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LGBT News 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Movement

Discussion in 'Current Events, World News, & LGBT News' started by Mischief, Dec 29, 2014.

  1. Oddish

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    I feel so fucking disgusted right now with transphobic idiots, namely Leelah's poor excuse for a "mother." The transphobic piece of filth couldn't even give her daughter the closure of calling her a woman in her 'farewell' Facebook post.

    Conversion therapy, and those who wield their religion as an excuse to be like this, I'm so fucking appalled.
     
  2. GhostOfRazgriz

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    I'm not sure about how much of a direct effect her parents had on her suicide. Don't get me wrong, how they treated her was absolutely atrocious, and I believe they could have stopped this from happening if they had been more supportive and given her the comfort and love that all children deserve and need. I think that her dysphoria is the real cause of her death, and I feel that one of the biggest roadblocks in trans* awareness is the lack of awareness and understanding of gender dysphoria by the majority of society.

    The second last paragraph of her suicide letter gives the reasons LeeLah felt she couldn't live any longer:
    The last line caught my attention, because she says, "I get worse." As a 17 year old transgirl, I completely get what she means. For males, puberty can continue into our early twenties. Everyday, I wake up knowing my body is becoming more and more masculine and I can't do anything about it because my parents don't approve of my gender identity. And I know that the longer it takes to start to transition the harder it's going to be. I have horrible funks of dysphoria right now. I don't even want to know how bad they're going to be after 3+ more years of male puberty. I try not to think about it because it scares me. I think her dysphoria drove her to kill herself, because she was scared it would only get worse.

    Like I said, a lot of people don't really know about or understand how terrible gender dysphoria can be. One of the most common explanations I've seen transgender people give to cisgender people about being transgender is that they feel like a woman trapped in a man's body, or vice-versa. But I don't think people understand the magnitude of the effect of constantly feeling like a prisoner in one's own body can have. My parents don't have a clue about what it is, despite several attempts by myself to explain it to them. They think my dysphoria is just depression caused by other things at some times, and at other times, they think I'm making it up and say I'm full of shit. They just don't know what it is, and they refuse to learn what it is from me.

    I'm not defending her parents one bit. What they did was horrible, cruel, and intolerant. And her mother's facebook post on her daughter's death disgusts me. I think they should be held accountable to some degree, but I don't know if they understood what they were doing though, because they didn't understand and/or were not aware of their daughter's gender dysphoria. Even though I don't believe this would have a huge impact on how her parents treated her, I feel that even the pro-LGBT news articles are getting that part wrong. The parents didn't start the fire that consumed their child, they just wouldn't help her out of it. In a world in which gender dysphoria is more commonly known by society and it is affirmed as being a problem that the trans* community struggles through by the media and in discussions in institutions such as Congress, courts and schools, I think that the parents should be charged with negligence, as in that world they would have known how deadly dysphoria can be, even if they didn't believe it themselves. But I think even the left-sided media needs to change the way it views the struggles of trans* folks. They only show the struggle we face with society, not the internal conflict we face everyday.
     
  3. Oddish

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    Thank you so, so much for emphasizing this point. It's something that has irritated me completely forever, how nobody talks about gender dysphoria or the pain that comes from being trapped in a body in which you can't escape, but rather focusing on the conflicts we have with society in general. I feel like if people were more aware of the fact that trans folks experience dysphoria, and this is why we transition, people may be less inclined to see it as a "choice," because they assume we don't feel this sort of pain every single day, but rather, we're just mentally "unclear."

    Irregardless, I am still extremely angry with her parents, and I won't give them any excuses, but I wholeheartedly agree here. People need to be educated about dysphoria, and the misery it brings trans people, especially those who can't (medically) transition.
     
  4. BryanM

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    With all due respect, they should definitely be charged with child abuse at the very least. Psychological abuse can have just as legitimate affect on a person than physical abuse. They may not have started the fire, but they definitely didn't do anything to help her at best, and at worst subjected her to hatred and bigotry that partly caused her death.
     
  5. florence2000

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    The daily mail used the right names and pronouns.
     
  6. GhostOfRazgriz

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    I've been thinking about it, and I definitely agree with you that the parents should be charged with some crime. But I still firmly believe that one of the reasons situations form in which trans* folk commit suicide is because of a lack of understanding of gender dysphoria by the people around them. I know this is true as I have been driven very close to taking my own life because of problems regarding that.

    And whether or not the parents should be charged really wasn't the point of my previous post. The main point is that people need to be careful, and understand how big of a role gender dysphoria plays in the lives of the trans* community. People need to realize how deadly it can be, and not put all the blame on the parents, and in some cases to not even put the focus on the parents actions. I will still stand by my statement that I think her dysphoria is what led her to kill herself. I think it is the thing we should be raising awareness of. There is no cause in the world that can guarantee that parents won't be bigots to their children. There are parents that abuse their children even though abuse is illegal. There are parents that get away with it. We can't allow our focus on this event to be upon our anger at the parents (even though, speaking for myself, I have a huge amount of anger towards them. I am incredibly pissed off at them. The mother's facebook status is revolting, and reading about their attempts at "curing" their daughter made me cry). But that's not where our focus should be. Our focus should be in pushing for legal framework that makes it easier for young transgender people to seek transition therapy, and that can only happen if awareness about gender dysphoria increases.
     
  7. Quiet Raven

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    Huh... I see...

    Wait a minute.... She says her "son" is 16... But the article says she is 17.... What's up with that?
     
  8. Pret Allez

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    I made the mistake of reading this story at work. And it was all I could do to keep from crying. I could barely keep myself together for the rest of the day.

    This story makes me so upset, and it's all the more upsetting to have people not understanding the fundamental issues they face. It's not an "identity" issue. It's who they are. It's about their bodies, and their needs to be emotionally healthy being inextricably tied to the physical.

    This makes me think of a new kind of child neglect. A lot of people elsewhere on the internet have made a lot of the "faith-based" counseling and how terrible that was. Yes, but it was missing a significant part of the picture. The real crime here wasn't that her parents tried to "ex-trans" her. The crime was that they refused to allow her to transition. They refused treatment. That's the part that's fucked up about all of this.
     
  9. Quiet Raven

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    What the parrents did is even more then negligence though. Like taking away all of her access to friends for 5 months is just plain abuse.

    If all they did was was the "conversion therapy" I would agree with you. But these parrents were far beyond just denial and negligence.

    But yes, the dysphoria was the main reason for her death, and yes, the world definitely needs to be better educated on gender identity. I do agree with that. But in this case, I would still put half the blame on the parrents. If they just gave her even a little support. It would have made a huge difference I'm sure.
     
  10. GhostOfRazgriz

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    I completely agree with you. Especially because I'm in the same boat as she was with my parents not allowing me to transition. They've threatened me that there will be grave consequences if I come out, and they stop me from participating in LGBT youth groups because, according to them, "they will influence me badly, because they have a mentality of an AA group." Transitioning would make my life easier, and I'm sure it would have made life easier for her too. And it's not just about waiting the extra year to turn 18, because often kids are still financially dependent on their parents to some degree after they move out. Transitioning, for a lot of us, is one of the few treatments for dysphoria. They let her die by not letting her transition.

    ---------- Post added 30th Dec 2014 at 07:50 PM ----------

    I agree, that support would have made a difference. But trying to force a lot of the blame on the parents, although it is completely justified to do so, steals focus from the less talked about issue. I honestly believe that a majority of people, or close to that, who hear about this will blame the parents to some extent. I think its almost given. But there's a lot of conversation that needs to be had about dysphoria because nobody knows about that. The struggle of the trans* community is often essentialized to challenging social norms like the bathroom debate. We're also too often essentialized as the T in LGBTAQ, and we often are seen as a section of sexuality. These essentializations occur towards non-heterosexual people as well. Gay people are often essentialized as being gay and nothing else, it becomes the most significant quality about them when it shouldn't be. (Like when someone tells someone else who is gay, "Oh! You should meet my friend ____! You'll love him, he's gay too!).

    But essentializing the struggle of the trans* community is dangerous. It gives off the mentality that if we pass anti-discrimination laws for gender identity and people don't try to "convert" them, that trans* people will be happy with themselves. I can be around people that support me 100%, and dysphoria can still screw my day up. We need better access to means to transition to escape dysphoria.

    ---------- Post added 30th Dec 2014 at 07:53 PM ----------

    And I do agree with you, that locking her up for five months is abuse.
     
  11. MsEmmzy

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    Just finished reading the story and came directly here... :icon_sad:
    I swear this is the reason trans* people can't be equal. Because there's some :***: transphobic bastards out there who can't see past their measly little views of the world. :tantrum:

    I'd better go do something else before I end up sending that poor girl's mom a thousand hate messages on Facebook. :tears:
     
  12. DoriaN

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    It was really weird reading the article for the first time a few days ago; her story sounds eerily similar to mine.

    Like, if I had not known better I would have thought I type it up.

    While I do feel she was rash and a bit immature, hopefully she is resting well.
     
  13. Littlehawk98

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    I saw the story this morning on Twitter and felt really sad. Then more and more info started coming out. I took to Tumblr and found the note she left and had to fight back tears for quite a while after. Then I saw her mother's post on Facebook, and my blood boiled. That dried up old hag has failed as a parent. I just don't understand how someone can be so close-minded that they can't even respect their daughter after her death. I don't ever want to forget Leelah. Leelah didn't deserve what she got. She deserved so much better...
     
  14. Ryujin

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    I feel sick.
     
  15. Rosepetal

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    Riley mosscatel felt the same way nd felt us nd his gf didn't care about him she got a new boyfriend fast nd he's trans and she called him her gf it pissed me off
     
  16. Daydreamer1

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    Parents that drive their kids to suicide or claim to be "good Christians" yet are bigoted need to be sterilized. I'm so pissed right now that I'm seeing red. Leelah's mother (who makes me sad that her father never pulled out) made transphobic comments at Laverne Cox, but claims she never bullied her child.

    Waste of breath. I hope Leelah finds peace and her parents suffer every second of the day knowing they murdered their beautiful child.
     
  17. Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    I've reblogged so much on this, and will continue to do so because IT'S NOT COOL OR ACCEPTABLE it's downright disgusting that parents would drive such a beautiful young woman to that length, when she had so much ahead of her. I had been following her on tumblr for months prior, and always enjoyed the things I saw of her. It breaks my heart to see her suffer like she did, and when I saw her note I bawled. Her stupid mother still won't even call her the correct pronouns, even after she was gone. It's not necessarily my place to rant about her troubles, as they aren't mine and I could never truly under stand the pain she went though. I only wish that both of her parents would just... idk. just regret and have unquenchable suffering for their daughter who they didn't deserve to even know. rip leelah (*hug*)
     
  18. Water lover

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    I almost feel as bad for the truck driver as I do her. He had nothing to do with the situation but must live with the fact that he killed someone this great wonderful girl. The whole situation is messed up. It's sad that young people must go to the extreme me of martying themselves to get anyone to help them.
     
  19. Burnedcloset

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    This story is so horrible sad.

    I tried typing a post about this girl's mother....I couldn't do it. Words cannot describe exactly how I feel about people like this. I don't think she should call herself a mother.

    She deserves grief and sorrow.
     
  20. SomeLeviathan

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    Re: 17 y/o Transgender Female Commits Suicide to Help Transgender Civil Rights Moveme

    I have a friend who is a trans woman that has considered ending her life because of the harassment and gaslighting from her mother. Thankfully, she's still alive.


    I'm having a hard time typing anything about this because of just how furious I am about what happened.

    rest in peace.