Over 2,000 queer and trans people from all 50 states and the District of Columbia have signed onto two letters highlighting criticism from the LGBTQIA+ community toward Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. Two autonomous groups, #QueersAgainstPete, a collective of queer people who interrupted a Chicago fundraiser for Buttigieg in January; and Queers Not Here for Mayor Pete, a group of LGBTQ community organizers across the U.S.; have both circulated open letters making the case that the LGBTQIA community deserves better than Pete.
At Friday’s Democratic debate, Buttigeig declared that “we cannot solve the problems before us by looking back.” The groups contend that we must honor the history of LGBTQIA+ communities to move forward equitably, and Buttigieg appears uninterested in doing so. Leaders within LGBTQIA+ communities—especially Black trans women—have worked tirelessly over the past several decades to push movements to value and fight for our full identities and experiences.
“Pete Buttigieg is not a candidate of the future; he erases and mocks the histories and realities of racial, sexual, and gender minorities. The LGBTQ community, like many others, faces racism, homelessness, unemployment, and a lack of adequate healthcare. In rejecting Pete Buttigieg, we don’t seek a nostalgic return to the past but a reminder that our histories persist into our present,” said Yasmin Nair, writer and activist of Chicago, IL ”We cannot solve the problems all of us face if we leave the most vulnerable behind. That’s not ‘looking back.’ It’s making sure everyone moves forward, not just the wealthiest among us.”
In their open letter, #QueersAgainstPete notes that “gaps in Mayor Pete’s platform will fall particularly hard on economically vulnerable LGBTQIA+ communities” from his opposition to Medicare for All and cancelling student debt, to his history of “tearing down hundreds of homes in Black and Latino neighborhoods in South Bend.”
#QueersAgainstPete also highlights Buttigieg’s ongoing failure to address the concerns of Black Lives Matter – South Bend, from their call to create a Citizens Review Board, to their call for Buttigieg’s resignation following Eric Logan’s murder by South Bend police. The letter cites Buttigieg’s failure to commit to a moratorium on deportations or decriminalization border crossing, and his disregard for the voting rights of the over 230,000 queer and trans people who are currently incarcerated. #QueersAgainstPete also stands with Chelsea Manning and criticizes Buttigieg’s stance that she should remain in prison for blowing the whistle.
In an essay, Queers Not Here For Mayor Pete contrasts issues important to the LGBTQIA+ community such as affordable healthcare and housing with Buttigieg’s embrace of donations from Wall Street and billionaires, earning him the nickname #WallStreetPete. In a second essay on his racial justice track record, the group noted the highly disproportionate marijuana arrests of Black people during Buttigieg’s tenure, an issue also raised in Friday’s debate.
Queers Not Here for Mayor Petecompare Buttigieg’s campaign to that of recently-elected out lesbian Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. The #StopLightfoot campaign, created by a diverse group of LGBTQ organizers, challenged her record on policing, immigration, housing, and ties to Islamophobia. She has backtracked on many of her more progressive campaign promises, and we are sure Buttigieg would do the same. “Just because someone may share our identity, it does not mean they will show up for the most marginalized and those most in need of attention within our community,” wroteQueers Not Here For Mayor Pete.
“Buttigieg has no record fighting for targeted or marginalized peoples and shows little sign of that changing—he surrounds himself with the likes of Big Pharma, CIA veterans, and billionaires,” said Harper Bishop (he/they), a co-founder of Queers Not Here For Mayor Pete based in Buffalo, NY. “We aren’t homophobic or self-hating. He has been bought-out, and we just don’t see his candidacy as a sign of collective liberation.”
#QueersAgainstPete and Queers Not Here for Mayor Pete are not the first LGTBQIA+ individuals to view Mayor Pete’s campaign with skepticism. A November 25 poll released by Out magazine shows Mayor Pete placing fourth among LGBTQIA+ voters. Jacob Bacharach, Yasmin Nair, Shannon Keating, Max S. Gordon, Rich Benjamin, and George Johnson all published critiques of his campaign from a queer lens. Rather than address concerns being voiced by the LGBTQIA+ community, Mayor Pete has decided to plug his ears. When confronted with criticism from LGBTQ media, Pete said “I can’t even read the LGBT media anymore.”
“Queer and trans people deserve a President who listens to our concerns, not one who runs from them,” said Ian Madrigal (they/them), an organizer with #QueersAgainstPete based in Washington, D.C. “While former Mayor Buttigieg boasts about the historic nature of his campaign, every step along the way, he has made the conscious decision to back policies that harm the very communities he claims to represent. Pete may be queer, but we know he is not here for us.”
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#QueersAgainstPete is a collective of queer people against Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s candidacy for president. We believe the LGBTQIA+ community deserves better than Pete. Follow @QueersAgnstPete on Twitter.
Queers Not Here for Mayor Pete is a community that believes that the foreparents of LGBTQ liberation set the bar high and Buttigieg’s candidacy doesn’t even come close. Follow Queers Not Here for Mayor Pete on Facebook.
Despite recent government promises to protect LGBT+ people, children in Vietnam are still taught at home and at school that being gay is a “disease”, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Same-sex marriages are not recognised in Vietnam, but gay sex is legal and it is believed to have never been criminalised in the country’s history. There is an equal age of consent, and LGBT+ people are able to serve in the military.
In 2015, the country made headlines for voting to allow trans people who had been through gender affirmation surgery to register as their correct gender.
In 2016, while serving on the United Nations Human Rights Council, Vietnam voted in favour of appointing a watchdog to protect LGBT+ rights.
While recent legal changes in Vietnam make the futures of queer people seem promising, socially LGBT+ people commonly face extreme stigma and discrimination.
In its report on education for LGBT+ youth in Vietnam, HRW interviewed queer youth who were searching for information against a “steady tide of stereotypes, misinformation, and anti-LGBT rhetoric”.
They described how being LGBT+ was frequently described as a “disease”, both by their families and at school.
Nhung, a 17-year-old bisexual girl, said: “I don’t feel safe at school, because the view and mindset of other people on LGBT+.
“I didn’t get hurt physically, but I did suffer mentally. You have to be hurt when people tell you have a disease that frequently.”
Other young people told HRW that the most frequent comments they heard from teachers on LGBT+ issues was that being gay is a “mental illness”.
Quân, an 18-year-old gay man, said he was taught in his high school biology class that “LGBT+ people need to go to the doctor and get female hormone injection” to cure their “disease”.
In 2019, Vietnam’s education ministry announced plans for an inclusive sex education curriculum, but it is yet to be implemented.
Graeme Reid of HRW told The Guardian: “Largely thanks to a vibrant civil society-led LGBT rights movement, social awareness and acceptance of sexual orientation and gender identity has increased greatly in recent years in Vietnam. The government’s actions, however, have so far not officially reflected these changes.
“One result of the sluggish policy change is that social perceptions in many cases remain mired in outdated and incorrect frameworks – such as the widespread belief that same-sex attraction is a diagnosable mental health condition.”
A study of gay, bisexual and questioning teenage boys in the United States has revealed that the majority have never had a HIV test.
Researchers surveyed nearly 700 boys aged between 13 and 18 and found that less than one in four had ever had a HIV test, Healthday reports.
They also asked the boys about their sexual activity and history and found that just one third of teenage boys who have had sex without a condom had taken a HIV test.
Teenage boys who took part in the study thought they couldn’t legally consent to HIV testing because of their age.
Researchers discovered various barriers teenage boys face in looking after their sexual health. Many believed that their age meant they could not legally consent to a HIV test. Others did not know how to go about getting tested, while more were afraid of being outed.
The study, which was published online yesterday in the Pediatrics journal, revealed the best solution to the lack of testing is, of course, education. Teenage boys who had open dialogue with their parents about sex and HIV as well as those who knew basic facts about the virus were more likely to get tested.
Doctors – pediatricians in particular – need to be having more frank and open conversations with their male teenage patients.
The study’s authors also noted that 15 per cent of HIV infections in the United States are undiagnosed, but his figure rises to 51 per cent among 13-24 year-olds.
“Doctors – pediatricians in particular – need to be having more frank and open conversations with their male teenage patients,” said study co-author Brian Mustanski.
“If parents ask their teen’s provider to talk about sexual health and testing, this may be enough to start that key dialogue in the exam room, leading to an HIV test,” he added.
He also said that teenage boys should be empowered to be able to speak about these issues with doctors without their parents present.
Antiretroviral drugs mean that people with the virus can now live healthy and happy lives.
While HIV was once a death sentence, progress in medical science has led to breakthroughs that mean people can now live healthy, happy lives with the virus.
Antiretroviral drugs are used to treat the virus, and when taken effectively, a person’s viral load is undetectable. A major study that concluded last year found that people on effective treatment cannot pass the virus on through unprotected sex.
Furthermore, the availability of PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), when taken daily, prevents people from contracting the virus through unprotected sex.
National newspaper The Australianhas sparked fury with an article that draws comparisons between the coronavirus and the “contagion” of transgender people.
The newspaper is well known for its its “appalling” coverage of transgender issues, which includes articles such as “They’re castrating children”, “Transgender project ‘out of balance’” and “Corrupting kids’ thinking”.
The latest article evoked strong comparisons with disease with the headline: “Health chiefs can’t ignore ‘global epidemic’ of transgender teens.”
Published on Monday, it begins: “With the coronavirus dominating the news, Queensland’s health authorities have been urged to confront an under-reported global contagion involving troubled teenage girls declaring they are ‘born in the wrong body.’”
It then quotes University of Queensland law dean Patrick Parkinson, a man who wrote a paper comparing transgender children to teens with eating disorders, causing his employer and colleagues to write an open letterdistancing themselves from him.
“Speaking in a personal capacity,” the paper says, “[Parkinson] conceded authorities would be worried and busy with the coronavirus but said the explosion in transgender teenagers, chiefly girls, was ‘another epidemic’ – one that had ‘so far escaped public attention.’”
The article also suggests that efforts to criminalise the harmful practise of conversion therapy are a “global tactic of trans activists” who are attempting a “deceptive widening” of conversion therapy’s definitions in order to criminalise any attempt to change trans children’s gender identity.
Coronavirus aside, The Australian has a history of anti-trans reporting.
For months, The Australian has been publishing claims of a transgender “social contagion” in a section of its website dedicated entirely to sex and gender.
Critics say the articles “demonise and spread misinformation about trans and gender-variant youth,” promoting fringe anti-trans extremists while campaigning against medical experts.
Last September, the Australian Psychological Society rejected the claims as “alarmist and scientifically incorrect”. Australia’s peak trans healthcare body, AusPATH, has also called out the newspaper’s “biased” reporting.
Swiss voters on Sunday approved a referendum to ban anti-gay discrimination in a landslide, 63 percent to 37 percent, reaffirming an antidiscrimination law approved by the Swiss Federal Assembly in 2018.
The reaffirmed law makes it illegal to publicly denigrate, discriminate or stir up hatred based on a person’s sexual orientation. The 2018 bill was an expansion of a law passed in 1995 that banned denigration, discrimination and hate speech on the basis of race and religion with potential fines and prison sentences for violations. The new law does not ban gender identity discrimination.
Only three of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, or states, had majorities vote against the public referendum on Sunday, which was forced after opponents of the 2018 antidiscrimination law gathered enough signatures to force a public vote on the issue.
“After the clear ‘Yes,’ the LGBTI community will use this momentum to push for the equal application of the law and enforce marriage equality for everyone,” Pink Cross, a Swiss advocacy group said in a statement posted in German. Same-sex civil unions have been legal in Switzerland since 2007, and a bill to legalize same-sex marriage for all is pending in the Swiss Pariament and could see passage this year.
Pink Cross also called for better recording of hate crime statistics, and for an overhaul of what it called the “bureaucratic effort” required to change gender on official documents for transgender and intersex Swiss people — “the part of the LGBTI community that cannot benefit from today’s yes,” the group wrote.
The BBC reported that some of the country’s right-wing political parties and evangelical Christian groups opposed the measure. The country’s largest parliamentary party, the far-right Swiss People’s Party, opposed the antidiscrimination law, saying it would silence “unwelcome opinions and voices.”
Justice Minister Karin Keller-Sutter, a member of the seven-person Federal Council that serves as Switzerland’s executive branch, said voters “are saying unmistakably that hatred and discrimination have no place in our free Switzerland.”
“Freedom of expression remains guaranteed,” she said, noting that courts have been “restrained” in their application of the existing law and “anyone who remains respectful need have no fear of being convicted.”
The body of a 56-year-old Australian man was found hours after he allegedly left home for a Grindr hook-up.
The unidentified Canberra man was discovered dead on February 2 by a man walking his dog in Boulee, New South Wales.
His body had been dumped in bushland a few metres away from the purple Honda Jazz he had been driving.
He had no visible injuries, and police are waiting for autopsy results to determine his cause of death.
Officers believe the man had been on his way to a Grindr hook-up, as he was known to use the app and others like it.
They will be using these apps to determine who the man was speaking with in the hours before his death.
Police urge locals and Grindr users to come forward with information.
Homicide squad commander detective superintendent Danny Doherty urged locals with any information to come forward.
“This is a small community and we hope that someone may be able to assist our investigators — either through sightings of the car, or who also may have been using dating applications to meet people in the area,” he said, according to Star Observer.
“Someone may come forward who may have knowledge of this person, this area might be an area where people have met before, they may have knowledge of this man in the car that’s important.”
The deceased was found wearing blue jeans, a sleeveless dark blue fitted t-shirt and white sneakers, and was driving a car with ACT number plates YFD 00H.
If you have any information which could assist police, contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000.
While Grindr and apps like it are used safely by millions of queer people ever day, there are rare occasions where hook-ups end in tragedy.
PinkNews ran through some simple tips that users can take in order to keep themselves safe, including meeting in public and sharing your location with an app such as Find My Friends.
When Reggie Bledsoe was a student in the public schools of Newark, New Jersey, he didn’t feel represented by the people he learned about in the classroom. As a black man, he could look to civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks. But as a gay man, he knew he didn’t fit the traditional mold of a black historical figure. He said he wishes he had learned about even one black LGBTQ figure, like Bayard Rustin, King’s longtime adviser and fellow civil rights pioneer, when he was young and in need of inspiration.
“Personally and academically, it would have been so helpful seeing myself in what I was learning,” Bledsoe, who now sits on the Newark Board of Education, told NBC News. “Had I known about Bayard Rustin or [writer and activist] James Baldwin, I could only imagine where I would be and what I would do.”
Future generations of Newark students will get the chance to learn about LGBTQ historical figures — including Baldwin and Rustin (who was posthumously pardoned by California’s governor last week, 67 years after he was arrested on anti-gay charges) — alongside their heterosexual contemporaries.
Reggie Bledsoe, center, at a meeting of the Newark Board of Education in Newark, New Jersey.Courtesy of Newark Board of Education
A year ago, New Jersey became the second state, following California, to pass a law requiring public schools to incorporate an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum into their classrooms; Colorado and Illinois soon followed suit. And ahead of the statewide law, which goes into effect in September, the nonprofit groups Garden State Equality and Make It Better for Youth rolled out a pilot program last month in 12 public schools across the state, including Newark Arts High School, that will run until the end of the school year in June.
Implementation
Implementation of California’s 2011 LGBTQ curriculum law was slow — so much so that the state didn’t approve LGBTQ-inclusive textbooks until 2017. Wanting to learn from California’s missteps and get ahead of the conservative politicians and anti-LGBTQ groups who vocally opposed the new law, proponents of New Jersey’s LGBTQ curriculum were proactive.
“Developing curriculum for any topic is incredibly resource intensive, so we have designed a full curriculum that we’re going to continue to expand, and we’re going to get it to every public school in New Jersey that wants it completely free,” said Jon Oliveira, director of communications at Garden State Equality, a statewide LGBTQ advocacy group.
He said his organization’s goal is to ensure that an “LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum has wide adoption across the state.” Unlike California’s law, New Jersey’s mandate leaves the specific curriculum materials and lesson plans up to individual school districts, not the state.
The interdisciplinary pilot curriculum, which was written by New Jersey educators, goes beyond lessons about LGBTQ historical figures and their contributions, according to Oliveira. The program also includes a creative writing lesson for how to treat LGBTQ characters, a world languages lesson on gender-neutral pronouns and biology lessons on sex and gender diversity.
Kate Okesen, the founder of Make It Better for Youth, led the writing team for the pilot program. In March 2018, when the curriculum bill was still in committee in the Legislature, she met with a group of enthusiastic volunteer educators, many of whom are LGBTQ themselves. They gathered in the library of Red Bank Regional High School in Little Silver to discuss what obstacles schools might face if the law were passed and what they could do to help ease the transition for teachers. In those conversations, the seed of the pilot program was sown.
“That input helped me recognize … if this is not grounded in the realistic practice of a classroom teacher, we’re not going to make the progress that we want to make with the spirit of the law,” said Okesen, who has been a teacher for 22 years.
Last March, Okesen and two dozen other educators gathered again for a three-day retreat at a Unitarian Universalist retreat center right by the beach town of Barnegat, where later in the year Alfonso Cirulli, the town’s conservative Christian mayor, would call the LGBTQ curriculum law “an affront to almighty God.” This time, with the law firmly on the books, the volunteers had a more concrete goal: to outline a plan to help teachers adapt to the curriculum mandate and brainstorm a collection of lesson plans and guidelines that would become the pilot program.
Kate Oksen (fourth from left on the couch) and other volunteer educators at a lesson-writing planning retreat for the state’s LGBTQ pilot curriculum in Lacey Township, N.J., in March 2019.Courtesy of Kate Oksen
The 12 elementary, middle and high schools from across the state were chosen based on a survey of interested schools, which gathered information on factors like administrative readiness and cultural competency training. The schools, which started incorporating lesson plans from the program last month, each have an assigned instructional coach — or “teacher leader” — who meets with teachers in the building to answer questions about implementation and to gather feedback on the lessons.
Another cohort of a couple of dozen schools, Okesen said, is also participating but without any instructional guidance or oversight.
John Bormann, superintendent of the Rumson School District, where the Forrestdale School is one of the pilot program’s 12 participating institutions, said his district is participating to better understand the requirements of the new law and what it must do to comply ahead of September, when the mandate goes into effect. However, he added, the district has not yet decided to adopt the curriculum.
“A lot of thoughtful decision-making and exploration needs to occur with our faculty and administration before lessons are rolled out to students,” he said.
Representation
At meetings of the Gay-Straight Alliance club at Haddon Heights High School in Haddon Heights, students will sometimes discuss LGBTQ history, like the 1969 Stonewall uprising, according to GSA member Lola Rossi. But Lola, a 10th grader, said this has been the only place in school where she and her peers have been exposed to this history.
“Our history, how we got to where we are, fighting for our rights,” she said, “a lot of LGBT members don’t even know about stuff like that or even current stuff that’s happening within the community.”
Haddon Heights is one of the 12 schools participating in the pilot program this term, and Lola said she’s excited that LGBTQ history is getting more attention in the classroom — for herself, her LGBTQ peers and their straight counterparts.
“What I look forward to the most is kids seeing that we’ve always been here and we’ve always been making an impact,” she said.
Nearly 65 percent of students in the U.S. reported receiving no classroom instruction about LGBTQ people, history or events, and 15 percent reported receiving only negative information about LGBTQ people in the classroom, according to a 2017 report by the LGBTQ education advocacy group GLSEN. While less than 20 percent of students reported seeing positive LGBTQ representations in the classroom, the survey found that a more inclusive curriculum could have a positive effect on LGBTQ students’ experience in school and their educational engagement overall.
Shannon Cuttle, first vice president of the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education, who is the first elected official in the state to openly identify as nonbinary, said their experience in New Jersey public schools would have been greatly improved if they had seen LGBTQ representation in the classroom.
“Our curriculum and our classrooms should be mirrors and windows for our diverse community,” Cuttle said. “I didn’t have representation when I was in school. Curriculum like this would have been life-changing for me.”
For Cuttle, whose school district is not participating in the pilot program, making curriculum more inclusive is often just a matter of including LGBTQ representation in lessons that are already being taught.
“We’re already talking about LGBT figures in history,” Cuttle said. “Some just may not know that they are.”
That is how the pilot program approaches lessons, according to Oliveira. When learning about the civil rights movement, for instance, students will learn about Rustin, and in lesson plans about World War II, students will be taught about Alan Turing, the “father of computer science,” who helped defeat Nazi Germany by deciphering its coded messages. What’s often left out of the history books is that Turing, despite having been a war hero, was chemically castrated by the British government for being gay, and he later died by suicide.
Bledsoe, the Newark school board member, said he appreciates the pilot program’s inclusion of local LGBTQ history, as well. One of its lesson plans focuses on Sakia Gunn, a 15-year-old black lesbian from Newark whose murder in a 2003 hate crime sparked protests and prompted a statewide conversation about protecting LGBTQ people from violence.
The curriculum also includes lesson plans on Barbra Siperstein, a lifelong transgender rights activist who was the first transgender member of the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee, who died last year, and Marsha P. Johnson, an LGBTQ icon who was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Marsha P. Johnson hands out flyers for support of gay students at N.Y.U. in 1970.Diana Davies / NYPL
“A criticism I often hear is ‘What does being LGBTQ have to do with that person’s contributions to society?'” Oliveira said. “It’s impossible for me, in my mind, to separate [Rustin’s and Turing’s] accomplishments from their identities in the lives that they lived.”
The response to the pilot program in the 12 participating districts has been a mix of enthusiastic support and vocal opposition, according to Oliveira. However, he said he’s confident that the program will be a success, and he added that opponents’ primary argument — that any mention of LGBTQ identity is inappropriate for the classroom — is increasingly falling on deaf ears.
“There are naysayers out there who have an agenda against our community, who say that stuff belongs at home, it’s a private conversation,” he said. “LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum is not talking about people’s private lives. It’s talking about people’s public lives.”
Data component
Along with helping public school teachers adapt their lessons to comply with the new law, the pilot program will also be a source of data for a research study that Oliveira and Okesen hope will make a supportive case for an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum.
Garden State Equality and Make It Better for Youth are working with a team of researchers from Stockton University in southern New Jersey to measure the effect of the curriculum on individual student outcomes and on the cultural climate around LGBTQ identity in state public schools. Okesen said the research aspect of the pilot program is just as important as the lesson plans.
“I’m hoping that the data we collect demonstrates concretely for schools in New Jersey that the kind of visibility that’s offered by this curriculum creates positive outcomes for kids and that we see a shift in … students saying that they feel accepted and affirmed,” she said.
A best-case scenario, she said, would be for the study to make the case for an inclusive curriculum beyond New Jersey, as well.
A national model?
New Jersey is now one of four states to require LGBTQ-inclusive curriculums in public schools, up from just one before 2019. Oliveira said he thinks the sudden push for more inclusive public education is motivated in part by a resurgence of anti-LGBTQeducationpolicies at the federal level.
“The Trump administration is proof that, at any given moment, these rights can be taken away,” he said. “We have to constantly remain vigilant about moving forward, making sure these stories are told, making sure that our stories are raised and that LGBTQ youth see themselves represented in the classroom.”
Six states still have laws that restrict the mention or promotion of LGBTQ history and people in public schools, according to GLSEN: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. The laws, sometimes called “No Promo Homo” laws, forbid teachers from discussing LGBTQ identities in a “positive light” — and often effectively mean they can’t discuss LGBTQ issues at all.
But there is also a growing consensus that curriculums should be more LGBTQ inclusive, as more states, including traditionally conservative ones like Missouri, are considering laws that mirror New Jersey’s.
Oliveira hopes the ready-made curriculum his organization has helped craft will make complying with the new mandate easier for districts across the state. He said that as the push to make curriculums more LGBTQ inclusive catches on across the country, as he hopes it will, other states could benefit from the model, as well.
“We really see the work that we’re doing here as a model that we can bring to every other state in the nation that wants to do it,” he said.
Youth suicide rates are dropping in the U.S., but the proportion of teens who have suicidal thoughts or make an attempt remains consistently higher among sexual minorities than among heterosexual young people, two new studies in Pediatrics suggest.
One study looked at suicide rates among teens between 2009 and 2017 and found young people who didn’t identify as heterosexual were more than three times as likely as those who did to attempt suicide. A second study looked at this same connection from 1995 to 2017 and found suicidal thoughts, plans and attempts were all more common among sexual-minority youth.
“Numerous studies going back to the late 1990s have consistently shown that sexual minority youth are about three times more likely to report making a suicide attempt,” said Brian Mustanski, co-author of an editorial accompanying both studies, and director of the Northwestern Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing in Chicago.
“The fact that societal acceptance for the LGBTQ community has improved significantly in the past decades raises the important question of (whether) these disparities in suicide attempt have shrunk over time,” Mustanski said by email. “The two studies . . . are some of the first to show that sexual orientation disparities in suicide attempts have not been shrinking over time.”
Adolescence is a time of sexual and social development when many young people may begin to recognize or express attraction to people of the same sex or identify with a gender other than their sex assigned at birth. While the risk of mental health disorders, suicide, substance misuse and other health problems spikes during adolescence, the risk can be even more pronounced for sexual minority youth, both teams of researchers note in their reports.
One of the studies, led by Julia Raifman of Boston University School of Public Health, examined almost a decade of data from youth in 10 states in the Northeast and Midwest.
During this time, the proportion of youth identifying as sexual minorities nearly doubled, from 7.3% in 2009 to 14.3% in 2017. Over the same period, the proportion of youth who reported any same-sex sexual contact climbed by 70%, from 7.7% to 13.1%, the study also found.
However, the proportion of teens who attempted suicide and also identified as sexual minorities also rose over time, from 24.6% in 2009 to 35.6% in 2017.
“There is a great deal of evidence linking stigma against sexual minority youth to suicide attempts,” Raifman said in an email. “Stigma in the form of family rejection, peer bullying, and higher-level state policies are all linked to increased suicide among sexual minority youth.”
The second study looked at more than two decades of data from youth in Massachusetts.
Lead author Richard Liu, a researcher at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his colleagues found that suicidal plans and attempts declined across the board, but much more steeply among heterosexual youth than sexual minority teens.
One limitation of both studies is that the results may not represent what’s happening among youth nationwide, the researchers note.
Even so, the findings suggest that at least some sexual minority youth may not be receiving the support they need, Liu said.
“I think the results of our study really highlight that we have a long way to go to reduce suicide risk in sexual minority youth,” he told Reuters Health by email.
“Interpersonal conflicts are often a trigger for suicide risk, and having supportive and accepting people in their lives is important for sexual minority youth,” Liu added. “Additionally, having family and friends to turn to when dealing with conflicts with others cab help minimize risk for mental health concerns and suicide.”
A new bill in the Ohio House would ban conversion therapy — programs intended to end same-sex attraction and make a gay person straight. The conversion therapy bill is sponsored by Rep. Mary Lightbody, a Columbus-area Democrat.
“Human beings are complex, and each individual is unique,” Lightbody said in a statement. “As children grow, we all learn about the world and develop an identity that expresses who we are at heart.”
Nineteen states and Washington, D.C. ban conversion therapy. North Carolina and Puerto Rico have partial bans. In Ohio, seven cities — Athens, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Kent, Lakewood and Toledo have banned conversion therapy.
Republicans far outnumber Democrats in both of Ohio’s legislative chambers.
A gay Missouri police officer who won a “historic” $20 million judgment in a sexual orientation discrimination lawsuit alleging he was told to “tone down your gayness” by a police commission board member has reached a settlement with St. Louis County for half the amount a jury awarded him.
The settlement in the discrimination case filed by Lt. Keith Wildhaber was announced just hours after St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said he will retire.
“I think it’s really important for those of us in St. Louis County to recognize this is a tough time for the county, but we have to recognize that discrimination isn’t right. By settling this lawsuit, the county recognizes that what Lt. Wildhaber went though was not right,” St. Louis County Executive Sam Page said at a news conference.
