If you pay attention to national news, undoubtedly you saw that last week included a few very disturbing events. The Louisville shooting is yet another tragic reminder that we have some very serious issues in this country that need to be addressed. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those families and loved ones affected by this horror. Watching the Dalai Lama asking to have his tongue sucked by a little boy is an image I wish I had not seen. I hope that little boy is ok. Really disturbing. And that video of Kid Rock shooting the Budweiser cans as an act of hatred and discrimination directed toward trans people brought up all sorts of emotions including fear, sadness, anger, and the reminder that as a mental health and addiction treatment center, it is our obligation to speak up when we see this type of discrimination and advocate for our patients, many of whom are transgender.
Watching this angry white man so aggressively and violently express his hatred at a beer company because of their business relationship with a transgender person was awful. I don’t know much about guns, but I am pretty sure the gun he used is like the ones used not just in the recent Louisville shooting but also in many other shootings in recent years, including the one in my hometown of Highland Park, Illinois last July. Kid Rock’s actions in this video are so full of awful violent and hate-filled messages, especially toward the transgender community.
At SunCloud Health we see many patients struggling with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and addiction who identify as transgender. The numbers have increased over the years, and it is no wonder. Living in a society that does not accept who you are will inevitably create all sorts of problems, including to one’s physical and mental health. We know discrimination is a social determinant of health. The data shows that people who experience discrimination have more health problems, including mental health, than those who do not. We certainly see this in the work that we do every day, and we know the (added) pain our patients feel when they see this kind of stupidity on social media.
We have several trans adolescents in treatment now for depression and eating disorders whose parents refuse to accept the fact that, or don’t know that, their kids identify as trans. Having parents who either don’t know us or don’t accept who we are is probably one of the most painful traumas any of us can experience. I spoke with one of these parents recently, and I could just feel the sadness they are feeling as they struggle to find a way to love their child for who they are. It was hard. I can only imagine that Kid Rock’s antics did nothing but increase the divide between this kid and their parents. Just not helpful in any way. We have staff who are trans, and I spoke with one recently who said they are now scared to travel to Tennessee (with their nonbinary partner) in the wake of the Kid Rock video and the myriad of recent laws and proposed laws directly targeting and discriminating against the LGBTQ+ community. In the conversation, she shared other stories of her experiences with bigoted, ignorant, abusive, and predatory white men like Kid Rock. I was surprised, and I nearly cried.
Human society will always have its problems. In America today things feel worse than ever, especially for women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people. It’s especially hard because, in our treatment center, we see human beings whose lives have become unhinged and unmanageable in large part because of things that I would think we could control, such as unnecessary and unexplainable hatred toward each other. Howard Stern, I think, had a similar reaction when he basically said he wanted to speak with Kid Rock to understand why in the world he is having such a strong reaction to a company supporting someone’s sexual identity. It does not make sense. The bottom line is everyone has a right to be who they want to be in this country, and if we aren’t hurting ourselves or others, how we identify and who we want to be is nobody’s business but our own. Those of us with privilege and at the “top of the food chain” as white men need to do all that we can to support this basic life right. Easier said than done, or maybe not really….
Many uneducated and uninformed white CIS men in this country are becoming increasingly scared because soon their “kind” (their words, not mine) will be a minority. What they don’t realize is that it won’t matter when this happens UNLESS they continue to treat others with such violence and hatred. If they do, they should be worried that they might be treated similarly when the tables are turned. If they don’t, they won’t. All human beings deserve to live a life without fear of being hated or killed by other human beings for no reason other than because of who they are. For as long as we can’t get this right, places like SunCloud will continue to be filled with people in pain, and at the end of the day ours is a business that in the best of all worlds isn’t needed because we have found a way to solve many of these problems in a preventative way rather than reactionary.