Remembering Leelah Alcorn

I had the privilege this week to contribute a few remarks to a Transgender Awareness event at one of our local colleges, and we were each asked to talk about someone who had influenced us. I chose to talk about Leelah Alcorn and how her death by suicide affected me. Since today is Transgender Day of Remembrance, I thought I should write down some of my thoughts.

Leelah was a teenager in Ohio struggling with her identity. When she was 14 she learned about gender identity, realized she was trans, and did something I never would have had the courage to do at her age: she told her parents who she was and she asked them for their help. Her parents refused. When she was 16 they sent her for conversion therapy, isolated her from her friends, and enrolled her in a Christian school. In 2014, at age 17, convinced that she would never find acceptance and get to live the life she wanted, she took her own life.

At the same time that Leelah was giving up hope, I was already in my fifties and still firmly in the closet. Having grown up in the 1960s and 70s when trans folks were viewed, at best, as curiosities, or, at worst, monstrosities, my internalized transphobia was pretty strong, and I had yet to find a therapist able to provide the proper context and guidance for my situation. I was convinced that transition would not only not help me but would actively harm my family and my ability to provide for them.

Learning about Leelah hit me in my gut and also broke my heart. I saw so much of her in myself. I wanted to go back in time and tell her she needed to hold on and find a way to survive. I wanted to tell her parents to be better, a sentiment David Lynch's character on Twin Peaks would put as "fix your hearts or die."

I knew I would be a better parent than Leelah's if my daughter ever felt the way she did, but I wanted to stand up and speak out for all the trans kids who needed defending. At the same time, I also knew I couldn't do that while hiding myself from the world. I won't say that Leelah Alcorn's death was the thing that cracked my hard-boiled egg, that would take a couple more years. But I thought about her often, and I still do.

The ghouls that we, the American people, have seen fit to put in power want to shove people like me back into the closet, and they want young people like Leelah to never see the light of day. And as tempting as it might be sometimes to hunker down and hide, I understand how important it is right now to stay visible and be there for the youngsters being told they have no future in our society.