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Kentucky senator appears to lash out at Republicans after transgender child commits suicide

December 21, 2022 | | Print Article

A Democrat state senator from Kentucky whose daughter, a “transgender boy,” committed suicide recently is now seemingly blaming the death on Republicans.

“Last Friday morning my son Henry died by suicide. He was a beloved son, brother, nephew, dog parent and friend. The depth of his loss is yet to be absorbed. Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone, but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized,” Kentucky state Sen. Karen Berg said in a statement Tuesday.

“This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him. As the mother of a transgender son, I gave my whole heart trying to protect my child from a world were (sic) some people and especially some politicians intentionally continued to believe that marginalizing my child was OK simply because of who he was,” the grieving senator continued.

While she didn’t specify any politicians by name, it seemed clear she was referencing Republicans.

“This lack of acceptance took a toll on Henry. He long struggled with mental illness, not because he was trans but born from his difficulty finding acceptance. … On a daily basis at his job Henry would be aware of the hateful and vile anti-trans messaging being circulated around this country and focused at his workplace,” she continued.

“This hate building across the country weighed on him. In one of our last conversations he wondered if he was safe walking down the street. The vitriol against trans people is not happening in a vacuum. It is not just a way of scoring political points by exacerbating the culture wars. It has real-world implications for how transgender people view their place in the world and how they are treated as they just try to live their lives,” Berg concluded.

The problem is there is no epidemic of transgender people being attacked just for being trans. Democrats and their media allies incessantly claim otherwise, but they’re wrong.

What they do is take random acts of violence perpetrated against transgender individuals and assume they were all motivated by anti-trans hate.

Conservative columnist Rod Dreher drew attention to this in a piece published in The American Conservative back in March of 2021. He noted that according to the media, there had been 11 examples of anti-trans murders by that point that year.

The problem is the majority of the cases involved no hate.

“[O]f the eleven US murders of trans or gender-nonconforming people this year, only two — the ones in Puerto Rico — appear to have been probably motivated by anti-trans hatred. They are still horrible — no one deserves to be murdered — but the killings do not have the meaning that are being attributed to them,” he noted.

“NBC News puffs this as ‘anti-trans violence,’ but has almost no evidence for that claim. Not all violence victimizing trans people is ‘anti-trans,’ just as not all violence victimizing black people is ‘anti-black,” he added.

This false framing has had consequences — namely, it’s led too many transgender people, including Berg’s now-deceased son, to believe that they’re being targeted and thus in constant danger.

This false framing has also been applied to GOP rhetoric on transgender issues. To hear the left-wing media tell it, when Republicans argue that “transgender women” should not be allowed to compete against biological women, that’s another example of so-called “anti-trans” hate.

So is when Republicans argue that schoolboys and schoolgirls should use the bathroom that correlates with their biological sex.

Speaking of which, Berg’s son testified before the Kentucky state Senate Education Committee seven years ago about this very topic:

“He urged members of the committee to vote against a bill that would require transgender students to use the bathroom that matches their biological sex or to seek special accommodations, such as a unisex bathroom,” the Lexington Herald-Leader reported at the time, using

Berg’s daughter added at the time that she just wanted to be treated “like a normal kid” and that the bill made it so “we don’t belong.”

While that may be so, it still wasn’t a form of anti-trans hate to request that biological boys use the boys’ restroom, and biological girls use the girls’ restroom.

It’s also not hateful to note that, despite identifying as a boy, Berg’s son had been a biological female. It’s simply factual …

Vivek Saxena
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