lightningandsnow
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Fri Oct-01-10 10:54 AM
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Scared to Death - Julia Serano |
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few people make it through high school without having at least one classmate commit suicide for me, it was tony newman in eleventh grade he locked himself in the garage with the car running the act seemed so unlike him he was one of the few popular kids who everyone genuinely liked and every time i saw him he was either laughing or making someone else laugh apparently, he never spoke about being depressed and he didn’t leave a note so the reason he took his own life remained a mystery it lingered like a lump in people’s throats
i had a theory that i never shared with anyone i wondered whether tony felt like i did i was transgendered although at the time i didn’t have a word for it but i was good enough at math to know that statistically there had to be at least a few other people keeping the same secret and i don’t know if tony was transgendered but i put two and two together because i knew that suicide had crossed my mind a few hundred times and i knew that i’d rather be dead than be caught dressed as a girl and i knew how much it hurt to have thoughts that you don’t want but you can’t turn off
and now i know that this is nothing new there are statistics that suggest that up to 50 percent of transgendered people try to end their life if not by suicide, then indirectly through substance abuse and everyday i consider myself lucky to have made it this far
although sometimes i still feel like i’m only one step away from the grave because once every two weeks someone like me is murdered for being transgendered and these are no unfortunate accidents no victims of circumstance these victims are almost always beating beyond recognition these are attempts at total obliteration and i can’t help but wonder whether i am next because at least once a week i get up on stage and out myself in songs and spoken word pieces and i worry that this makes me a target because all it takes is one asshole in the audience who feels that his manhood is threatened by my mere existence
but i remind myself that there are many ways to die and the slowest most torturous one of all is being scared to death because being intimidated into silence is like being suffocated in both cases someone else is taking your last breath
so tonight i speak on behalf of an entire endangered species because i know that silence really does equal death and i know that the only thing that stops injustice is protest and my words are a tribute to every transgendered voice that has been silenced whether by suicide or homicide or those who are still alive but frightened into keeping quiet and i hope that this piece will be one of a million small acts that together add up to fighting backhttp://www.juliaserano.com/eitheror.html#scared
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GreenPartyVoter
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Fri Oct-01-10 11:27 AM
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1. Very powerful and touching. Thanks for sharing. |
ThatsMyBarack
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Fri Oct-01-10 11:28 AM
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lightningandsnow
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Fri Oct-01-10 12:16 PM
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Wed Apr 24th 2024, 12:06 AM
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