Trigger warning: There are mentions of suicide and other related topics in this article.
On election night, as soon as the results came out that Donald Trump had won, Cardenas Pintor’s first thought was, “How many more people are going to commit suicide because of the fact that a man is elected into office?”
The social work major at UH Mānoa then posted on Instagram a series of hotline numbers and other resources for people to utilize. These included information about warmlines, sexual/domestic violence hotlines, and immigration resources. Since the election, there has been a huge spike in calls to mental health hotlines, with many of these calls related to fear and anxiety about rising homophobic and transphobic rhetoric.
“My goal as a social worker was to see less people die,” Pintor said. “It is challenging to tell people not to commit suicide or not to attempt. There are preventative measures that we can take, and there’s a lot of stuff we can do, but in reality, it’s also, ‘How can we help them?’ And sometimes it’s really hard; we can’t save everyone.”
The election is not the only event affecting the mental health of queer individuals. As of Jan. 7, Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy changed, permitting “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, later justified this change as adapting his platforms to be more in-line with mainstream discourse.
UH Mānoa communications professor Jenifer Sunrise Winters specializes in big data governance. In her interpretation of the policy, she mentioned that Meta still does not approve of calling people “mentally ill,” but exempts gay people specifically, almost as if encouraging people to do just that.
“It just seems very unscientific and it seems abusive,” Winter adds. “It just seems like a really big change from what was publicly stated before, from [Zuckerberg] and from Meta.”
Winter recalls that during her tour of Facebook campus in summer 2019, she saw Pride banners that actively celebrated LGBTQ+ identities. Moreover, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, his philanthropic organization, still has its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility page. These juxtapositions are what make these recent changes even more confusing.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 allows social media platforms not to be held responsible for what their users do. Major social media companies, like Elon Musk’s X, are taking steps to shift from fact-checking to community notes.
Community notes function similarly to Reddit: users make a note, while other users vote on the note to determine its visibility.
“But that’s leaving it in the hands of either a mob, potentially, or more importantly, what we’ve been seeing in political space for the last 12-15 years now: bots,” said Winter.
Historically, accusations of disability in the U.S. were used to justify depriving minority groups of their rights, according to Pintor. These groups include enslaved and free black peoples, women, and immigrants.
“Yes, many people, LGBTQI+ people are more likely to have mental disability. But that doesn’t mean all of us are and that doesn’t mean we are incapable. We are more than capable. It’s just that society chooses to disable us,” said Pintor.
For Camaron Miyamoto, the director of the LGBTQ+ Center at UH Mānoa, key remedies include physical community and resource accessibility.
Center events such as twice-a-week coffee hours at the Queen Liliʻuokalani Center and the National Coming Out Fair in October serve as visible, physical reminders that solidarity – on and off-campus – does and will continue to persist.
“I love for students to be able to see that we have such a huge and diverse community to support us, and that we can be a part of here in Hawaiʻi,” said Miyamoto. “And it’s not just something where we have to hide in corners as little gay people and find a boyfriend or disappear. There’s so many ways we could be active with different things.”
