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

[afleitch]

I read this story earlier and it touched my conscience more than I thought it would. There is a great sadness not only in the suicide, but in the fact that she felt she needed to make this post appear after it had happened because she knew her family would never tell the truth. And that's what's very sad. Christianity as practiced can often nothing more than an ideology to serve the ego; securing your own  salvation. If other people suffer as collateral damage, less you be seen by either your god or your community to care about someone a little too much who is outside your own in-group or contradicts whatever stupid some passage says, well that's what you have to do. Me me me. You'll find plenty of people to tell you you're right anyway.

So family; flesh and blood get's subverted to your own selfish desire to stay on the right side of a superstition. And this is what happens. And when people ask for help, you're more concerned with helping and affirming yourself than you are with helping them.

She had issues, and she had other routes to take but if you suffer from depression then you cannot see the wood for the trees. Adulthood is a lifetime away, even when you're 17. It's a tragedy.

[afleitch]

so her moral culpability for truck-jumping is quite minimal, IMO.  ideally she'd have darknetted a whole bunch of heroin or cyanide, but this is a lot to ask of someone who felt surrounded by quicksand in all directions.  

^^^

You can't really judge someone who is emotionally and mentally suffering for killing themselves in a manner that we might not consider 'rational'

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?

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.’

Given that Christian thought still hasn't completely grappled with the concept of women, let alone trans issues, it will probably take some considerable time.

'God made you to be what that book tells you, you should be and if you aren't that way then it's your fault; you're a sinner, you're immoral, you're possessed, you're wrong, go pray, go fix yourself, go repent' is still a very powerful message whether it's Georgia or Gambia. Christianity in general has never allowed itself to develop a fully formed and fully informed position on sexuality and gender. It is perversely concerned with the physical and the carnal and the need for uniformity in how those facets are presented and utilised.

[afleitch]

The only thing you leave behind when you die is what people think of you. You can do your best to be the master of that in life; if you're good you hope that people will remember that you are good. But it's never entirely in your control. In this instance it is likely that she will be buried as a he, in clothing that she would not have liked and in a manner that is disrespectful to her life and to who she was as a person. That is the ultimate tragedy and it befalls many people; if you are eulogised as a person that you were not, then it's almost as if you were never 'you' at all.

The other issue related to this, is the general disregard for the rights of children in society. Children have rights as people independent of and contrary to the rights or wishes of their parents. This is a normal part of human development.  It is unfortunate that their wishes, even when expressed, can often be disregarded particularly on the cusp of adulthood. 

[afleitch]

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

The mother speaks.

[afleitch]

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).

Might be helpful here to outline some of the phrases you have used, just for the casual reader. My response is probably more directed at the forum in general because I think for some it's not self evident

I think society is more 'conducive' in both supporting and accepting trans men because that's the case  for men in general. That carries over into transitioning as well. Being physically male still gives men a physical advantage. It is a 'step up' in some minds, it's subconscious, it's not meant to be deliberately sexist but it does linger even in very open societies and open minds. It gives the power to physically dominate and to penetrate. Being a passive male partner in a same sex relationship or a dominant female in a same sex relationship carries a similar baggage, even amongst LGBT people.

Also aesthetically (because society is a bitch like that), the transition from female to male is more 'convincing'. The effects of testosterone in what it does to the framework of a male body makes transition to a female somewhat more conditional (I don't like that word but it'll do) that it is the other way around. While I know from a friend of mine that his experience of puberty and the growth of breasts and menstruation was a great difficulty for him, he knew (and all credit to the NHS here) that when he was 18, that he could begin his transition. He could tick all the medical and psychological boxes as a consenting adult. For cases such as Leelah that wait is greater in terms of what it would do to her body. However, it is also a very difficult position for society as protective and overprotective of children as it is, to deal with these issues. Sometimes it needn't involve any permanent physical alteration at all. There is certainly a very militant element within the trans community that think it has to be all or nothing.

We don't want to think of children thinking adult 'things' about sex, gender and sexuality. We somehow forget ourselves in that respect when we become adults, but we do need to 'do something about it'.

In terms of how gender is expressed by an individual, in the manner in which they carry themselves, how they dress, all the things that make life quite stressful for anyone because every time you meet someone it's an 'impression' is amplified for trans people but it shouldn't differ. You really shouldn't recommend that anyone dress or carry themselves in any other way than they see fit. With my friend,  I couldn't honestly advise on what to wear. If I see something I like, I will wear it. I did take him to a predominantly male gym, just to act as a buddy in what is quite an intimidating environment. Even I will be the butt of a gay joke, followed by a request to spot someone and then a 'how's your man?' question meant with absolute sincerity. It's daunting. But there is no other way to navigate it than to jump in.

[afleitch]

Let's remember that this person was mentally ill (suicidal depression) so their point of view might not be 100% objectively trustworthy. We don't know what the parent/child relationship was like.

Obviously Leelah didn't feel loved enough, and obviously the parents didn't approve of their child being trans, but that doesn't mean the parents bullied or mistreated her.

Also, we shouldn't make a martyr over a person committing suicide. That would only encourage more confused and depressed people into suicide.

The parents obviously don't care about their daughter enough to accept who she was. That's mistreatment right there. Leelah wasn't "confused". She was fed up with her parents and society at large treating trasngender people like sh**t.

It is clear, even stripping the hyperbole from her posts what the situation was. The mother's response to the media simply confirms that. I have no doubt that her family were not supportive for religious reasons and no doubt tried to subject her to 'Christian therapy'. She did not get the psychological help she needed to assist her in dealing with everything from affirming herself to dealing with her depression.

[afleitch]

I have no idea what trans people go through both internally and externally, but it's obvious that the parents completely dismissed or didn't understand that their late adolescent child was experiencing real and severe emotional and psychological difficulties, and as such should never, ever be treated this way. Minimally, I hope that lesson comes out of this. This is a serious issue that needs to be treated as such. The parents reacted as though their child was misbehaving or something, and that's disturbing.

If they didn't believe that transgenderism is "real", then why wouldn't they think this was a phase or some other sort of rebellious behavior?

It was 'real' enough for them to oppose it and to oppose it on religious grounds.

[afleitch]

The religious context of this is not 100% clear to me. Is this link between fundis and being against transsexuals as simple as "God ascribed a gender to him/her, it is sinful to change it?" Or is there more to it? (fear of their "son" turning gay by having a relationship to a guy?).

No on answered this, so I will repost.

There are probably any number of answers to that. The problem is that Christianity, as rooted as it is in patriarchy generally (and I do mean generally here) takes a patriarchal view of sex, gender and sexuality. That doesn't have much room for anything other than man is man, woman is woman, man is 'greater' than women (which mealy mouthed Christians try to make out as being about different roles, attributes rather than a continuation of the Greek understanding of the lesser nature of women) and man and women should procreate. For some it leaves very little wiggle room.

[afleitch]

I also believe they thought they were acting in the best interest of their child themselves.