and suicidality (e.g., Dorais and Lajeunesse 2004; McDermott and Roen 2016). LGBTQ people clearly feel uncomfortable and unsafe in speaking about this topic. Nevertheless, instead of perceiving this discomfort and fear as part of a suicidist system, many authors conclude that other ideological and material structures, such as heterosexism and cisgenderism, prevent suicidal subjects from speaking. These conclusions represent missed opportunities to see the suicidist violence at play in these forms of self-silencing. They also represent forms of silencing themselves, since the reasons behind suicidal people’s fears of expressing themselves are not explored in detail; rather, the cause is simply assumed to be oppressive systems other than suicidism.
Third, many activists/scholars theorizing queer and trans suicidality endorse the notion that we must do everything to save suicidal people’s lives. Therefore, they explicitly or implicitly endorse coercive suicide prevention strategies. As Thom (2019) mentions, we must never give up on suicidal people. McDermott and Roen (2016, 147) also insist on the importance of simultaneously depathologizing suicidality while refraining from supporting it: “We are in no way advocating self-harm or suicide as worthwhile strategies for working through life’s problems.” These are only two examples of activists/scholars who, while doing important work to destigmatize and depathologize queer and trans suicidality, still endorse the suicidist preventionist script to some extent. Furthermore, suicidal subjects who cannot be salvaged through prevention should be left to fend for themselves, as Thom (2019, 46) suggests: “If a trans girl decides to die, that is her decision, and I will not shame or pathologize it. But there is a big fucking difference between not shaming or pathologizing a suicide and being complicit in it.” In sum, activists/scholars who denounce the negative impacts of coercive suicide prevention measures are rare in that body of scholarship discussing LGBTQ suicidality, and most of them endorse the preventionist script to save LGBTQ lives. The next section highlights two alternative discourses on suicidality put forth by organizations by and for trans people.
2.2. Alternative Approaches to Trans Suicidality: Trans Lifeline and discharged
We can count on one hand the authors and organizations at the international level who propose to radically rethink (or, we might say, to trans or to queer) suicide prevention strategies. Some of these alternative approaches aim first and foremost to accompany suicidal individuals rather than to save lives, among which we can count my “suicide-affirmative healthcare approach” (Baril 2020c, 25) and Scherer’s (2020, 148) “death counselling” approach. Interestingly, we both self-identify as trans and suicidal.14 From an intersectional, queer, trans, feminist perspective, Scherer evokes the possibility that suicide might be an option in some cases and pushes for noncoercive prevention strategies. While endorsing the discourse critiqued earlier of “the societal norm-scripts kill” (Scherer 2020, 143) and the argument that systemic forms of violence lead to slow and “delayed murder” (144) in the form of suicidality, Scherer nonetheless arrives at a different conclusion than the authors analyzed earlier, proposing that we listen to suicidal individuals with an open mind instead of trying to rescue them at all cost. They contend (148):
I propose to rethink “suicide prevention” in terms of counselling: non-judgmental and result-open explorations of the wounds. [ . . . ] We might want to call such services “end-of-the-road counselling” or “death (resolve) counselling.” By doing so, we can take seriously both the autonomy and agency of those living with death wishes and/or death resolves due to delayed murders or ethical deliberations; and the pain of those surviving loved ones of self-completed deaths who understandably might feel upset by any reframing from “prevention” toward result-open counselling.
Scherer argues that “death resolve counselling” would aim to distinguish between actions founded on autonomous deliberation versus “pseudo-agentive death wishes” (149). They believe that deaths by suicide might constitute, in some contexts, “ethically acceptable decisions” (149). As my previous work proposes (Baril 2017, 2018, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c), Scherer argues that an approach less focused on the prevention agenda might unexpectedly save more lives by truly destigmatizing suicidality and opening up honest conversations.
Among the rarest alternatives that radically rethink suicide prevention approaches are two trans-led projects based on the principle of peer support: the discharged project and Trans Lifeline.15 In their report titled “All I Need Is Someone to Talk To”: Evaluating DISCHARGED Suicide Peer Support, Kelsey Radford, Emery Wishart, and Robyn Martin (2019) discuss an Australian initiative founded on peer-support groups for trans people living with suicidality. Interestingly, once again, two of the report’s authors (Radford and Wishart) have lived experience with suicidality. Anchored in the values of “Alternatives to Suicide,” an approach based on peer support developed in the United States and firmly opposed to coercive intervention with suicidal individuals, the discharged (Deserving of Inclusion, Support, Community, Hope, Authenticity, Respect, Growth, Empathy, and Determination) project was launched in 2018, specifically to respond to the needs of the trans community (Radford, Wishart, and Martin 2019, 11). As the authors underline, the goal behind Alternatives to Suicide and discharged is to offer a safe space to talk. Saving lives is a secondary goal. Radford, Wishart, and Martin (2019, 9) explain:
In Alternatives to Suicide groups, peers will mindfully listen to each other’s stories rather than trying to “fix” or diagnose people. These groups are different to other suicide prevention initiatives because the goal is not to force someone to stay alive from moment to moment: the goal is to support someone in creating a meaningful life they want to live. Not killing one’s self is simply a side effect of that.
The researchers interviewed trans suicidal participants and trans peer-helpers and concluded that all of them agree on the fact that what is most desperately needed is to stop forced intervention, to develop safer spaces to talk about suicidality without judgment, and to be accompanied without fearing clinical interventions and the negative consequences that come with revealing suicidal ideation and plans (see also Krebs 2022). In other words, they insist on dismantling the suicidist mechanisms present in suicide interventions. Radford, Wishart, and Martin (2016, 3–4) write:
The participants’ need is straightforward—a trustworthy person who listens deeply and will stand beside them. The mental health services’ inability or unwillingness to sit with, and listen to, participants’ distress, coined a “knee-jerk” reaction, disempowers, silences and erodes autonomy. Ultimately, these responses mediate what participants say to clinicians, often leading to non-disclosure of suicidal thoughts[,] and serve to further isolate those in distress. Participants also spoke about dehumanizing and punitive experiences within mental health services. In particular, participants reported they were misunderstood and considered to lack the capacity to know what they needed. This meant clinical care often sits within a context of fear about a voluntary hospital admission becoming involuntary, leading people to censor what is disclosed for fear of loss of autonomy. In contrast, discharged provides a safe and trustworthy space to explore experiences and thoughts without encountering a knee-jerk reaction or needing to censor what is said. Having a space to speak, be heard and affirmed created the conditions for people to experience greater self-determination, control, power and meaning making. The power of having a space to share freely and be witnessed by others allowed the release of overwhelming emotions and helped participants to gain insight into how and why certain events trouble them.
At the heart of this approach is the trust-building relationship between suicidal people and peer facilitators. Suicidal people are seen as the experts on their reality and on helping and supporting other suicidal people. This approach is transformative and empowering for trans participants and trans facilitators, and while the small sample studied in the report does not allow for generalizations about its efficiency, the authors conclude that this radical peer-support approach offers clear benefits and advantages. I strongly agree with their conclusions.
Similarly, the grassroots Trans Lifeline organization has offered a hotline service for trans individuals in the United States and Canada since 2014. In its powerful contribution to Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha 2020), titled “Why No Non-Consensual Active Rescue?,” the organization responds to a question it receives regularly from the public and crisis intervention milieus about why its volunteers choose not to call the authorities (police, paramedics, and so forth), even when someone is actively suicidal, unless the person consents to that intervention. This decision is one of the organization’s three core values, which include having only trans operators, promoting peer support, and never contacting emergency services without the suicidal person’s consent.16 Trans Lifeline (2020, 136) mentions that this third principle clashes drastically with the values of other hotlines, which rely on intervention involving emergency services when deemed necessary for the sake of prevention. The organization strongly believes that “non-consensual active rescue” involves more risks for suicidal people and that those risks are higher and more severe when it comes to marginalized groups, such as racialized or trans communities (136):
In October 2015, Trans Lifeline surveyed about eight hundred trans people across the United States regarding their experiences with suicide hotline use. Approximately 70 percent of the respondents stated that they had never called a suicide hotline. Over half of those respondents specified that they had been in crisis, but they did not feel safe calling a hotline. Approximately a quarter of respondents stated that they had interacted with law enforcement or emergency personnel as a result of a crisis call, while one in five had been placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold. [ . . . ] Over and over again, we hear from our community—including our own volunteers—that one of the main deciding factors in whether they reach out for help is whether they will have to deal with active rescue.
Trans Lifeline argues that nonconsensual rescue increases suicidality due to the inhumane, harmful, and violent treatment imposed on suicidal trans subjects by the police, health care providers, and other parties. Indeed, quantitative studies show that trans communities experience severe forms of discrimination, violence, and stigmatization by the police and health and social service systems.17 Trans Lifeline rightly points out that while we recognize that encounters with the police or the health care system are situations in which trans communities face a tremendous level of violence, we tend to forget, in LGBTQ suicide prevention strategies, that these institutions and their services are not the best placed to respond to the distress experienced by suicidal trans people. In fact, in addition to their suicidality, trans people, particularly those who belong to racialized groups, are poor, homeless, disabled, Mad, or neurodiverse, will most likely experience more distress or harm resulting from their interactions with these services. According to Trans Lifeline, “the risk of harm or use of deadly force predictably increases when the person in crisis is a person of color or disabled” (137). In the end, Trans Lifeline believes, as do I, that recourse to coercive measures to save lives through nonconsensual rescue “increase[s] the suicidality risk factors for a caller” (138). In the same spirit as the discharged project, Trans Lifeline insists on the importance of trust-building relationships, peer support, and open conversations about suicidality. They remind us that the positive results of their approach have too often been ignored in crisis intervention milieus and by (critical) suicidologists and that this approach has heuristic value not only with trans people but with suicidal people in general. However, contrary to the discharged project, Trans Lifeline states, “Ultimately, saving lives is the mission we serve” (139).
The Trans Lifeline (2020, 138) organization identifies a series of negative consequences associated with nonconsensual rescues that particularly affect marginalized groups, such as trans communities. Again, those negative impacts are more severe for trans people living at the intersections of multiple oppressions. I summarize these negative impacts in five points: (1) coercive rescues often out young trans people to their relatives and families, and such forms of outing can lead to further rejection, expulsion from the home, and violence; (2) coercive rescues involve fees (ambulance, hospitalization) for trans people who are already overrepresented in statistics on poverty; (3) involuntary hospitalization and histories of mental health issues may negatively affect access to trans-affirmative health care by delaying or blocking care; (4) interactions with the health care system and social services often include stigmatization, violence, and alienation; and (5) coercive rescues break the trust of potential hotline callers, who may fear that the operators will initiate a nonconsensual active rescue. In other words, a hotline that supports coercive suicide prevention measures (which almost all of them do in North America) does not elicit trust, confidence, or honest sharing by suicidal people (see also Krebs 2022; Martin 2011).
Radford, Wishart, and Martin (2019) confirm the negative impacts of coercive measures implemented when trans people interact with suicide prevention services. One trans participant states:
I’ve not had good experiences with them [social services], especially with one . . . calling the police on me because I mentioned feeling suicidal. It didn’t end well for me since . . . suddenly having the police rock up at your house—it can be distressing . . . like this happened in front of my kids as well . . . the police didn’t want to listen to me, like even when I tried to explain it to them . . . I had no plan, there was nothing in the house I could use but I was still cuffed and thrown in the back of a police car and spent a “fantastic” 24 hours locked up for no reason—well, to protect myself. (Lane, as quoted in Radford, Wishart, and Martin 2019, 19)
Additionally, as statistics from the Canadian Trans pulse survey show, racialized trans people are rightly afraid of dealing with the police and emergency services: “A striking 33% of racialized respondents had avoided calling 911 for police services in the past 5 years, while 24% had avoided calling 911 for emergency medical services” (Chih et al. 2020, 8). In fact, some trans people participating in the discharged project are so traumatized by their interactions with emergency services that they would “rather be dead than go there” (Radford, Wishart, and Martin 2019, 21). Furthermore, the negative impacts on trans people of the stigma associated with suicidality and mental health issues are observed by many authors (e.g., Kirby 2014). For example, in one of the empirical research projects on trans youth in which I was involved, many participants explained that they were denied trans-affirmative health care because of their mental disability/health issues and emotional distress (Baril, Pullen Sansfaçon, and Gelly 2020). In sum, studies confirm that mental disability/illness is used by health professionals to increase gatekeeping toward trans people and their transition. Therefore, the negative impacts on trans people of coercive prevention measures are particularly relevant to take into consideration from a trans-affirmative perspective.
While I cannot agree more with the noncoercive approach to suicide intervention taken up by scholars such as Scherer (2020) or groups and organizations such as discharged or Trans Lifeline, and while I think that these alternative approaches are an important step in the right direction toward queering and transing suicidality, I also think that these approaches would benefit from embracing the full support for suicidal people through positive rights, as I endorse in this book. The authors and groups discussed here focus their critiques on nonconsensual active rescues and their detrimental effects on marginalized groups, including trans people living at the intersection of other oppressions. Although they do not use the term suicidism, they denounce, in their own way, forms of suicidism and promote negative rights for suicidal people. However, they do not endorse an agenda for positive rights that would involve concretely supporting suicidal people at the social, legal, medical, economic, or political level in their potential quest for death. I hope that my analysis will foster dialogues with these authors, activists, and organizations, to move a step closer to full recognition of suicidal people. One way to move toward an accountable position regarding suicidal people may be in the mobilization of queer theoretical tools to analyze suicidality.
2.3. A Failure to Really Fail: Queer Theory, Suicidality, and (Non)Futurity
While some cutting-edge authors in critical suicidology, such as Katrina Roen (2019), Elizabeth McDermott (McDermott and Roen 2016), and Amy Chandler (2020a), have started mobilizing queer studies concepts, such as the notions of failure and negative affect to be discussed here, their brilliant and inspiring work usually remains focused on self-harm, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts but is not extended to suicide itself. However, this new trend of scholarship contributes to radically transforming our perception of self-harm and suicidal ideation and embraces the failure to conform to oppressive norms, happiness, success, or productivity. The moral imperatives to get better, to get “fixed,” and to get back quickly to a productive and happy life aligned with normative expectations burden marginalized subjects who, due to structural barriers, do not fit these norms and do not seem to get better over time. In other words, the injunction to feel good and the “happiness duty” (Ahmed 2010, 59) contribute to the sense of failure of people who self-harm or are suicidal. Instead of repudiating the failure to meet the norms, these authors, and a few critical suicidologists discussed thus far, boldly embrace the agency and heuristic political value of failure and negative affect. In the spirit of their work, my reflections are an invitation to mobilize these queer concepts not only to theorize self-harm and suicidal moods but also to apply them directly to suicide.
In addition, a growing field of queer death studies proposes a queering of death, the dying processes, and mourning (Radomska, Mehrabi, and Lykke 2019). While this promising, emerging field has yet to fully theorize suicidality, many interesting links may be made. For example, similarities between the experience of the closet for queer and trans people and for suicidal people are evident, based on the fear of judgment, stigma, and discrimination that comes with being out. Similarities also exist in the dominant narratives about identities or “choices.” Indeed, discourses on nonconforming sexualities and gender identities being “just a phase” that will pass once the person gets back on track resemble the same kind of narrative about suicidality, often perceived as a phase from which one will emerge. Likewise, similar discourses on contagion and the moral panic around the “spreading” of homosexuality or transness and the “spreading” of suicidal ideation exist. However, the similarities between those discourses of contagion on queerness/transness and suicidality remain untheorized. Queer theory (and queer death studies) has remained relatively quiet about suicidality itself, except in the study of queer youth suicides. While a queering of almost everything has been initiated, from theoretical paradigms, to methodologies, concepts, and social issues, a queering of suicide, in the sense proposed here, has not yet been done. The death drive at the heart of the queer antisocial turn (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2008, 2011) has remained quite figurative. While suicide may be described as an antisocial act par excellence because it embodies a radical negative politics of nonfuturity; a refusal of reproductive heteronormative temporality focused on sociality, stability, and longevity; and a refusal of the normative injunction to happiness, queer authors have not conceptualized suicide in these terms. Too often, suicide continues to be depicted as a unilaterally negative act that can never be a solution to structural problems. In some ways, suicidal LGBTQ people are cast as “bad queers” who fail to participate in the revolution against their oppression.
However, a few authors in queer and critical race studies have started to challenge presumptions in discussions on LGBTQ suicide and their deleterious effects on some populations. For example, scholar Jasbir K. Puar (2013, 2017) rightly wonders why we are giving so much prominence to exceptional suicides instead of critically reflecting on the numerous “slow deaths” (Berlant 2011) that are occurring every day in racist, capitalist, and neoliberal systems that condemn whole populations to gradually disappear through processes of debilitation. The focus on spectacular deaths by suicide fuels a form of exceptionalism that makes other deaths invisible in a context of “queer necropolitics” (Puar 2007, 32). Puar’s (2013, 179) asking “Why is suicide constituted as the ultimate loss of life?” highlights the exceptionalism surrounding queer suicides that erases the slow deaths caused by racism, capitalism, and other systems of oppression. Like many activists/scholars analyzed in this chapter, Puar conceives suicidality as the result of systemic factors that slowly but surely kill suicidal people, yet she also insists that the attention given to suicides deters us from looking more carefully at the contexts in which they occur. By pointing to how some LGBTQ subjects are integrated into dominant discourses, norms, and structures, while others, in necropolitical environments framed by racial capitalism, are “left to die,” Puar’s brilliant theorization is full of potential to start critiquing suicide from an anti-suicidist perspective. However, this is a task that has not yet been tackled by queer theorists. Still, as she wisely warns us in relation to the neoliberal framework guiding the disability rights movement, it is important to wonder “about what happens after certain liberal rights are bestowed” (Puar 2017, xviii); the same applies in the context of the claims made here for suicidal people. Far from pursuing suicidal people’s individual rights through access to a liberal right to die that would embrace the death of some unproductive subjects and leave unquestioned the necropolitics making certain lives unlivable, the reflections proposed in Undoing Suicidism invite us to simultaneously act for structural change as well as for better care and support for suicidal people from marginalized groups. When applied to the right to die, Puar’s (2017, 13) crucial interrogation “Which debilitated bodies can be reinvigorated for neoliberalism, available and valuable enough for rehabilitation, and which cannot be?” helps highlight the disparity between those suicidal subjects seen as valuable enough for capacitation and those marked to die, such as disabled/sick/ill/old people, among other populations targeted by necropolitics.
In a similar vein, despite not queering suicidality per se, Halberstam’s (2010) incisive analysis of the reductive explanations of LGBTQ youth suicide is full of potential. He critiques the It Gets Better campaign by pointing out that it does not get better for so many queer people who lack various forms of privilege (e.g., White privilege or class privilege). Actually, he suggests that it gets worse.18 In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam (2011, 1) asks, “What comes after hope?” and proposes embracing a politics of failure to celebrate our limits, losses, negative affect, and emotions. This “logic of failure” (106) unpacks and deconstructs the “logic of success” (2) driven by heteronormative, classist, capitalist, or racist standards. For Halberstam, accepting failure instead of repudiating it allows for better relations and interactions based on cooperation, creativity, and acceptance instead of competition, exclusion, and assimilation to dominant norms. Espousing failure permits marginalized subjects to focus a critical lens on the “toxic positivity of contemporary life” (3). I contend that compulsory aliveness is intertwined with this toxic positivity. Indeed, the injunction to live and to futurity rests upon the hope that things will get better at some point and the belief that suicidal people must remain positive about the possibility of emerging from a suicidal state or phase. However, while Halberstam puts forth “failure as a way of life” (23), the ultimate failure of life—suicide—remains untheorized in his work. This lack of analysis is a missed opportunity from a critical suicidology perspective. The same reflection could be extended to Halberstam’s (2005, 4) critique of longevity, in which he cleverly suggests that “we create longevity as the most desirable future, applaud the pursuit of long life (under any circumstances), and pathologize modes of living that show little or no concern for longevity.” While problematic statements regarding disabled communities appear in that quote, as Alison Kafer (2013, 40–44) rightly points out, this critique of longevity could also be read from a crip perspective as denouncing the devaluation of people with a shorter life expectancy. This critique of longevity could also be applied to suicidality. Through a hypervalorization of longer lives inscribed in a biopower apparatus, current suicidist norms pathologize individuals who value quality of life over quantity (and I am not equating quality with the absence of disability). For suicidal people, the importance given to a long life might not be among their core values, yet their perspective is invalidated through longevity narratives. In sum, Halberstam’s critique of longevity and his exploration of the notion of failure have enormous potential to shift our understanding of suicidality but have remained underdeveloped thus far, in his work and in that of other queer theorists and critical suicidologists.
The closest I have come to seeing a queering of suicidality is in a brief section of Ann Cvetkovich’s 2012 book, Depression: A Public Feeling, in which she wishes to overcome, as I do here, the old debates and fraught discussions between the queer antisocial and the queer utopian proponents. While her book focuses on negative affects, particularly depression, the question of suicidality is briefly discussed. Commenting on the It Gets Better campaign, Cvetkovich insists that there is not always a “happy ending” and proposes that we embrace the complex messiness of various affects, including good and bad feelings. Beyond the acceptance of living with negative affects instead of trying to purge them, Cvetkovich (2012, 206–207) argues that it is also understandable that some people do not want to wait for a medical, social, political, or revolutionary “cure” to be “fixed”:
Commanding someone to stay alive is, unfortunately, not a performative statement, however much we wish otherwise, and expressions of love don’t necessarily translate, except haphazardly, into a cure for the insidious habit of self-hatred or feeling bad about oneself [ . . . ]. Many of us have no doubt tried to encourage someone [ . . . ] to keep on living or just to remember that they are loved. But because knowledge and recognition aren’t the same thing, because staying alive is a practice and not just a momentary feeling, those moments of reassurance can be ephemeral [ . . . ]. Although as the queer pundits have pointed out, the desire to help those who are younger often stems from the sometimes sentimental and patronizing belief that childhood and adolescence should be protected, it can also be motivated by the grim and sometimes secret underbelly of our own experiences of suicidal wishes and desperation. Along with worrying about all the adolescent and college-age queers who are more anxious than ever, this book is haunted by the memory of many people for whom growing up didn’t necessarily mean getting better, people who couldn’t figure out how to wait until things got better, people who are not that different from me.
Cvetkovich emphasizes here that the injunction to live and to futurity is not always effective. No matter how hard we try, reach out, hope, or love (to reuse Thom’s words), some people will decide to die. Some of the questions at the heart of Undoing Suicidism ask: What do we do in relation to these people, here and now? How can we mobilize the values of empowerment, informed consent, self-determination, bodily autonomy, and harm reduction so often put forward by queer and trans studies and organizations to theorize suicidality and to intervene with suicidal people? In the spirit of Cvetkovich, who aims to extract negative affects and depression from the realm of the medical sphere and politicize them, how can we extend that politicization to suicidality in a way that would not only insist on the social and political aspects of suicidality but also see a political and relational act in suicide itself as well as in the actions to support suicidal people?
From an antisocial queer perspective, suicide could be theorized as the figurational queer act par excellence. Indeed, the suicidal subject refuses to reproduce the social order or to invest in futurity and its dominant norms. Scholar Lee Edelman’s theorization of “reproductive futurism” in his 2004 book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, suggests that the ideological and material organization of societies is based on the figurative idea of the child to come and the necessity of protecting that child and their future. This idea of reproductive futurism could be interpreted alongside compulsory aliveness and the injunction to live and to futurity. In fact, compulsory aliveness is fueled by reproductive futurism: To produce aliveness, reproductive futurism, or the promise of a future, needs to exist. Similar to Foucault’s (1997, 2004a, 2004b) vision of biopower and biopolitics as targeting the life of the population itself, Edelman (2004, 3) conceives of the child figure as the focal point of “every political intervention” to feed this logic of reproductive futurism. From the dominant point of view of reproductive futurism, queerness and its association with negativity and the death drive (in a psychoanalytic sense) is cast as a threat and a space of resistance to contest heteronormative norms orientated toward futurity. Although Edelman does not theorize suicidality per se, I argue that similarly, in a suicidist context, suicidality and its literal death drive represent a threat and a space of resistance to compulsory aliveness and its mechanisms, such as the injunction to live and to futurity. In that sense, it is also an afront to reproductive futurism. Refusing life, like refusing the child, according to Edelman’s theory, could be interpreted as a highly political gesture. Similar to queer temporality, a queering of suicidality opens up possibilities and imagines alternatives to straight reproductive temporality and futurity, which are focused on linear stories involving jobs, relationships, a family, and a long life of normative happiness. Indeed, suicide could be seen as a way to refuse the cruel and excruciating slow death imposed on marginalized communities (Greensmith and Froese 2021), a way to say, “Fuck the injunction to live and to futurity, fuck getting better, and fuck productivity” in the same spirit as Edelman (2004, 29) says, “Fuck the social order and the Child.” The “No Future” of Edelman’s book title takes on new meaning when considered with respect to suicidal people’s refusal to continue living. Using Ahmed’s terms, we could understand suicidality as a radical refusal to align with “happy” objects and imagine the political potentiality in what I would call the suicidal killjoy. Suicide could be seen as the ultimate act of a feminist killjoy (i.e., the killjoy action of a marginalized person who refuses to smile and silently submit to the oppression they experience). In sum, queering suicidality could help us reimagine death beyond the usual script of aging, terminal illness, or involuntary accident; it contests the normative conceptualizations regarding death as necessarily involuntary and unwanted.
However, one of the dangers of theorizing suicidality from the lens of queer conceptual tools, such as the notion of anti-reproductive futurism, failure, or the feminist/suicidal killjoy act, is to romanticize the suicidal experience or to use it as a figurative example to put forth a queer political agenda contesting dominant norms about success, happiness, productivity, reproduction, and intelligibility without taking into consideration the gravity of distress experienced by suicidal people. Undoing Suicidism tries to walk this fine line between, on the one hand, casting suicidality as a rebellious act or a radical rejection of dominant norms from a queer antisocial lens and, on the other hand, depicting suicidality as the ultimate failure, even though this failure is understood as a social and not a personal one. To develop this nuanced argument, the work of authors who have critiqued some aspects of the antisocial perspective in queer theory might be enlightening. For example, scholar José Esteban Muñoz (2009, 12) criticizes Edelman and other queer theorists who promote an antisocial turn with their “certain romance of negativity” and proposes instead to imagine what queer futurity might look like for those who live at the nexus of multiple oppressions. Along those lines, in her crip feminist critique of Halberstam’s discussion of failure, scholar Merri Lisa Johnson argues that failure not only opens the door to alternative political imaginations but is also a real, concrete, embodied experience involving distress, sadness, and despair. It is important to recognize that failure, and here I would add that suicidality is sometimes, if not almost always for many suicidal people, an extremely difficult and excruciating experience. In other words, it is important to keep in mind that some experiences of failure are horrible. Suicidal experiences might not be (and are most likely not by the majority) lived as a queer revolution against reproductive futurism, as a contestation of compulsory aliveness, as a critique of the injunction to live and to futurity, or as a failure that opens up alternative ways of thinking and being in the world; they are simply tragic and unescapable solutions to desperate situations. Mobilizing the politics of negativity put forth by queer theorists could run the risk of invisibilizing the harsh reality of many suicidal people—hence the importance of not romanticizing the experience of suicidality and the negative affects and feelings from a queer antisocial perspective. The question “What comes after hope?” asked by Halberstam (2011, 1), while anchored in a critique of hope itself, still relies on a form of hope, or what Muñoz (2009, 13) calls “queer utopianism,” which is anchored in relationality. For some suicidal subjects, sometimes what comes after hope is simply nothing: Giving up on hope unfolds into giving up on life itself, and no alternatives whatsoever are imagined. In the spirit of Cvetkovich (2012, 2), who states at the beginning of her book that “there are no magic bullet solutions, whether medical or political, just the slow steady work of resilient survival,” I believe that there are no magical solutions for some suicidal people. The alternative might simply be “learning to live with wanting to die,” as Cortez Wright (2018, para. 1) states. Queering suicidality could help us see the productive tension between those different strands of queer theory, between an antisocial turn and queer utopianism, and between positive and negative affects instead of viewing those affects through a binary opposition and a filter that makes them seem mutually exclusive (Ahmed 2010). Cvetkovich warns that politicizing negative affects, feelings, and depression should not mean simply reinterpreting them in a positive light and romanticizing harsh and difficult embodied experiences. The same is true for suicidality: While envisioning its fundamental relational, social, and political aspects, highlighting its heuristic value in dismantling norms and injunctions imposed upon marginalized subjects and its refusal of slow and gruesome deaths, we should never forget that, for many suicidal people, suicidality is the last recourse, the better choice of two “bad” alternatives. It is important to reconcile and value these different discourses and experiences.
Cvetkovich also argues that depression may simultaneously evoke a wide range of negative affects and alternative types of sociality. It can bring people together and lead to political transformation. I contend that the same could be true of suicidality, if we were able to move beyond suicidism. Similar to the way we have started to discuss mental health issues more openly in public spheres and have created networks of support and services for people experiencing mental health issues, an anti-suicidist framework would help us perceive suicidality as grounds for relational and political transformations. Death and the preparation for death might bring people together in radical ways; family, relatives, or friends who have been torn apart and estranged for years might sometimes reunite for this reflection about death or this last passage from life to death and find resolution to old conflicts. Be it natural or provoked (for example, through assisted suicide), death often seems to elicit a sense of urgency to resolve any outstanding issues before it is too late. The suicide-affirmative approach I discuss in Chapter 5 would grant suicidal people the support given to others in their dying process. Most importantly, it might allow us to replace the isolation and silence that precede suicidal acts with relationality and open discussions, a process that would probably save more lives than the current coercive prevention measures. I am not only interested in developing a politics of negativity, anti-sociality, anti-futurity, or failure, along the lines of Edelman or Halberstam. Following affect theorists such as Ahmed and Cvetkovich, I am also interested in conceptualizing suicidality as a deeply social and relational state. The queering and transing approach to suicidality proposed here insists on the importance of an affective and relational turn regarding suicidality. As paradoxical as it may seem, we must begin to think about the (non)futurity of suicidal people to maximize what we can offer them during the time they are still alive. When we conceptualize suicidal people as a group whose voices are unheard, whose thoughts are delegitimized, and whose claims are characterized as irrational or unintelligible—in sum, a group that experiences significant forms of epistemic injustice—it becomes urgent to theorize and concretize a viable future for suicidal people that includes suicide-affirmative support, which could be life-affirming and death-affirming.
In the spirit of Ahmed’s (2010, 13) suspension of the presumption that happiness is necessarily a good thing, I wonder what kind of new rapport for suicidality and suicidal people could emerge if we let go of the injunction to live and to futurity and suspended our adherence to compulsory aliveness. As Ahmed does in relation to happiness, I am interested in tracking the deleterious effects of the haunting presence of compulsory aliveness on marginalized groups, including suicidal people: From social and public health policies to regulations and laws, from intervention strategies to community-based initiatives, compulsory aliveness, like the duty of happiness, is used to justify oppression. Ahmed rightly points out how “happiness indicators” (6) are used to compare and contrast nation-states. In a similar way, suicide rates are used as a tool to evaluate the health of nation-states from a biopower perspective. Indeed, since the development of early social conceptualizations of suicidality, “the imbalance between suicide rates (debits) and birth rates (credits) serves as alarming sign of a national crisis and the need for urgent social and political action” (BayatRizi 2008, 115). Leaving critical suicidologists versed in history to accomplish this task, I would like to briefly point out that suicide rates are still used as instruments of nationalist, colonialist, racist, and capitalist agendas. The war against suicide in public health discourses is, implicitly, a war for a strong, healthy, sane nation, based on multiple -isms. What does it mean, in this context, to have not only a happiness duty but also a “life duty,” implemented through a vast array of mechanisms, such as the injunction to live and to futurity embedded in medicine, psychiatry, psychology, law, economy, institutions, and so on? Ahmed believes that in a world focused on happiness, unhappiness becomes, in some ways, a right. Similarly, in suicidist societies that impose life through various forms of violence inflicted upon suicidal subjects, death by suicide should become a right, and a positive one. Echoing Ahmed, who emphasizes how happiness becomes a burden and a responsibility for marginalized subjects, the happiness of others becomes a burden on suicidal people’s shoulders. The injunction to live and to futurity is based on the idea of staying alive to please other people who do not want to let the suicidal person go. The injunction to live and to futurity is also fueled by capitalist, neoliberal ideologies and structures that aim to salvage another individual and reintegrate them into the productive economy. In other words, the happiness of others and the contentment of the nation-state are the foundations on which we impose life and futurity for some subjects, but not others.
I therefore argue that the diverse narratives embedded in compulsory aliveness and in the injunction to live and to futurity are not only soma-technologies of life but also a form of “cruel optimism,” a concept defined by Lauren Berlant (2011, 1):
A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler, too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being. These kinds of optimistic relation are not inherently cruel. They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.
In other words, cruel optimism materializes when the goal you desire to attain becomes, through the impossibility of realizing it, what makes you suffer cruelly. The desire to live and to futurity, as promoted by the suicidist preventionist script endorsed by many queer and trans activists/scholars addressing the issue of suicidality, could be interpreted as a desire that is “an obstacle to your flourishing,” as per Berlant, since this promise of a good life, a better future, or a cure (medical or political) for suicidality specifically prevents suicidal people from being able to express what they need and consequently constructs them as epistemically dead subjects. In other words, suicide prevention is a cruel optimism because it is a fantasy that seems to liberate suicidal subjects from a burden—suicidality—but actually entrenches control, surveillance, regulation, and normalization. Suicide prevention strategies are a form of cruel optimism because they preserve “an attachment to a significantly problematic object” (Berlant 2011, 24), be it a happy long life, a better future, or a sense of well-being. Suicide prevention strategies are also a form of cruel optimism because promises of help, compassion, and support remain often unattainable and turn too frequently into violence and further marginalization and isolation, particularly for marginalized subjects. Berlant (11) states that their book Cruel Optimism is about “the attrition of a fantasy, a collectively invested form of life, the good life.” Undoing Suicidism also proposes the “attrition of a fantasy” regarding certain forms of “good” deaths that exclude suicidal people. Good deaths, from a suicidist perspective, are those perceived and constructed as natural and involuntary. Dying of old age, illness, or even from a tragic accident is cast as normal, although unfortunate. Voluntary or chosen deaths through suicide or assisted suicide (as the raging social and ethical debates show) are often cast as unnatural and undesirable. The attrition of the fantasy of a good death becomes possible through the queering and transing of suicidality. Berlant invites us to think critically about all forms of cruel optimism that, while binding subjects to hope for something better to come, slowly kill marginalized populations. This is exactly what is happening with suicidal people: Suicidist preventionist scripts slowly but surely cause more harm than good, and eventually more deaths, by forcing suicidal people to remain silent before completing their suicide. Forms of cruel optimism thus represent “‘technologies of patience’ that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions about the cruelty of the now” (28).19 In that sense, queer and trans activists’/scholars’ discourses on LGBTQ suicidality represent somatechnologies of “patience” that put forth the hope of a better future but simultaneously erase “the cruelty of the now” stemming from suicidist structures and norms.
Chapter 2 demonstrates that activists’/scholars’ conceptualizations of LGBTQ suicidality shape somatechnologies of life, which impose a burden of happiness, hope, future, and life on suicidal people. Despite good intentions to support and help suicidal people, the reflections and interventions proposed by these activists/scholars sometimes inadvertently reproduce forms of oppression, such as sanism and suicidism. Furthermore, despite the invaluable contributions of discourses on LGBTQ suicidality to improving queer and trans people’s daily lived experiences, they often fall short in explaining the complexity of suicidality and in offering multiple solutions genuinely accountable to suicidal people. Indeed, current suicide prevention strategies focusing on LGBTQ suicide often rely on evaluating suicidal people’s risk, surveilling them, contacting emergency services, and preventing suicide through various (coercive) measures. Such measures are not only suicidist, as demonstrated in Chapter 1, inflicting a wide array of inhumane forms of violence, but they also reinforce, as shown in Chapter 2, racism, colonialism, classism, ableism, sanism, and cisgenderism, as suicidal people belonging to multiple marginalized communities are usually more negatively affected by coercive prevention measures. A transing and queering approach to suicide, from a social justice and intersectional perspective, would allow us to really consider how suicide intervention strategies should take into consideration not only suicidism and its role in the way suicidal people are poorly treated from a preventionist perspective but also how all -isms are reinforced by interventions focused on prevention. Alternative approaches, such as the ones used by discharged or Trans Lifeline, have started to put forth these intersectional analyses in their critiques of nonconsensual active rescues but have yet to fully include suicidism alongside the other oppressions under scrutiny. To return to Alcorn’s suicide note, which asks us to fix society, I would like to reinterpret the request to fix society not only in terms of its heterosexism or cisgenderism but also its other -isms, including suicidism, which is at the heart of (LGBTQ) suicidal people’s daily experiences.
This chapter is also intended to encourage (critical) suicidologists, and queer and trans activists and theorists, to deploy the heuristic value of negative affects and feelings, the death drive, and notions of failure and cruel optimism in rethinking suicidality. It is an invitation to queer and trans not only self-harm, suicidal ideation, or suicide attempts but suicide per se. Indeed, these queer reflections and concepts offer a rich basis from which to start problematizing and denouncing the imposition of a burden of happiness and futurity on suicidal people and the cruel optimism in which they are trapped through the suicidist preventionist script. The same is true of trans theory and the possibility of transing suicidality. Just as trans theory allows the deconstruction of some regulating fictions and fantasies, such as compulsory cissexuality, transing suicidality allows us to understand, by extension, other regulating fictions, such as compulsory aliveness, which we must still unveil and criticize. From this point of view, fighting suicidist logic and its injunction to life and to futurity also means fighting the cisnormative logic of life, in the broad sense, which postulates that the only normal, valid, and healthy option is to die in the same way we came into this world—that is, without choosing it. However, as demonstrated, this potential of trans and queer theory is left underdeveloped in those fields of study as well as in critical suicidology, as suicidism remains untheorized. As Chapter 3 shows, this underdevelopment is also the case among disability activists/scholars who, while engaging in conversations regarding various forms of assisted suicide, have simultaneously left suicidism and suicidal people out of the discussion.