‘BOTH LEAD TO DEPRESSION’
Deaf LGBTQ youths, further on the margins, experience heightened isolation without aid
Recent years have not been easy for Tonya and her family. Four years ago, her 14-year-old son began losing his hearing; he is now profoundly deaf. Then, two years ago, he came out as transgender. “In the last four years, he has dealt with COVID, transitioning and losing his hearing almost completely,” said Tonya, who did not want her last name used to protect her son’s privacy. “Depression has very much been part of his life.”
In addition to severe depression, he was having panic attacks. It was hard to know, Tonya said, whether they were triggered by his hearing loss or the gender dysphoria he was starting to feel.
“Both lead to depression,” she said. “I just can’t imagine what that feels like to have both at the same time and just be starting on that journey.”
For children who identify both as LGBTQ and part of the Deaf community, the challenges of navigating adolescent life are compounded.
That can have devastating emotional and mental effects: More than half of deaf LGBTQ youths have seriously considered suicide, a newly released report found – and they’re twice as likely as their hearing peers to have actually attempted it.
The report, a brief drawn from data gleaned during the Trevor Project’s 2020 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, illustrates the isolation experienced by deaf LGBTQ youths struggling to find their way.
“The more marginalized identities you have, the more external stressors you have in your life,” said Jonah Dechants, a research scientist at the Trevor Project, a national organization based in West Hollywood, California, and dedicated to LGBTQ youth suicide prevention.
“All of those can accumulate and then manifest in forms of stress that can affect your mental health.”
The brief, released Monday, found deaf LGBTQ youths were more likely to experience depression than their hearing counterparts: 81% of deaf LGBTQ youths reported feeling depressed in the previous two weeks, compared with 68% of hearing respondents.
Meanwhile, 55% of deaf youths said they had seriously thought about suicide in the previous year; 26% said they had attempted it. For hearing youths, rates were 39% and 14%, respectively.
The findings, advocates say, stress the need for more inclusive and culturally competent outreach to youths who fall under both umbrellas, especially amid an environment of increasing legislative measures to limit trans community rights.
“What is being targeted toward the LGBT and trans community is nothing short of animus,” said Leslie Mcmurray, transgender education and advocacy associate for Resource Center, an LGBT community resource based in Dallas. For youths, she said, that can be dangerous.
“They may lack the perspective of, ‘Hey, things can change and get better,’ and as a result, they can get into self-harm and depression,” Mcmurray said. “Especially for deaf youth, who are often on the margins as it is.
“Their classmates, the folks they interact with, may not know ASL (American Sign Language). So they’re constantly on the outside looking in.”
For Tonya and her son, who live in Salt Lake City, the struggle to navigate two challenging worlds has been the norm. Sometimes he’s the only kid in the room with a hearing aid, the only one struggling to lipread, the only trans kid and usually the only deaf trans kid, she said.
Finding someone who could understand the whole of his experience has been near impossible, and early on, she said, he went into some very dark places emotionally.
Among the places Tonya found support was through Mama Dragons, a national support group for moms of LGBTQ children that she joined in June 2020.
“That has given my family more than I can put into words,” she said. “I felt isolated. Now he gets cards from other Mama Dragons who tell him he’s amazing. That in itself is suicide prevention.”
Finding the language to express themselves
In St. Paul, Minnesota, Jessalyn Akerman-frank, organizer of Minnesota Deaf Queers, said the Trevor Project’s findings came as no surprise given her own experience and that of others in the group. That was why, 12 years ago, she formed the group – to provide a space for the deaf LGBTQ community to assert itself.
Many people who are deaf or hard of hearing, she noted, grow up in hearing families that don’t know ASL, forced to sit in silence while their parents and siblings share their daily experiences.
“To have a conversation about, how are you feeling, what is going on, requires language,” Akerman-frank said. “If you do not have access to that language, how can you sort through your day?”
That lack of adequate language becomes even more crucial when it comes to coping with one’s own identity, she said.
“Just like their hearing peers, kids have to navigate that coming-out process and navigate their parents’ support or not being supportive,” she said.
The same holds true for those negotiating mainstream schools, even with ASL interpreters, Akermanfrank said. Deaf LGBTQ students may not want to use certain signs reflecting LGBTQ terminology out of embarrassment or fear that they might be used against them.
And, she said, deaf LGBT students who are mainstreamed may struggle to find friends or to stay up to date on the incidental vocabulary that students pick up on from each other. As a result, they may not have the confidence to ask questions about identity.
“This has nothing to do with intelligence,” Akerman-frank said. “It has to do with access to language.”
The Trevor Project’s 2020 survey, conducted between December 2019 and March 2020, collected online responses from 40,000 LGBTQ youths. Respondents were identified as deaf if they reported experiencing deafness or serious difficulty hearing.
Dechants, of the Trevor Project, said the marginalized status experienced by deaf LGBTQ youths likely pointed to other disparities between that group and their hearing peers – a greater likelihood of discrimination and economic hardship.
In the survey, a quarter of deaf respondents said they were unable or struggling to meet their needs, compared to 14% of hearing LGBTQ youths.