Cisgender privilege in mental health spaces (TW: Transphobia, Suicide)
The way some medical professionals approach the well being of their patients changes based on whether that patients trans status or lack thereof. Treatment may be withheld, postponed, or altered because of this. And this isn't just transphobes, even cisgender allies are subject to this (and I suspect some trans people are as well).
This paper illustrates this very well, though it talks about queerness more broadly and especially about matters of sexuality, I wish to expand the points it makes and talk about how transness effects peoples attitudes towards the mental health of trans people.
If a cis person is suicidal, then they are a suicidal person, they are strange for being suicidal, they are normal for being cis. A mental health professional will seek to find the reason for their being suicidal through talking with the person and learning more about their individual circumstances to eventually stop whatever in this persons life is causing it.
If a trans person is suicidal, then they are a suicidal trans person, they are strange for being trans. They're just another 42%er. A mental health professional will (either consciously or subconsciously) blame their transness for making them suicidal. And before considering any other reason that person might be suicidal they will consider the possibility of that persons trans status being the reason.
This idea comes both from the study linked above and also my own personal experience, where my mental health struggles have been dismissed as a side effect of my being trans, or my hormone replacement therapy, without consideration of any alternative explanation.
Cisgender people have the privilege of being normal, and therefore their mental health struggles are the strange thing about them that needs to be corrected, whereas transpeople are abnormal and their suicidality is expected.
42% is the oft quoted statistic for post-transition suicide among trans people. I have heard debate about it's accuracy but it stuck in my mind. If a trans person attempts suicide they lose their personhood, they become just another statistic for the alt right to wave aloft, as if they were already dead.
My hands are shaking as I write this, because here where I live in Australia, there has been less research conducted, but according to the Australian Institute of Health and Wellfare, the current rate of suicide among trans people is 49.25%. A mere 0.75% away from mathematically "normal" (not to mention the fact that among trans men the rate is actually above normal). It's no surprise then, that it is expected that a trans person has attempted suicide, and it is in fact surprising when they haven't, and because of that, the mental health struggles of trans people are not give the same weight as cis peoples, not necessarily because of hatred (though that is sometimes the case), but rather because of unconscious bias people have against the humanhood of trans people.