Guess how we can drastically improve suicide rates among trans people?
Bauer’s team looked at 13 modifiable factors in the lives of trans people. They found that strong parental support for expressed gender “corresponds to a potential prevention of 170 trans persons per 1000” from seriously considering suicide, and those who reported experiencing lower levels of transphobia were 66 per cent less likely to have seriously considered suicide in the past year.
Among those who wanted a medical transition, people who had begun hormone therapy were “about half as likely to have seriously considered suicide.” About one-quarter of trans people in Ontario don’t want a medical transition, the researchers say.
The study also found a significant decrease in suicide risk among those who had identity documents – such as a driver’s licence, health card or passport – matching their expressed gender. Having proper ID was found to have the potential to prevent 90 in 1000 trans people from seriously considering suicide.
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The silent comedic greats have always been utterly, utterly lost on me, but I can appreciate that this piece about Buster Keaton is legit:
Unfurling this distended postscript without acknowledgement of the astonishing properties of Buster’s art would be unkind. A case study of his childhood might be equally rich, too. Born in 1895, which makes his age exactly synchronous with cinema itself, he was a willing participant in vaudevillian mishegoss as soon as he could walk. According to myths circulated by his father, he had survived a few twirls in the eye of a Kansas tornado when he was three. Alongside his parents, he was part of the Three Keatons, a riotous slapstick act in which his mother played saxophone and his father discoursed on child discipline while hurling Buster about the stage. His education was irregular; his father was an alcoholic. In photographs from this time, he looks like a playful wraith.
The New Yorker on that shooting in Chapel Hill we largely stopped talking about too soon, and the family we lost:
At N.C. State, Razan had been studying architecture—a daring choice. Mussarut Jabeen, the principal at Al-Iman, told me, “In our community, we tend to think there are two professions: medicine and engineering.” Razan was thrilled when she won a campus design competition with a time-lapse video of herself fashioning abstract shapes out of cardboard. In September, she tweeted, “Freakin love first year studio.”
Increasingly confident in her taste, Razan began wearing snapback hats and beanies over her hijab, though some people told her it was a weird look. Her Twitter account shows both a youthful insouciance—“I feel so bad for people who only enjoy one music genre like why do you do this to yourself child let me help you”—and a moral seriousness, particularly when it came to Islam’s place in the world. She retweeted comments like “If you think Muslims aren’t condemning ISIS, it’s not because Muslims aren’t condemning ISIS. It’s because you’re not listening to Muslims.”
Ontario is looking to regulate carding on a provincial level:
Some possible reforms include setting a limit on how long police are allowed to keep personal information; having police issue a “receipt” to people they card, which would spell out for them all the information collected; and obliging police to tell people they are about to card that the interaction is voluntary and they can walk away without giving up any information.
The regulations could also spell out more specific circumstances in which carding can be undertaken. Right now, Toronto police carding policy states only that officers need a “valid public safety purpose” to card residents, a rationale that rights groups have said is far too vague.
I am terrified of Lyme disease as well. One of the great blessings of having moved to Utah from West Windsor, NJ is that it was no longer necessary to pluck our dog like a chicken after a run in the woods. We once took sixty-four ticks off him in a single session. Also, once I was in the shower and reached around to wash my back and felt this MASS and thought I had a massive melanoma and then realized it was a blood-fat tick and screamed and ran out of the shower wet and naked and being feasted upon and got Steve to yank it out.
I have been reading a lot of Christian theology recently, for no particular reason, and I am a little obsessed with Dallas Willard right now, especially Hearing God (I’m not religious, but have taken to praying for things sometimes! Life is a rich tapestry!) Here is Mallory’s dad’s beautiful tribute to him in Christianity Today, which kicked off my WillardFest 2015:
Somebody once asked Dallas if he believed in total depravity.
“I believe in sufficient depravity,” he responded immediately.
What’s that?
“I believe that every human being is sufficiently depraved that when we get to heaven, no one will be able to say, ‘I merited this.'”
The doctrine of sufficient depravity is one of a thousand truths from Dallas that seem novel and yet, the more we reflect on them, point to the most fundamental tenets of our faith. Since he died, one of the scenes I’ve had in my mind is of Dallas arriving at the gates of heaven, only to be turned away with a stamp marked INSUFFICIENT DEPRAVITY. Dallas himself would have insisted he had more than his fair share of depravity. He would have insisted that what we love in a life such as his is the One to whom Dallas constantly and joyfully pointed. What we love most about Dallas is the Jesus in him.
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