Leelah Alcorn died by suicide on December 28, 2014. She was 17 years old. She was trans.
Her tumblr blog has been archived by people who may or may not have known her. She expressed the feeling in her suicide note that no one really knew her, that she was alone, and that that loneliness had been enforced by her parents, who placed her in conversion therapy when after she came out as trans at age 14, who pulled her out of school and cut her off from her friends, online and offline, when she was 16.
Freshman year, then sophomore year, then junior year. The walls around you growing higher every day, the gulf between your body and your soul widening until the thing that is you is mostly empty space and a darkness that blots out the sun.
Who knew her? Not her parents, she says, and it's hard to argue with her. They couldn't even get her name right. Not her friends either, when her parents let her speak to them again after five months of solitude.
Not me. I didn't know anything about her until the news of her death radiated out from tumblr, to LGBTQ+ news outlets, to the Boston Globe and beyond to American history.
Still, she's lived in my brain for what will soon be nine years. Today I found her blog, archived by someone, because the internet doesn't forget, and I had a look. Her suicide note sits at the top. Below that, her posts unfold in reverse-chronological order. Many of them are just images, things she saw on her feed and decided they belonged in the digital scrapbook that was her blog. She loved Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena, Harajuku fashion, digital art and historical photography. She uplifted advocacy for women, for gay and trans people, for immigrants and minorities. She celebrated expressions of gender nonconformity, not just her own, but everyone's, across the spectrum and in every direction. She had no patience for bigotry, for exclusionism or infighting in the community. Her blog was a wonderful place to be.
And then I scroll up, and it feels like a clock ticking down to zero.
Leelah Alcorn's story is not unique. Quite the opposite, it's an archetype, both now and then. I think Leelah knew that.
"My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year," she wrote. "I want someone to look at that number and say 'that’s fucked up' and fix it. Fix society. Please."
This past Day of Visibility, I did what I do every year and looked at the twitter thread memorializing every trans person who died in the 365 days prior. Each person had a picture, an age and hometown or country, a short blurb about how they died. Suicide, suicide, murder, suicide, murder, murder, murder, murder, suicide, murder, suicide, suicide, exposure, exposure, exposure, exposure, exposure. Found dead in a roadside ditch, found dead in a roadside ditch.
Leelah's death brought with it an outcry against conversion therapy, a wish she specifically expressed in her final note to the world. There were results: Cincinnati, the third largest city in her home state, made conversion therapy illegal with City Ordinance 373 on December 9, 2015. As of today, it's illegal statewide in 25 states, either totally or for minors. Texas has not enacted a ban, not even in Travis County.
Unbelievably, the still-widespread legality of conversion therapy for minors is not the most pressing issue facing trans people this Pride month. Their right to exist at all in public is being threatened by fascists at every level of government, in bathrooms, in schools, at pharmacies, in clubs they own and frequent. Two of my closest friends, people without whom I would be long dead, are preparing to leave Texas specifically because despite the fact that they are 21 and 23, there is a very real risk that their hormone treatment will become illegal or inaccessible for people under 25. Similar bills were proposed in Oklahoma and Texas as recently as this spring.
The website translegislation.com is tracking 64 anti-trans bills in Texas as of this writing. All target children by hamstringing the legal ability of parents and institutions to listen to and care for a child who says that they are trans. Under these bills, if they are passed, public colleges can be forbidden from forming diversity, equity or inclusion offices. Trans people can be denied participation in sports. Pharmacies can refuse to fill HRT prescriptions on religious grounds. Children's mental and behavioral health facilities can be refused grant money if they "provide mental health services, including treatments or procedures, to a child that affirm the child's perception of the child's sex if that perception is inconsistent with the child's biological sex." (HB 1898)
Let me be unmistakably crystal clear on two things. First: the fact that these measures target children means that the fascists who wrote them trust their constituents to go after the adults. It's easier that way. Cops, PTAs, subscribers to InfoWars, angry men with guns tucked into their pants hearing the muffled bass of a drag club across the street at night, these people are not bound by the same rules the politicians are. They don't have to sign anything to kill or terrorize trans people. They might face consequences for it (they just as easily might not), but the result is the same: Trans people are either dead, or too scared to be trans in their line of sight. That is what this comes down to. When people say "children shouldn't have to see this," what they mean is "I shouldn't have to see this." Gender, to them, is sacred and immutable, because it is a source of power. Samuel R. Delaney once wrote that misogyny is the oldest bigotry, the one on which all others are based. Bigotry is a tool of power. For it to function, there must be a clear delineation between in and out, empowered and disempowered, man and woman. What fascists call "Gender Ideology" threatens that, and so threatens the basis of their hegemony. You hear it in the language they use. It's not just "Gender Ideology," it's "dangerous Gender Ideology." So they want it, and the people who in their eyes represent it, to shut up and go away.
The second thing:
Earlier, I said that Leelah Alcorn's story was an archetype. For Republican lawmakers, it is more than that.
It is a model. It's a success story. Trans kids grow up into trans adults, unless they do not. If you create an environment where the child is denied their identity at every turn, you limit their options to either giving up, accepting the identity you have forced upon them, or killing themselves, which achieves the same result: you, victorious, them, silent.
I would normally end a post like this with a call to action but I'm too exhausted and angry for the research required to do that right now. One will probably come later. All I can think about is Leelah, and why I chose her to haunt me nine years ago. She's like a fishhook in my brain, Leelah the symbol, yes, but also the woman, living with a few friends in an apartment in Cleveland, or maybe further away, sparsely decorated with what she can afford, a Sailor Moon wallscroll hanging above her bed. Today is her birthday. She would be 26 now. Should be.
TLC
