Old habits do indeed die hard. Particularly if one of those habits happen to be distorting scientific work to lie about the LGBTQ community. It's been quite a while since the Family Research Council has done this, so my guess is the group is attempting to make up for lost time.
FRC is angry at Texas Speaker of the House Joe Straus for speaking the truth about the anti-transgender bill some in that state are eager to pass. Straus recently said he was disgusted by the debate and implied that the bill could lead to the suicides of transgender men, women, and children.
Naturally, FRC posted a push back filled with distortions:
Lt. Governor Patrick, who’s led the charge for privacy, hopes Straus’s comments were misreported. “Obviously, no one wants to see harm to anyone as a result of any legislation that is passed,” his office responded. Of course, as FRC’s Peter Sprigg points out, the most harmful position may be the House speaker’s. Suggesting that protecting women and children would lead to suicide is a ridiculously false and disingenuous statement. Even the Left cites studies by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Ann Haas, who says, “Years and years of research has taught us that the overwhelming number of people who die by suicide had a diagnosable mental disorder at the time of their death.” In other words, people do not commit suicide because of the passage of legislation, or even because of “bullying,” but because of mental illness (which gender dysphoria, according to the APA, is!). There’s absolutely no evidence that which bathroom someone uses will cause them to commit suicide.
In an older article of the journal Pediatrics, the authors wrote: “….suicide attempts were not explained by experiences with discrimination, violence, loss of friendship, or current personal attitudes towards homosexuality.” A 2005 analysis of this article, by conservative scholar Neil Whitehead, Ph.D., is still available online. “So these last two points,” Peter points out, “that public hysteria about LGBT suicides may actually contribute to them, and that early self-labeling also increases them -- suggest that Straus’s own comments (reflecting fear of transgender suicides, and implicitly supporting self-labeling even by schoolchildren) might do more to cause suicides than passing the Privacy Act would!
Then, of course, there’s the important 2011 Swedish study, which showed that even AFTER having gender reassignment surgery, people who identify as transgender had a suicide rate 19 times higher than the general population. This undermines any suggestion that simply giving those who identify as transgender everything they ask for will do anything to reduce their suicide rate.
The American College of Pediatricians calls agendas like Straus’s child abuse. This week’s Daily Signal highlights one such pediatrician, who says that this ideology has infiltrated her field and offered a deeply-flawed narrative. Read why here. As for Texas, let’s hope leaders like the House speaker can set aside their own prejudices long enough to do what’s in the best interest of the state -- which research shows is not a gender-free existence!
There is just so many lies pushed here. Allow me to break them down:
