Leelah Alcorn, transgender girl, kills self due to bigoted parents

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Christianity needs to be destroyed.

Ignorant statement. Christianity is an excuse for poor treatment, not the reason.

Obviously Snowstalker's wrong, but it's kind of just covering our own asses as Christians to reduce it to that and refuse to admit that Christianity can genuinely be a contributing factor to this sort of thing that we genuinely have reexamination and reform that we desperately need to do, isn't it?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I think the problem isn’t that Christianity won’t address these issues. It is, but in the completely opposite direction to which it should be doing so at least in a global sense. The end result of that is both sinister and tragic. If anyone talks about ‘Christianity’ then they have to appreciate that global Christian thinking on these matters is regressive. In fact it’s more regressive than it has probably ever been at any point in the history of Christianity because it has been decided that it is ‘now an issue.’

Oh, definitely. The sudden spike in number and severity of homophobic statements out of the Catholic Church starting around the 1970s or 1980s--statements frequently written in a register of hysteria that would be funny if it weren't so sad, indicating a sense of urgency and more or less blind determination to address something allegedly 'new' and allegedly 'scary' that, reading these documents, the Church seems to think has just now appeared on its radar--as against previous centuries of (at least by comparison) not really caring to address the subject, clearly demonstrates that.

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There are denominations that have historically had or have recently developed understandings of sexuality that are both well-grounded and down-to-earth with respect to empirical reality and intellectually responsible and morally robust with respect to theology. The Quakers come to mind, as do certain types of Congregationalists and Methodists. (I'd love to be able to say that Anglicans come to mind as well but I can't say that in good conscience because not only does the Anglican Communion has a whole have no coherent understanding of sexuality--regardless of whether or not that understanding is a good one, even--many of the provinces don't have one either, and many of those that do have understandings that are insanely awful.) We--'we' being the rest of Christianity--could all learn something from these understandings, even if not all of the specifics of their conclusions are directly translatable into a non-Quaker or non-Congregationalist or non-Methodist or non-whatever else theological and ecclesiastical context. The problem is of course that these denominations are mostly present in parts of the world that are already more or less 'liberal' on these sorts of issues, and aren't situated in the directions in which Christianity is really still growing.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/12/31/us/ohio-transgender-teen-suicide/

The mother speaks.

Disgusting.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Not super-directly related to what was just being discussed (for the record: I see nothing wrong with the existence of gender roles as an abstract concept but think the boundaries between them should be as porous and as optional as possible, and I don't actually particularly care whether they're rooted in biology or not), but something else that's been weighing on me for the past couple of days with regards to all this is that such support for trans people as we do have in this country seems to default to prioritizing the needs of trans men over trans women. An example, one that might seem somewhat petty but that comes to mind for me because I've encountered it several times in the quite recent past (and yes, I admit that it's mostly tumblr where I've encountered this), is the tendency that a lot of people have to recommend contouring without explaining how to do it. People who have been socialized as male cannot be expected to either already know or somehow intuit how to contour. Hell, even a lot of people who have been socialized as female don't know how to contour. The impression that one gets is something along the lines of 'the trans people most worth giving advice and support to are people who were assigned female at birth and to some extent socialized into conventional femininity but now want to look more masculine', which completely sidelines the needs of all trans women and frankly a lot of trans men too.

The word that a lot of people (again, especially on tumblr) will use for this sort of thing is 'transmisogyny', a special type of misogyny held to specifically afflict trans women by contrast to both non-trans women (not using the adjective 'cis' in deference to some posters here who find it twee or something) and trans men, but I don't think it's necessarily helpful to treat it as qualitatively different from other forms of transphobia and misogyny when really it's more or less just both acting at once. Denying that trans women face unique challenges compared to both non-trans women and trans men is mendacious and harmful, but claiming that these challenges stem from a qualitatively unique form of oppression rather than a compound of more familiar forms strikes me as needlessly damaging to solidarity (or intersectionality, whatever your particular current of leftist and feminist activism's preferred term is for this concept).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Given that this thread is mainly dedicated to chastising parents who have recently lost their child in an especially unpleasant way for their moral failures, it might not be the most appropriate place for a tasteful discussion of the ethics of suicide.

Their moral failures which directly contributed to their child's death.

I agree that Atlas in general isn't an appropriate place for a tasteful discussion of the ethics of suicide.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Are we really bringing in the idea that Leelah's selfishness might have traumatized the truck driver?  Jesus **** can you people just say that she skeeves you out and you want an excuse to say something bad about her?  Do you think you aren't completely transparent?  Just get it out and be honest and stop hiding your nastiness behind such a stupid and irrelevant argument in the overall conversation.

Uh, I am trans and I think Leelah erred in terms of method, I just didn't want to bring it up until now because I think it distracts from the main point.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Are we really bringing in the idea that Leelah's selfishness might have traumatized the truck driver?  Jesus **** can you people just say that she skeeves you out and you want an excuse to say something bad about her?  Do you think you aren't completely transparent?  Just get it out and be honest and stop hiding your nastiness behind such a stupid and irrelevant argument in the overall conversation.

Uh, I am trans and I think Leelah erred in terms of method, I just didn't want to bring it up until now because I think it distracts from the main point.

Maybe so, but that is not what we are discussing here.  It's like discussing the rationale the Bush Administration used to invade Iraq and then bringing up how it boosted American morale back home.  Yea sure, but that's not the point and if you make a point to mention that you are clearly just doing it to further an already-standing opinion. Same thing here, where those people who are the first to bemoan the plight of the driver are also the first to display a prejudice or ignorance towards trans individuals.

Yes, I agree, which is why I didn't bring this up before. It's just not the point.