What's in a Name? Quite a lot, actually...

I’ve already posted about this on Facebook, but I’ve been mulling it over for a few days and feel that it needs a longer post to truly express how I feel about it…I apologise for the length of this post, but there's a lot which needs to be said...

I’m going out on a limb here and assuming most people have by now heard about the tragic suicide of Leelah Alcorn? For the uninitiated, Leelah was a 17 year old from Ohio who committed suicide on 28^th December 2014 by walking out in front of a truck. I daresay her death, tragic though it was, would have gone pretty much unnoticed by the rest of the world were it not for one thing: Leelah was a transgender girl whose Tumblr posthumously published her suicide note which, in devastating simplicity, laid bare her soul and told the world how unsupported she felt by her family, thus (in her eyes) rendering suicide her only option. If you haven’t read Leelah’s suicide note I am going to post it here, in its entirety, because it is one of the most powerfully moving and deeply disquieting things I have ever read and, in accordance with her plea for people to look at the high rate of suicide amongst transgender people and say “that’s fucked up”, I think it needs to be shared: 

“If you are reading this, it means that I have committed suicide and obviously failed to delete this post from my queue.

Please don’t be sad, it’s for the better. The life I would’ve lived isn’t worth living in… because I’m transgender. I could go into detail explaining why I feel that way, but this note is probably going to be lengthy enough as it is. To put it simply, I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was 4. I never knew there was a word for that feeling, nor was it possible for a boy to become a girl, so I never told anyone and I just continued to do traditionally “boyish” things to try to fit in.

When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong. If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.

My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.

When I was 16 I realized that my parents would never come around, and that I would have to wait until I was 18 to start any sort of transitioning treatment, which absolutely broke my heart. The longer you wait, the harder it is to transition. I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life. On my 16th birthday, when I didn’t receive consent from my parents to start transitioning, I cried myself to sleep.

I formed a sort of a “fuck you” attitude towards my parents and came out as gay at school, thinking that maybe if I eased into coming out as trans it would be less of a shock. Although the reaction from my friends was positive, my parents were pissed. They felt like I was attacking their image, and that I was an embarrassment to them. They wanted me to be their perfect little straight christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.

So they took me out of public school, took away my laptop and phone, and forbid me of getting on any sort of social media, completely isolating me from my friends. This was probably the part of my life when I was the most depressed, and I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. I was completely alone for 5 months. No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.

At the end of the school year, my parents finally came around and gave me my phone and let me back on social media. I was excited, I finally had my friends back. They were extremely excited to see me and talk to me, but only at first. Eventually they realized they didn’t actually give a shit about me, and I felt even lonelier than I did before. The only friends I thought I had only liked me because they saw me five times a week.

After a summer of having almost no friends plus the weight of having to think about college, save money for moving out, keep my grades up, go to church each week and feel like shit because everyone there is against everything I live for, I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse.

That’s the gist of it, that’s why I feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me. As for my will, I want 100% of the things that I legally own to be sold and the money (plus my money in the bank) to be given to trans civil rights movements and support groups, I don’t give a shit which one. The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please.

Goodbye,

(Leelah) Josh Alcorn"

Now clearly we're only getting one side of the story here, but is that not one of the most gut-wrenching, soul-destroying things you have ever read? I’m not even a parent and yet I sobbed my heart out reading this for the first time; even now, seeing it for the third or fourth time, it brings tears to my eyes. Leelah’s eloquence and passion are clear; what a terrible, tragic waste of all her potential this whole thing is.

In the wake of her passing, of course, the internet erupted. Firstly there were Leelah’s own words explaining her situation, which struck a chord with many and provoked outrage for various different reasons (believe me, I have read and digested opinions on both sides of the fence); secondly, there was the reaction from Leelah’s mother, both on Facebook and in a TV interview. The no-doubt grieving Mrs Alcorn told CNN that she and her husband “don’t support that, religiously” (meaning people being transgender) but that they “loved their son unconditionally”. She categorically refused to refer to “Leelah”, instead making reference to her “son”, to “Joshua” and using the pronouns he, him etc throughout. Cue web-based fury and a media frenzy…

Now. Now. Firstly I want to point out the glaringly-obvious here and say that this whole thing is tragic all round. Parents have lost a child. Brothers and sisters have lost a sibling. An entirely innocent truck driver, who just so happened to be driving along that particular stretch of road at that particular time, will probably never get over what happened; what he saw. A young life full of potential and promise has been snuffed out. The entire thing is one big messed-up tragedy which breaks my heart in several ways. That much is clear, right?

That being said – and without going on a witch-hunt like some members of the press and sections of the internet – I want to express my solidarity for Leelah and my horror at what she had to endure. I will try and do this as respectfully as I can, because no matter what, two parents have lost a child and that is something so horrendous I can’t even begin to imagine the pain they must be feeling. It would be disrespectful of me to even try, and I feel desperately sorry for them and for their other children. However. Ohhhhh, however…

Mrs Alcorn said, and I quote: “We don’t support that, religiously. But we told him that we loved him unconditionally. We loved him no matter what.”

And herein lies my problem; my “sympathy limiter”, if you will. Now I am not, and have no intention of ever becoming, a parent, so the intricacies and mysteries of this weird and wonderful state remain somewhat elusive to me. However I’m not an idiot. A quick glance at my dictionary confirms my belief that the meaning of “unconditional” is “without conditions or limitations; absolute”. And this is where I think my definition of “unconditional” and the Alcorn’s definition of it are entirely at odds.

Now I can’t even begin to comprehend what a shock and a struggle it must be to discover that the child you’ve raised for x-number-of-years isn’t actually the son you thought you had because he identifies as a girl and tells you she wishes to transition. I watched a documentary a few years ago about teenagers in America who were at various stages of the transition process and something one of the mothers said stuck with me: you have to mourn the child you had before you can come to terms with the child you have. When I thought about it, it made sense. After all, the daughter she thought she was raising was, in a sense, dead and she was now the (very proud, as it turned out) mother of a teenage boy, but in her head she must have had thoughts about how her daughter’s life would pan out. Helping her choose her prom dress, her wedding dress. Being there to support her in childbirth. Just doing all the little things mothers and daughters do together every single day. Normal stuff. All of that, all of those little thoughts and dreams and hopes, were gone and she had to suddenly reassess and reappraise her life. She mourned for the daughter she’d lost, much as parents whose children die must mourn, but then she got on with the business of celebrating and supporting her son, and it was wonderful. From reading Leelah Alcorn’s blog, however, and listening to what her mother had to say, it became clear to me that this was not “unconditional” love.

Unconditional love is about loving and supporting your child without putting restrictions on that love. Not the son you thought you had but your child nonetheless; a child you carried for nine months; nurtured; watched grow. A child you taught and loved; a child you would have – should have – been prepared to lie down in front of a train for if the occasion demanded it. You might not always agree with them and you might not always like their choices, their haircut, their attitude, but you don’t stop loving them for it.  They might do something so unspeakably awful you can't even begin to comprehend what went wrong, but that doesn't stop them being your child (a fact pointed out with extraordinary eloquence by Dylan Klebold's mother Judy in "Far from the Tree" by Andrew Solomon, a must-read book on understanding the unconditional love of a parent). 

Unconditional love doesn’t prioritise your religion above the safety, happiness and wellbeing of your child, forcing them to attend “conversion therapy” (which is tantamount to child abuse and should be banned everywhere immediately for the harm it causes people), or sending to them to purely religious therapists who perhaps didn’t have the expertise but certainly didn’t appear to have the inclination to understand what your child was struggling with. And god knows it must be a struggle. To face that alone…I can’t even begin to imagine it. To consider your religious beliefs, strong though they may be, as more sacrosanct than the wellbeing of your own child…I can’t understand that. I can’t even begin to get my head around it. Maybe it’s because I’m not religious as well as not being a parent, but I fail to see how anything could be more important than the welfare of your child.

I can appreciate it must be a shock when your 14 year old son says, “actually Mum, I was meant to be a girl and I want you to treat me like one from now on”. I can appreciate that you would struggle to comprehend and digest such news. But what I cannot comprehend is why, if you love that child as unconditionally as you claim, you would put them through something as soul-destroying as “conversion therapy” or tell them they were “wrong”. (Also, “God doesn’t make mistakes”? The Biblical story of the Etch-a-Sketch end of the world, aka Noah’s Ark, when God apparently went “bugger!” and tried to destroy everything would say otherwise. Just a by-the by…) How could you do such a thing? In the heat of the moment, maybe, while struggling to get your head around it all, you might say something like “oh, don’t be daft!” but to keep that up forever? Everything the Alcorn’s have said and done since Leelah’s passing – their insistence on referring to her as “he”, removing the suicide note and another post which was critical of their attitude from her blog – indicates to me that they are placing conditions on that love, and that saddens me.

What makes this even sadder to me is that there have been incidents in the media recently where parents have received the exact same news about their children and reacted in completely the opposite manner to the Alcorn’s; celebrating their children publically instead of denying their true self. Earlier in December a birth announcement appeared in Brisbane’s “Courier Mail” which read: “A Retraction — Bogert: In 1995 we announced the arrival of our child, Elizabeth Anne, as a daughter. He informs us that we were mistaken. Oops! Our bad. We would now like to present our wonderful son — Kai Bogert. Loving you is the easiest thing in the world. Tidy your room.”

The first time I saw the ad, I laughed for about ten minutes and then, I’m not ashamed to say, welled up a little. That is unconditional love, and Kai’s parents Yolanda Bogert and Guy Kershaw are clearly not only accepting but openly proud of their child. They too will have been shocked, even if, as a subsequent interview revealed, there had been “little signs along the way when he was little” that their daughter was actually their son, but what a joyful, wonderful way to show their love and acceptance of their child once they got their heads around it all.

I didn’t know Leelah Alcorn but from what I can read between the lines in her blog posts she seemed like a bright, intelligent, thoughtful young person who had a great capacity for love and was brimming with potential; it saddens me her parents couldn’t accept her and will now never know just what great things their child might have been capable of. My heart goes out to her siblings, who must be incredibly bewildered and confused by the whole thing. I feel dreadful for the poor truck driver. And, most of all, I feel desperately, desperately sad for Leelah and all the other children trapped in a similar position. A study published in the US last year highlighted terrifyingly-high rates of suicide and attempted suicide among transgender people, particularly if they were openly rejected or felt unaccepted by their families.

At the end of her blog post Leelah Alcorn wrote: My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please. I don’t have the answers. I don’t have any particularly brilliant or radical suggestions. What I do have is empathy and compassion by the bucketload, and that is something anyone can tap into if they need it. All you have to do is ask me...

If you or someone you know has been affected by this topic, there are places you can go for help. You are not alone. In the UK, The Gender Trust has a wealth of information and resources which are useful: http://gendertrust.org.uk/directory/support-organisations In the US, the National Centre for Transgender Equality can help: http://transequality.org/ and there are plenty of LGBTQ organisations in both countries who can offer support and advice. Google is your friend…

Also in the UK, for teens and young people specifically, the Albert Kennedy Trust  and Mermaids are both useful contacts to have.  There are of course other organisations as well, but these are perhaps the most specific...