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leelah alcorn, my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans, suicide tw
I interrupt this blogbreak to talk about Leelah Alcorn, a trans girl who recently committed suicide. This is something of a Rant, and I make no promises w.r.t. coherency or structure.
I do have something to say to suicidal teenagers in general:
There are two randomly chosen dictators who have essentially unlimited control over your life in a way no adult would allow. They can isolate you from your friends, control where you go and how you dress and what you eat, stop you from doing your hobbies, force you to participate in religious activities you don’t believe in. They may be kind or not, wise or not, respectful of your autonomy or not; regardless, as long as they refrain from starving or beating you, they face few consequences for their actions. The thing they did to earn this right is have an orgasm. This is a terrible system.
But it is a terrible system with an end.
When I was a teenager, people continually told me that life gets better after high school and I was like “yeah, yeah.” And then I left high school and I was surprised by how unimaginably better it was.
Here’s the thing: as a teenager, you are continually forced to interact with people– your parents, your teachers, your classmates. As an adult, that’s much less true. You can hide in a little bubble of people who treat you like a human being. You can say “if you want to interact with me, you can’t misgender me, you can’t make fun of me, you have to let me stim and rock in public, you have to be okay with the fact that I’m mentally ill, you can’t treat me like I’m stupid because I have tits,” and enforce it, and really only be friends with people who fit those criteria. (The exception is jobs– as a Jobs Human, you will sometimes have to interact with people who don’t respect you. But even then I understand that codes of professionalism usually mean that “cordial and polite” is more common than “outright bullying.”)
As an adult, you have the right to tell people to fuck off.
And for those of us who are weird– who are queer or trans or crazy or autistic or just a little off– the right to tell people to fuck off is pretty much the biggest quality of life increase I can imagine.
I specifically want to say something to my trans siblings: don’t kill yourself until after you’ve transitioned. I know, it feels like it’s impossible to have the body that you want; every day that passes, you’re ravaged more by testosterone or estrogen. You might be a woman who’s 6’4″ or a man with G cups or a nonbinary person who wants genitals that aren’t physically possible, and the idea that you’d pass, much less be happy with your body, seems unimaginable.
But transition helps. It is astonishing how much more I appreciate my body just because I’m confident that most people I interact with on a day-to-day basis see me as the gender I am, and I haven’t even medically transitioned. If you’re not being constantly misgendered, the things that will never change often become more manageable. I’m not going to lie and say that things will all be splendid, because they won’t. But if everyone sees you as a boy and you have this disgusting hairy body and this weird sticky-out thing that doesn’t belong and you’re tall and that won’t ever go away, you feel gross and miserable and disgusting. But if people see you as a woman and you have boobs, you can make peace with the height thing.
I worry about our discussions of transphobia. I mean, it’s important to raise awareness and to teach people to stop being cruel and to let people suffering know that they’re not alone, but there’s a price. I’ve talked with a lot of people who say wistfully that they’d love to be trans, but they just couldn’t deal with the transphobia. And… I worry that we’re teaching trans kids that there’s nothing to hope for, that they will never be seen as their gender, that the world hates them and the best thing they can do is hide in a bunker and hope that no one notices.
But there is. The transphobic assholes are loud, but the world is full of cis people who are kind, albeit deeply confused. I’ve been the first nonbinary person a lot of people have met, and most of the time people’s reactions are not anger or a desire to hurt; it’s worry. They’re afraid that they might inadvertently hurt me because they don’t understand transness, and the thought upsets them. The Internet signal-boosts every asshole’s nonconsensual coprophilia play, and social justice communities have a vested interest in pretending that they’re the only place where people won’t continually yell TRANNY at you, but in the real world most people don’t want to hurt other people.
And… there is so much out there. You can find love, you can find interesting work and friends and a community, you can look in the mirror and see a face you recognize, there is hope, I promise there is hope, it is bad but it is not as bad as it once was and we are making it better and you can make a life here and you do not have to be unhappy forever.
(Did you know one of the first composers on the Moog synthesizer was a trans woman? Did you know a trans woman revolutionized electronic engineering? Did you know that the highest paid female executive in America is a Jewish trans woman transhumanist who is making a robot version of her wife? Trans women are fucking nerds.)
It’s a lie that half of us die before 23, you know. We survive. We live.
Finally, this is my sincerest wish for Leelah Alcorn’s parents: I hope you learn exactly what you’ve done and that you can never, ever fix it. I hope you read about transness and come to accept that it is real and we have as much right to live our lives as anyone else. I hope you accept trans people, and I hope you realize that if you’d come to accept us a little bit earlier your daughter would be alive. I hope you go to bed every night and wake up every morning remembering your daughter’s face and knowing that she would be alive if it weren’t for you. I hope you know you’re murderers.
Love,
A real live trans adult.
Thing of Things 
Thank you for this, it gives me hope. I worry about the trans people in my life, as we are in our early twenties there are still remnants of that compulsory social life. This message needs to be spread, there are so many people going trough pain because our society tries to pressure us to stay with the idea that saying “fuck off” is not an acceptable reaction to not liking someone.
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Thank you for writing this. I stayed closeted for longer than I needed to because of the omnipresent doom and gloom refrain. Plenty of folks have treated me poorly for being trans since, but it’s been largely due to the uneasiness you describe rather than outright hatred, and the defensiveness I’d built up to cope with the seemingly inevitable violence didn’t help me interact with the fumbling reactions I was getting.
This is also why I used to lose my shit at critics of the It Gets Better Project. While the production has some assumptions at its heart that don’t apply to everyone, a collection of videos telling kids that folks like them exist and that celebrities they respect accept them is an overall positive contribution to the world. The act of offering even a tentative roadmap to happiness is incredibly powerful.
Rest in peace, Leelah.
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Some people reading this might appreciate this Arcade Fire music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRXc_-c_9Xc (Although others have complained about the casting and various other aspects.) Content warning for some violence, but I think in the end it’s pretty uplifting. (Also Arcade Fire is great.)
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You shall know
Them by the furor
Of the blazing hope they bear!
And the gleam
Of searching vision
Finding all who yet forswear
From those of old whose suff’ring
Gave their case a desperate glare
Now as steel-armed soldiers marching
For Empire, free from fear
– Anthem of the Rainbow Covenant Regiments.
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I’ve read your comment about 8 times and I have no idea what it means and the phrases don’t match anywhere else. Forgive me for being obtuse, but what did you mean?
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Thank you, mate.
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Yeah, this is so amazing and I’m simultaneously grateful that you wrote it and sorry that you had to.
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I am confused by your statement about “jobs humans” as though it’s some sort of special case. A large majority of people have jobs for most of their adult lives. Some of them are able to maintain a social life of people they choose outside their work, but I know people who say they don’t have time or opportunities to meet anyone outside work (and are surprised to hear that this isn’t the case for everyone in their late 20s). Some people have hobbies/interests that lend themselves to forming other social groups and jobs that leave time for those things, but some people don’t.
Professional norms that keep people “cordial and polite” help a lot in some jobs and industries (especially higher-paid/higher-class ones), but many other people have to deal with managers who are petty tyrants just as bad or worse than the bullies and bad teachers they encounter in high school. Also the two most common occupations in the US are “retail sales workers” (8.5M) and “food and beverage serving workers” (6.7M), both of which involve interacting with and usually submitting to customers who are anything but “cordial and polite” on a daily basis.
On a more general note, the “only be friends/interact with people who fit your chosen criteria” thing only works if you are lucky enough to have an abundance of people who want to interact with you (relative to the onerousness of your chosen criteria). This works for you and me, but some people find themselves forced into painful compromises, even to the point of tolerating abuse, with the only alternative a life of loneliness.
There is something of a bravery argument here, and I think people like Leelah Alcorn and indeed most teenagers would benefit much more from reading your post than my comment. But I think perhaps some of your blog readers could use a reminder that the world is not so just, that even though life really did get unimaginably better for you and your friends (and me!), there are many others (near-invisible to us) for whom it got no better, who live their entire lives never finding the kind of friendship and freedom we enjoy.
Not that I know how to solve that. Best I’ve got is, support basic income and try not to be unnecessarily cruel even to unlikable and incompetent people.
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Unfortunately, my experience of jobs where you actually have to interact with people is fairly limited. (My experience of retail work was very solitary and didn’t involve any nonscripted interactions.) This post is definitely written from the perspective of a member of the unemployed moocher class. 🙂
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The biggest problem with being a member of the unemployed moocher class is that you often end up at the mercy of the same two dictators who ruled your life as a teenager, because they’re often the easiest people to mooch off of.
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Yeah, being likable enough that you can mooch near-indefinitely solely from friends you actually like (rather than from parents/relatives or “whoever will put up with you”) is definitely a rare privilege. (Not that you should feel bad about using it; it’s still almost certainly positive-sum.)
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“social justice communities have a vested interest in pretending that they’re the only place where people won’t continually yell TRANNY at you, but in the real world most people don’t want to hurt other people.”
This doesn’t even require any dishonesty from the SJ people – I find it likely that many non-SJ people act more hostile to SJ discourse than they would to learning that a stranger is transsexual; SJ discourse can come off as sanctimonious and holier-than-thou. So as a result, SJ people mistake outsider’s reaction to SJ preaching to how intolerant they are of various minorities, and so overestimate various kinds of persecution/oppression (this effect is in addition to the usual echo chamber effects of any ideology).
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There’s presumably also a self-selection effect to consider. The people with the most incentive to seek out and spend time in social justice communities are likely to be the ones who need those communities the most, which is to say the ones who are having or have had the worst experiences.
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There’s also a different sort of self-selection going on in who else talks to them: People who comment in X spaces and are not X (where X is anything remotely politicized) are disproportionately people who see X as the enemy and have come there to fight.
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“I hope you know you’re murderers.”
What the heck? Why is everyone piling on these people who have just lost a child? These two individuals having an epiphany will do jack-shit for welfare of trans people. Whatever happened to compassion? Or is that only for people you like?
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I think driving your child to suicide is a slightly different case than the median example of a parent who has just lost a child. It’s not like their daughter killed herself for unrelated reasons; it was a direct consequence of them sending her to conversion therapy and isolating her from her friends. Of course I don’t endorse mistreating them in any way, but I’m not going to pretend my emotional reaction to their grief isn’t “justice is served.”
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a) There’s a vast difference between driving your kids to suicide because of your malice or power-lust and doing it out of ignorance. This is the latter. The damage on the child is no doubt equal in both cases but the moral standing of the parent is not. It’s the difference between homicide and manslaughter.
b) Bigotry is bad. But “bigots deserve to suffer the pain of child loss and immeasurable guilt” isn’t that far behind some bigoted beliefs in it’s awfulness, and far ahead of others.
I agree with just about everthing else in your essay, but the lack of compassion to people who have lost a child – even if you loathe them as people – is horrible.
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This is why I don’t like the concept of justice at all – on a System 2 level. On System 1 level I’m a normal human being, that tends to enjoy suffering of those who had hurt me or someone I care about. Wanting revenge is a normal reaction. However, when I’m calm enough to apply higher-level ethical reasoning, I notice that sadism is generally bad reaction, and justice is a moral switch that turns the most horrible feelings in the most noble ones. Look at the comments to these: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/160lkc/puppy_burned_alive_last_night_in_sacramento_8000/ or http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/23dke4/lion_vs_hunter/ – people are competing in coming up with the most horrible way of torturing perpetrators, and whoever calls them out on that is heavily downvoted.
So, whereas I totally can have feelings about justice and revenge, I prefer to use consequentialist approach: what should we do to minimize the amount of suffering? Both the suffering of victims and offenders counts. Sometimes punishment is the answer – to deter other potential offenders – but we really have to weigh if statistically we’re really preventing more suffering of victims than we inflict on criminals by punishing them.
In this particular case, there is at least one scenario in which the realization of guilt and subsequent suffering may lead to the decrease of total suffering – if it drives her parents into participating in and donating to LGBT activism. But there are also scenarios in which it does nothing or even makes things worse – if they just sit there crushed by guilt, or possibly commit suicide as well, because of it. I absolutely don’t know which one of them is more likely, as well as the expected value of the outcome of each of them, so I have no idea whether the parents’ suffering is net positive or not. And of course the only reason why I’m even able to execute far mode thinking in this case is that I don’t really relate to the situation, never having experienced serious problems with relatives because of unconventional gender presentation. If I had, most likely I would experience much higher empathy to the victim than to the parents, and feel satisfaction because of their suffering.
On a different note, it’s hard to tell from the information available whether the parents really alieved the claims of their religion about eternal damnation for sexual abominations, or just used these beliefs to justify the hateful behavior. If it’s the former – fairly unlikely, but still – they may have been motivated by the desire to do the best to their child, and made her avoid torture in hell. But what’ much more likely is that they may have not realized that what they’re doing can be traumatizing. Some people are that ignorant of psychology, so they don’t understand that conversion therapy is torture, and that being “harsh” to your kid may be bad for them. A case could be made that in 2014 in the US for the middle class this information is so much available that failing to familiarize oneself with it is unacceptable negligence, and doesn’t remove any liability for the ignorant action. However, that sounds pretty much like the conservative claim that the possibilities for getting rich are so abundant that being poor is entirely one’s fault. And the same kind of objection about privilege can be raised here: her parents grew up without the privilege of being exposed to the state of the art psychology. But of course there’s also a possibility that they’re complete sociopaths or sadists without even a slightest glimpse of love to their child. I remember seeing a post, which could of course be trolling, but if taken at the face value, it was written by a woman from an Eastern pro-Russia region of Ukraine, who said that she doesn’t regret the death of her son, and is offended by condolence, since her son married a “fascist” woman from Western Ukraine, and fought on the Ukrainian side of the conflict.
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How should a parent feel if they kill their child by e.g. driving drunk and crashing? They have just lost a child they never intended to kill, but it’s a result of their own poor and unethical choices.
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That would, I believe, count as homicide by negligence. This was not a case of one act though, this was multi-year child abuse. Conversion therapy is under investigation for breaching the Geneva convention against cruel and unusual punishment. Isolating a child from all non-family contact is emotional abuse. Just because it was all *designed* to look ok-ish from the outside doesn’t mean it wasn’t deeply traumatizing and harmful, and considering how none of this was spur-of-the-moment stuff, I find this much more evil than having a deadly accident while driving drunk.
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So yes, “I hope you know you’re murderers” is also how I’d put it.
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@Stille, @Anon256 I think the answer I gave Ozy above – the difference between malice and ignorance – applies to both of you. I think intent really does matter in deciding how awful people are, whether they deserve what happened to them, and what our response should. An abuser who gets zir jollies from beating up small human beings who can’t fight back is clearly much worse than someone who practices corporal punishment because that’s how they think children should be raised and it pains them to do it. The latter falls below the threshold of awfulness at which it’s okay to say “You’re murderers.”
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I, too, felt there was something majorly off with the last paragraph. (And only last paragraph; beautiful stuff, Ozy, I’m pretty emotional right now.)
I think there’s a difference between these two things:
“I hope you read about transness and come to accept that it is real and we have as much right to live our lives as anyone else. I hope you accept trans people, and I hope you realize that if you’d come to accept us a little bit earlier your daughter would be alive. […] I hope you know you’re murderers.”
“I hope you learn exactly what you’ve done and that you can never, ever fix it. […] I hope you go to bed every night and wake up every morning remembering your daughter’s face and knowing that she would be alive if it weren’t for you. I hope you know you’re murderers.”
I agree with the first statement. I understand the second statement, but … no, forgiveness is always the answer.
There’s no point in hoping these people are vicariously tortured; all it will do is make you more sympathetic when Bad People are calling for a witchhunt against the evil heretics.
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There’s a difference between wanting people to be tortured and wanting them to realise the full extent of the consequences of their own actions. Ozy didn’t say they should never be happy again or never experience peace. But people who have done bad things need to understand what they have done.
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@queenshulamit
I don’t see why “But people who have done bad things need to understand what they have done.” is always true. Maybe its usually true that people should understand the harm they have caused so they can cause less harm in the future. But suffering for suffering’s sake is always a bad thing. So sometimes it is probably better for people to never understand the damage they caused.
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@stargirlprincess There are two probable outcomes in this situation.
1. Leelah’s parents realise they did an horrific abuse thing which caused their little girl to kill herself. They will come to understand and support trans rights and advocate for still-living trans people in an attempt to atone for their horrifying actions. They will never ever ever bring Leelah back but they might be able to help other trans people.
2. Leelah’s parents continue to believe that being trans is a terrible sin, that the child they think of as a son was killed by giving into the “sin” of transness and join a movement of people who believe that increased lgbt suicide risk is caused by a “sinful lifestyle.” They will parade around talking about how the desire to transition killed their child, how they should have sent “him” to conversion therapy sooner, bla bla bla. They will add fuel to a fire that is burning trans people and make everything even worse.
The first outcome is better than the second.
Also it’s a little harsh to not allow a trans person to express pain and anger when hearing about another trans person being abused to death.
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@queenshulamit I agree with you in this particular situation it would be much better for them to understand what they have done. I just disagree that ” But people who have done bad things need to understand what they have done” is true in general (though its usually true).
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Don’t forget that negative consequences have a deterrent effect as well. If people think to themselves “if my child is trans and I misgender them, they could kill themselves and it would be my fault”, then that is a pretty strong argument in favor of not misgendering your trans children. Anticipation of future guilt and pain helps people avoid doing wrong; unfortunately, that requires that some other people suffer guilt and pain.
Also, yeah, I’m a trans person who has a letter coming out to my parents I haven’t sent because when I send it they’re probably going to stop speaking to me, I’m allowed to get angry about the topic.
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“Don’t forget that negative consequences have a deterrent effect as well.”
This argument would seem to apply to externally imposed negative consequences as well–that is, it would justify actual non-metaphorical torture.
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Let me put it this way: I would not wish for an actual, literal murderer to spend the rest of their days haunted by what they did. I would wish for them to realize that what they did was wrong and repent.
Angry though I am about this – though, understandably, less angry than our host – if these people turned around in the morning and went to an LGBT group, I would want them to be treated with courtesy, not have their daughter’s death shoved in their faces. It might be actually possible to make this haunt them for the rest of their lives, and that would be wrong.
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Them expecting sympathy from me is EXACTLY, LITERALLY like the proverbial murderer who killed his parents and pleaded that he’s a poor pitiable orphan.
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OMG Ozy, thank you for this.
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Gotta say, I like most of what you have to say, but I disagreed with a number of the things in this post. My own experiences as a trans person who has transitioned and who has left high school do not align with the rosy picture you present there. Also, another thing that I need to point out is that even after the events of high school (or before) have ceased actively occurring, that doesn’t mean that one is free of the pain they caused.
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This post takes place in a context: a context in which trans people are continually told about job discrimination, housing discrimination, family rejection, denial of health care, harassment, violence, murder.
And those things are real.
But they aren’t the only thing that’s real. And I think if we concentrate too much on those things it’s easy to paint our lives as ones of hopeless misery when… they’re not, not always. And I don’t think it’s fair to tell young trans people that they don’t have anything to hope for.
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Would like to point out that in some places- a lot of places, actually- abovementioned pair of humans face very few consequences even if they beat their kids. (In non-visible ways, that is.)
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I’d like to add that even if your parents are both kind and wise, there’s a huge deciding-who-to-associate improvement that comes with finishing high school. Even the most “selective” high schools force you to interact with lots of kinds of people you can leave behind in college.
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