Trigger Warning. I am not sure how to label it beyond that.
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The Trans Community lost a child last week. It’s probably not big news everywhere, it happens so often, but in my corner of the web things have exploded.
On 28 December, 2014, Leelah Alcorn walked in front of an oncoming truck. She was only a few months shy of her eighteenth birthday.
Since then members of the LGBTQ community and their allies have been posting about it on Facebook, Tweeting about it, and writing articles for various websites (such as the link above).
I have seen people label what happened as abuse and negligence, and I have seen people defend her parents as innocent. I am not going to voice my opinion in this article, because that is not what this post is about.
When she decided to leave, she left a message behind in the form of a set of Tumblr posts that were scheduled to post after the fact. Her Tumblr profile is no longer there but the various articles go into detail about what she said.
What has prompted this article however was what I have seen in conversations on Facebook.
I have seen people defend the parents’ innocence, insisting that they were in no way responsible for their child’s suicide.
I have seen people insist that being trans was a mental illness, a delusional disorder. They insisted that the parents were simply doing everything they could. They insisted that it was up to Leelah to dig deeper into her spiritual reserves to find inner strength to persevere just a little while longer.
I have seen people refer to her as delusional, a coward, selfish. They have expressed no sign of empathy or compassion for a child who was so lost that she would take her own life. They only expressed defensiveness because they felt their religion was coming under attack for the role that it played in this child’s death.
They insist that there was no abuse obvious in the stories they have read, or what they have heard from the family, who told CNN that they loved their SON unconditionally, but just couldn’t support THAT religiously.
For the Christians that are out there, that just don’t understand how there could possibly be any abuse in what the family did, or how it could possibly lead to a child’s death, please read on. I present here a thought exercise.
Imagine this:
You were born into a non-Christian family, but you came to know Christ. At a young age, your family found out about it, and forbid you from practicing.
They tell you it is just a phase and will soon pass.
You aren’t Christian, you are just confused.
They love you, but they just can’t accept this part of you.
They don’t let you talk to Christian friends. They look over your shoulder to be sure you aren’t visiting Christian websites. They go as far as to say there is no such thing as a Christian.
Now extend this out to the rest of your life. None of your friends at school, at least the ones you are allowed to talk to are Christian, and they either blow it off, or they actively attack you.
Imagine half of them don’t believe Christianity is a thing, and the other half believe you will burn in Hell for it.
Some are convinced you are going to aggressively recruit them, and verbally or physically attack you for even talking to them once they find out you are Christian.
Now extend it out further. The city council has voted in laws saying it is legal to discriminate against you because of who you are. You have committed no crime, but this existential part of your psyche is grounds to take away your rights.
People can legally declare self-defense if they attack you because your beliefs freak them out.
Extend this out further: your state legislature has passed laws saying that Christianity is an affront to their faith and an attack of civil society.
Your very existence is a blight on humanity. They are not only not going to censure your city level law makers, they are passing laws forbidding you from even taking the case to a civil or legal court.
Extend it out further: The national legislature is made up primarily of members of this majority religion. Some of them pay lip service to civil rights, but the rest actively work to codify the abuse you are receiving at the national level.
The Supreme Court, every member of which is this other religion, rules almost unanimously that there is no reason to protect your rights.
It’s your choice to believe in your God. They hold up the handful of Christians in the legislature as examples of why everything is perfectly fine.
Extend this out. The UN pays lip service to civil rights protections, but don’t really give a fuck. After all, they are all in the majority religion, or one of the larger groups.
The fact that it is unofficially, but effectively legal to kill you in the streets like a rabid dog is a primarily domestic issue.
Beyond that, your nation has veto power if the UN did decide to move.
There is a small ray of hope. There are obvious natural allies in the world, people who should understand your plight entirely. There are other Abrahamic religions who are also persecuted. They stand together with each other, and it would be expected that they should stand with you as well. Except they don’t most of the time.
Most of the time, members of these other two religions will pay lip service to having you around. They might even drag you from one party to another sometimes, to prove they have a Christian friend. When your back is against the wall though, they are just as freaked out by your Christianity as the members of the majority religion.
I know this sounds outlandish, but all I have really done is taken a description of the life of a member of the Trans community, and replaced them with religious labels and terms.
Even in places where great strides have been made for gay and lesbian men and women, trans people have been left in the dark. When they speak up, they are told by the LGB community that they are being selfish and asking for too much. I left off the T and the Q, because in this context the L and the G may as well be a bunch of cis straight dudes.
Try looking at the story through different eyes and see how different it looks.
Don’t look at everything from the perspective of the straight conservative Christian who is feeling insecure because someone has said their religion has caused harm to some minority.
Look at it for a moment through the eyes of a scared child, who belongs to a class of people who is a minority within the minority, whose very existence is treated as an abomination, and isn’t even allowed the strength that friends and family could provide.
Then ask if it is such a wild idea that she could have broken, that she could have found herself walking off into the darkness with no beacon to guide her home. The people who were responsible for holding the light up for her were the ones that took it away and left her to wander.