Denying Transgender People Bathroom Access Is Linked to Suicide [View all]

[KamaAina]

http://www.newsweek.com/transgender-bathroom-law-study-suicide-454185

As North Carolina grapples with the fallout from its new “bathroom law,” which says that people must use public restrooms matching the gender on their birth certificates, and a dozen states consider similar bills, a new study suggests an association between denied access to restrooms and suicide attempts by transgender people.

In a national survey of people who identified as transgender, a higher percentage of respondents who reported having been denied access to a restroom also reported having attempted suicide, compared with respondents who said they had not been denied access, according to a study recently published in the Journal of Homosexuality. The study took into account access to restrooms only on college and university campuses and people who identified as transgender while on campus.

Of 2,316 of those respondents to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey in 2008 and 2009, 46.5 percent said they had attempted suicide. That rate is significantly higher than the self-reported rate for the general population in the United States, which as of 2006 was 4.6 percent.

The study found a significant statistical association between denied access and suicide attempts, which it says “suggests that there may be a distinct relationship between the stress of not being able to use bathrooms…and one’s mental health.”