The Number Before The Meaning of Life
or, Why I Don't Care About Cis Discomfort Surrounding Trans Suicide Jokes
The Trans Political Horseshoe is best exemplified by trans suicide jokes: they’re only considered acceptable comedy by the two groups of people most likely to want us dead.
As the subtitle and first section have hopefully made clear, please do not proceed reading this article if suicide is not a topic you wish to interact with at the moment.
Naturally, trans suicide jokes jokes have their criticisms. Those criticizing anti-trans comedy do so in an attempt to limit trans-exterminationist rhetoric, a valid cause. Those criticizing trans people cracking these jokes argue that they trivialize or normalize suicide and suicide jokes on whole. There’s not nothing to this claim, but considering the 41% meme originates from studies on trans suicidality, you won’t pull anything stretching to assume that that many of the trans folk making these jokes have some level of agency and lived experience to do so. For many, gallows humor in general can serve as a coping mechanism, one I’d argue is less maladaptive than many other options trans folk sometimes take. Assuming the room has been read, and nobody who could be negatively impacted by the telling of a 41% joke is present, a trans person telling that joke is, in my eyes, acceptable, though this is certainly a position that can personally vary among trans people.
I am wholly uninterested in the comfort of cis people on this topic. It’s like seeing cis people visibly wince when I call myself a tranny for the purposes of a joke—there is fun to be had with a word which, if I utter, can be a joke—and if you utter, may be prelude to a threat. It’s my reminder to cis people that I haven’t forgotten what I am, what they are, or to be prepared for fight-or-flight scenarios based on that difference, like an animal flitting its eyes as it falls asleep to let you know it’s still paying attention. Cis people get so many things we don’t: bodies that don’t betray them so elementally; a better shot at love, marriage, and biological children; not having to stick a needle in their thigh every week for the rest of their lives; one less justification of certain forms of violence and discrimination. We get things like Suicide Jokes and Saying The Word Tranny. It’s a pretty shitty trade, so I’m going to flaunt what little wealth we got in the exchange.
I’ll acknowledge trans folks are not a monolith, my tastes in comedy or the macabre are not necessarily representative of the vast diversity of trans experiences, and among trans folks, this is up to personal preference (particularly the preference of trans folks who have experience with the topic). I’ll tell 41% jokes among friends who I think will riff along, and I won’t tell them with friends they bother, like a decent human being. Cis folks don’t get a say here unless I know that they have a history with suicide on a topical level, but a good 41% joke is specific to trans suicide, which helps distance it for a lot of cis folks. That said, whether trans people should tell 41% jokes isn’t the topic I find most interesting.
I find the far right’s 41% jokes more interesting.
To be clear, I’m not interested in why the right makes jokes about the death of their political enemies. I’d have to be a hardcore simp for The West Wing to not understand Republican disinterest in playing respectability politics. “Love thy Enemy” is just one of many Christian maxims that fascists discard when expedient, because one of the few ideological consistencies of fascism is that it sacrifices ideological consistency for expedience. Wanting to eradicate your enemies is as key to fascism as bad hair.
However, 41% jokes (synecdoche for the broader category of trans suicide comedy, and the shorthand I’ll be using for the rest of this screed) made by the right, more than demonstrating how fascism works, or how transness works, betray how conservatives think suicide works.
Pundits like Tim Pool and Ben Shapiro make homage to the idea that suicide should be prevented, and would likely balk at 41% jokes. “Those could be our kids that they’ve transed!” they gasp, and use that to justify intolerance of trans existences in the DNA of our social climate, schools, and policy. “Get rid of trans people so trans people don’t get rid of themselves!” they screech through puffs of the cigars neither of them want to be smoking.
So of course, when “conservatives”1 discuss suicide rates in the context of trans populations, they do so in a way best described as “misunderstanding how causation works”, or “ass-backward”. Let’s construct their assumed timeline, with a hypothetical girl who, for shits and giggles, we’ll call Agatha:
[Redacted]2 is born, and is a normal male baby [the term AMAB is for libcucks].
[Redacted] ages and goes to school, and exhibits normal masculine traits by being attracted to women. Sure, he’s called slurs reserved for gay kids, but that’ll toughen him up.
In college, [Redacted] learns that trans people can exist from woke liberal arts classes and meets trans people, neither of which should acceptably exist at a publicly-funded institution of learning. This spontaneously transes [Redacted].
A now-trannied [Redacted] wants to kill himself, more than he used to, due to dysphoria he didn’t have until he was told he should/that it was normal.
41%!
Viewed in a linear fashion, it would appear that Step 3 was the pivot in Agatha’s life that veers it off course. This timeline is what pundits view, and is is deeply revealing of how they view it: as outside observers. Suicide is justified by the last most recent life change or event they witnessed; there couldn’t be anything bubbling up under the hood, because, ironically for the Christofascists, if they can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. It’s the same reason why Cucker Carlson and Andrew Tate deny the existence of depression and are generally mid at peek-a-boo: they lack object permanence.
Here’s a better conception of how that timeline works if we remember that, our second big stretch today, people are pretty good at internalizing their feelings when they think it is the only viable option. Double this for a population at risk for violence, being kicked out of their homes, losing a job, and much more, all for daring not to internalize.
Agatha is born, assigned male at birth, and is named [redacted]. From an early age, she doesn’t like her name, because it doesn’t feel like it describes her. When people address her, it feels like they are talking about someone else.
Agatha goes to school. Particularly from the 4th grade on, her general lack of masculine interests or behaviors is often highlighted. She is sensitive, and struggles to make friends. She thinks about waking up as a girl to help her fall asleep. She thinks about how often she thinks about waking up as a girl to fall asleep.
When she reaches high school, she realizes that it’s only getting worse, and now people she had thought viewed her at least with indifference are starting rumors that she is gay. She starts changing her behavior. She tries a little less hard in school, like the boys were. She tells impolite jokes about gay people (the lady doth protest too much) and feels queasy about it.
She starts dating, dating girls, and thanks God profusely that at least, in his sharp cruelty, as wrong as he made her, this thing that felt like every day, felt like it was play-acting Being A Boy, doing it badly, and if ever caught, her life was over—then at least the God who did that didn’t force her to pretend to like girls.
Agatha goes to the state college next to her parents’ house, because being aloof about schoolwork meant one less target for ridicule. She didn’t bother applying anywhere else because she doesn’t want to think about the future. Puberty hit, and she hates shaving, and she hates seeing her face, which shaving requires, and she thinks about that while she is in class instead of focusing on the instructors. Sometimes, on her walk home, people will yell rude things at her from their cars, like “faggot”, as if they too know she is a facsimile. She’s had some sex, but it’s all felt wrong, and it makes her think about the fact that she will never have a body she feels in command of. Agatha considers suicide, more than once.
Agatha tries, but she can’t follow through.
In her Junior year of college, Agatha will read the novel Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo. This will be the first time she encounters a trans person. Sure, she’s seen jokes in the shape of trans women in sitcoms, adult animation, and movies. But even the fictional trans people in this novel are the realest she has ever met to this point (she will, of course, later learn that she had already known many trans people).
Agatha will make it until the start of her Senior year of college before she cracks. She will tell some friends that she’s pretty sure she is transgender. Most will take it well, but one won’t, and that will make her very, very nervous about telling her parents.
Agatha tries to work up the courage to come out to her parents. Maybe they can help her—therapy, transitioning, just being there when people are less-than-kind. But this is the year 2016, Caitlyn Jenner (Trans Sub-Mediocrity!) occupies the national attention, and Trump is elected. Agatha’s parents make abundantly clear how they feel about trans women, without ever trying to once.
Agatha considers suicide again. And again. And again.
6-?": Agatha eventually moves, has the space and financial resources to transition, does so, is outed to family, but things turn out okay, with only an occasional brush-up with suicidal ideation.
This Totally Hypothetical Story is only one of millions of anecdotal demonstrations that transness doesn’t flip some suicide switch in the brain. When we look at the interiority of trans people pre-transition, and the social treatment of trans people post-transition, other neurodivergences and the pressures of cisnormative society are undeniably culpable. Agatha doesn’t consider ending her life because she’s trans—Agatha considers ending her life because society threatens to destroy her for being trans.
The right/Christofascists (pick whichever you’d prefer, I’m no longer in the mood for semantics) has no interest in that level of scrutiny; they can much more ably smooth over the nuances that defeat their points by intentionally ignoring the person when they attack trans people. It’s why I’ve always found their pearl-clutching at suicide rates so stunningly disingenuous. Suicide rates are, statistically, provably, higher for trans people being treated the way Republicans would treat them. Regardless, the right/Christofascists don’t actually care about preventing the suicide of the Other—theoretically, in their eyes, suicide is the problem taking care of itself. No, their glances at suicide rates are more in service of justifying eliminating trans folk from public life, a justificative process that forces a linear, outsider perspective: we weren’t trans, we turned trans, we died by our own hands.
Of course, that we were trans the whole time, and perhaps just didn’t have a name for it, isn’t a fact worthy of consideration.
All this context is why I find right/Christofascist 41% jokes so… refreshing. They are, fundamentally, free of the intellectual dishonesty of folks like Ben Shapiro pretending not to fist pump when a trans girl kills herself. To Matt Walsh et al., who think all trans adults are literally trying to rape children, we should kill ourselves3, and the only concern they have is the epidemiological concern of limiting spread. Trans suicide hastens our removal from public life, as it both removes individual trans people from public life in that most final of ways, while also justifying any action to discontinue tolerating trans existence. This crowd smooths over the nuances and interiority required to understand trans suicidality, not because it would contradict everything they know about trans people, but because it means that anyone harboring feelings that they might be a girl stifles their thoughts until they eventually kill themselves and the trash that couldn’t cut it in patriarchal society takes itself out. For a bunch of Christian Nationalists who deny Evolution, it’s very Darwinian. This crowd jokes about a dead trans girls the way I joke about wanting Henry Kissinger dead.
I’ve decided not to link in any 41% jokes, because collecting them in one place felt icky. If you’re a particular kind of online person—hello, Substack reader— then you’re either encountered them or will encounter them. If you hang out with irony-pilled trans women, you’ll definitely end up hearing a couple. Understanding why the right tells them informs why some trans women (and trans people in general, I’m just speaking from my personal point of knowledge) think they’re so fucking funny. “Oh no, the LeFt turned me into a tranny, guess I gotta kill myself!” is fundamentally hilarious to me because:
Nobody turned me trans, they just gave me the vocabulary and space to know it was okay;
Transition has been the biggest factor in my life for making me not want to kill myself (other than having a cat);
The majority of Republicans would prefer I killed myself!
Hannah Baer, a smart woman with lots of smart things to say, writes extensively about trans suicidality in her book Trans Girl Suicide Museum. It’s a short read, with a lot of really thought-provoking navel-gazing and a lot of anecdotes about K (both of these are compliments and recommendation material). She discusses the experience of being trans, and trans suicide, as a museum, where we are exhibit, and patron, and museumgoer, and docent, partially of our own making and partially a product of society’s attempts to make transness legible and thereby contain it. But that’s why I think the museum cafe should host an open-mic comedy night, every Saturday at 8PM. Let the trans girls (all trans girls are funny. This is fact) bust out their best, raunchiest, most cis-confusing slice-of-life tight five, and let the far-right hacks out themselves for what they are when they hint at what they would like those trans women to do to themselves. I adore the power of 41% jokes, both when trans women use them to cope, and as an anthropological artifact of the far-right (and not-that-far right, of course.) Baer writes:
“Maybe it’s just like why k is better when you can’t buy it at CVS, because there’s some part of transness that cracks of fucks with all these cultural norms I’m talking about, and this current cultural moment of trans visibility is probably actually about securing transness in a sack of amber and declawing it and making it legible (the way gay culture has been ripped from the anonymity of the dark bathhouse and into the stagelighting of the reality show…lots of people have critiqued this one.)”
Cis discomfort at 41% jokes is an act of declawing. It declaws trans folks by rejecting their coping mechanisms for the comfort of others. It also declaws trans exterminationists—not by removing their claws, but by looking away from them. If the act of trans people making 41% jokes were meaningfully negative, we would have been telling 42% jokes for years now.
Comment with your best trans suicide joke!
“True” Conservatives would be pro-trans rights and in favor of allowing kids access to many forms of trans-affirming healthcare, both due to their stances on bodily autonomy and preserving historical precedent. Trans people, and trans youth as well, have been transitioning for longer than many of them have been alive. For more information, I staunchly recommend the works of Susan Stryker and Jules Gill-Peterson as a starting point.
I was pretty sure they wouldn’t use Agatha’s name, so I didn’t feel like deadnaming her for the sake of fidelity to right-wing discourse.
This is why they conflate us with pedophiles, and are arguing that we’re trying to add things like Pedophile or Minor-Attracted Person to the acronym. We aren’t, because fuck that, and it’s just rhetorical sleight of hand to justify anything they do to us.