Teen kills herself, parents are terrible (Transgender thread)

[BaneTheBrawler]

Transgender teen kills herself, Christian parents deny her gender identity and that she took her own life (they claim it was an accident, despite the long suicide note on her tumblr).

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...r-highway.html

The link to her tumblr is in the article, as well as the suicide note she posted there. I'm heartbroken reading this (yes it popped up on my feed this morning) because I just don't understand how parents cannot love and accept their children.

To be fair to the parents, she really was hit by a truck (probably jumped in front of it), and the suicide note was a scheduled tumblr post, so they may have made their little facebook post before the tumblr thing went off. The parents are still assholes for letting their religion torture their child and prevent them from accepting her as she was. Christian "therapists" should be illegal.

Yeah, no.


She didn't even know how old her daughter was.

I also like how she says "out for an early morning walk" because you know, people regularly take early morning walks on interstates.

I was correcting Aks' assumption that the parents were somehow vindictive in their facebook post and were attempting to pass off the suicide as an accident. Yes the parents are shitty, but there's still no evidence to support the conclusion that they knowingly lied about the nature of her death. I wish tumblr posts were timestamped so I could just point to the timestamps and end this little debate.

While it's very sad and they are terrible parents, it's also very clear that the parents' attitudes weren't what led to the suicide (even the suicide note, a notoriously unreliable narration of events, admits this). Luckily a lot of people stop at the headline!

Well, they edited the post to correct her age, but left the rest, so...

Wut. The suicide note doesn't admit any sort of such thing. If anything it pins the blame on them quite nicely, and quite rightly, too. Unfortunately a lack of close friends to support her also was a major factor. loneliness is a bitch, all the more so when your own family rejects who you are. Then you don't have any emotional support to fall back on.

It's okay, i'm sure her parents had nothing to do with it.

you beat the hell out of that straw man, good work





Other than going to church, it's not obvious how any of this has to do with the parents or religion. We're already treading on thin ice reading a suicide note literally, but, to be honest, the fact that people are still cramming their own agendas into her mouth instead of letting her words do the talking is probably a symptom of the social disease that led her to her decision.

Nice selective quoting. Right before it:



Also this: http://lazerprincess.tumblr.com/post/106547704517/sorry

How can you not blame the parents when the parents literally kept her in isolation for several months and didn't allow her access to any of her friends or outward support? That is severe emotional abuse. I mean I'm not generally going to blame someone's parents for shit, but in this case and after having read her suicide note and heard from others like the neighbor in the pic I'm about to post, I don't see how anyone can think that the parents were not at least partially (or even mostly) to blame.



I mean even now they refuse to acknowledge who she was and this young woman is sure to be buried in a suit under the wrong name and that's pretty much the biggest dishonor to someone you can do. I mean damn I sure didn't agree with everything some of my relatives have done but when you die you respect their wishes and if they say "no funeral" then you don't have a fucking funeral you don't do the whole shebang with a huge funeral home and the hearse and the procession to the cemetery. I mean I know they are grieving right now, and I can't imagine losing a child to suicide, but for once in their goddamn lives they should try to respect the one thing their daughter wanted which was acceptance.

On a completely different note, there is a petition on change.org to make transgender conversion therapy such as Leelah's parents subjected her to illegal, and because I feel that this is a terrible and abusive thing to do to someone, I'm sharing it here with the hopes that some of you will find it in your hearts to sign. https://www.change.org/p/president-o...ersion-therapy

From grocery store thread. Carry on.

[BaneTheBrawler]

Would like to hear Nirokuns input on this.

One more, snuck past me. I would also be interested in her opinion.

[myreality]

ninja edit:


Lol, damnit Bane!

[BaneTheBrawler]

TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAY!

[test123]

Transgender teen kills HIMself, parents are terrible

FTFY

[Cream Soda]

Both the parents and the child are horrible. The parents are horrible for obvious reasons. The teen is a piece of shit for the method of suicide. If you're going to take your life, that's not a decision I can make for you, but do it in a way that doesn't endanger other people. She could have killed the truck driver or anyone else who may have been on the road a the time and regardless of what you're feeling, what you are/aren't taking into consideration or thinking about, that is downright moronic.

[shepardG]

[hey]

FTFY

No, he had it right.

[Aksannyi]

Well, with one post, test affirmed why he was on my ignore list. Well done, bigot.

I do feel terrible for the truck driver. That happened to someone I know actually, more than 20 years ago, and that's still stayed with him. It really is awful. The only solace the driver will have is that there is absolutely nothing he could have done to react. Still heartbreaking though.

[wipers]

I don't feel anything is that bad ? Truck driver is clearly a bigot though.

[Aksannyi]

Mother is interviewed, continues to misgender her daughter. Honestly reading this article really pissed me off.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/31/us/ohi...html?hpt=hp_t2

She worried Wednesday that hateful messages directed toward her and her husband are making them out to be "horrible people," she said. She has other children, she said, and they are incredibly sad about losing a sibling.

She's more worried about how she looks than about how she treated her daughter in life.

And screenshot from another news site (found on tumblr and I have no link to it, looks like a local page though.)


I don't know how she can even claim that she loved her child unconditionally.

EDIT: Her post on Reddit, asking if what she was encountering with her parents was abusive:
https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgen...sidered_abuse/

[Tarage]

So, I don't think this has been touched on, but is it wrong to be a bit... miffed about the choice of suicides she choose. It's one thing to kill yourself in a way that doesn't hurt anyone else, but she walked into traffic and could have potentially killed other people as well. That and the poor truck driver who now has blood on his hands that he never wanted.

This whole situation just seems horrible.

EDIT: NVM it seems people touched on it already. Sorry.

[Koul]

Mother is interviewed, continues to misgender her daughter.

The thing about the parents identifying her as a him is that that's how they know her. Regardless of what anyone tells them or anything like that, to them, it will always be their little boy. I also think it's unfair to say that they didn't love their child. It's not that they didn't love her. It's that they didn't understand what she was going through and they didn't know how to properly help her.

and if people send them hateful messages, demonize or be shitty to them. That won't make anything better. It's in situations like this where we need both groups to use a lot of patience and understanding with each others situations. If you have a flurry of pro-LGBT people slamming them(or others with similiar mind-sets) and being shitty, how will that make them change their minds or consider mabye their religious views are a little backwards? Pretty sure it won't.

[hey]

The thing about the parents identifying her as a him is that that's how they know her. Regardless of what anyone tells them or anything like that, to them, it will always be their little boy.

But she won't. Regardless of how they saw her, she was their daughter. Whether they like it or not, that's who she is. By referring to her with male pronouns and as their son, they are saying that they don't care who she is, they're going to decide for her. That is seriously terrible.

[Psion]

To me, love isn't showing dedication to someone, or saying "i love you". it's accepting someone for who they are, not who you want them to be or who you thought they were.

As far as i'm concerned, her parents didn't love her, and still don't. They fell in love with an idea of a person, rather than the person themselves.

Also, the idea that you can rationalize with a person's religious beliefs is laughable at best. Religion isn't rational at the least, it's emotional. The proper reponse to religious beliefs that cause harm to others is outrage and anger in spades, because emotion is the only way to get the idea across to someone that maybe, just maybe, their religious beliefs are terrible and need to be relooked at. once that idea gets planted in their mind, once they actually accept the possibility, THEN you can go and have a more rational discussion, the detailed "whys" of why they are wrong. If you try having a rational discussion before the outrage they just blow it off and mentally ignore the huge piles of evidence that their beliefs are terrible.

[vagus]

Trying to be like Jax.

[SephYuyX]

The thing about the parents identifying her as a him is that that's how they know her. Regardless of what anyone tells them or anything like that, to them, it will always be their little boy. I also think it's unfair to say that they didn't love their child. It's not that they didn't love her. It's that they didn't understand what she was going through and they didn't know how to properly help her.

This person is a he - legally, he is a he.
Unless he is falsifying social security and any other government documents, he is a he.
Until he is recognized as something other than a he, he is correct, she is incorrect. There is no person by the name of Leelah Alcorn.

Be all supportive and whatever, but no where else other than social correctness land, this person is a he.

Though, I am curious, at what point is it legally acceptable to change name and gender? Is there a physical involved? Can I, a man with a penis, go and change my gender to female on all my govt papers any time that I wish?

[Stumblingdrunk]

This person is a he - legally, he is a he.
Unless he is falsifying social security and any other government documents, he is a he.
Until he is recognized as something other than a he, he is correct, she is incorrect. There is no person by the name of Leelah Alcorn.

Be all supportive and whatever, but no where else other than social correctness land, this person is a he.

Though, I am curious, at what point is it legally acceptable to change name and gender? Is there a physical involved? Can I, a man with a penis, go and change my gender to female on all my govt papers any time that I wish?

This person is an asshole.

[Stumblingdrunk]

Also, changing your name and gender marker varies depending on which document and where you're located

[BaneTheBrawler]

This person is an asshole.

Cool it.