“Rhetoric like this flies in the face of everything we know about mitigating suicide risk.”

Author J.K. Rowling laid out the mental health risks associated with the rhetoric coming from proponents of radical gender ideology, arguing that it was more likely to contribute to an increase in mental health problems than to help address them.

Rowling began by sharing an example of the rhetoric to which she was referring: “Are you complaining about people who feel they’d rather die than live bound by the expectations of masculinity and presenting as a barbarian caveman? Would YOU like to be seen as a man? Would YOU like to let go of your femininity? No? It might make you feel like dying, yes?”

The “Harry Potter” author cut straight to the heart of the matter, saying that such rhetoric was guaranteed to compound the problems of those suffering from gender dysphoria by fostering an unhealthy dependence on outside affirmation.

“An infallible recipe for poor mental health and lifelong unhappiness is believing that unless the entire world validates your self-perception, it hates you,” Rowling began. “If you move through life telling yourself that unless you can force other people to play along you’ll ‘be ‘erased,’ if the slightest hint that another person doesn’t see you the way you’ve labelled yourself feels like an attack on your very existence, your life will be spent in a state of miserable insecurity and fragility.”

“Would I like to ‘let go’ of my femininity? Willingly; femininity is the set of stereotypes imposed on women by men. Would it ‘make me feel like dying’? Of course it wouldn’t,” Rowling continued.

She concluded by pointing out how such statements fed the oft-repeated lie that trans-identifying young people were more likely to take their own lives if their identity was not accommodated — up to and including risky and irreversible hormones and medical procedures — by those around them.

“Vulnerable young people are being harmed by your kind of hyperbolic language, which promotes the lie about the inevitability of suicide among the gender-questioning unless they’re given often irreversible medical interventions,” she said. “Rhetoric like this flies in the face of everything we know about mitigating suicide risk among those with mental health issues and it’s particularly gruesome when done by self-congratulatory people on Twitter whose banner picture is ‘be kind.’”