Leelah Alcorn killed herself. She stepped in front of a truck the Sunday after Christmas. I looked at a picture of her face and found her to be both sad and beautiful all at once. She was born a boy in a Christian household. In the face of telling her parents that she felt like a girl born into a boy's body, she was told that: God does not make mistakes.
I am not a reporter. I talk about the things that bother me in this online place that I call my own. I am not telling this story for any other reason than I heard it and it bothered me. It hurt me. You can read it if you want, you can sympathize, disagree or go away.
The death of Leelah Alcorn is murder to me. And while I realize that this is an odd thing to say, I mean it with every fiber of my being. Our society murders innocent people, and it begins with a death of the soul that oftentimes transfers itself into a death of the body--a senseless kind of death. This person did not have cancer. This person wasn't shot in the commission of some terrible crime. This person was murdered from the inside out, and, I guess, what I want people to do is TALK about it--admit that we do this to one another. Hopefully, if we speak on it, we can stop killing our future doctors and scientists and poets for stupid reasons that don't matter at all in the great scheme of things that are ... human.
People are killing their own children. And this is something cold and cruel that I simply do not understand. While I get the fact that some people kill their children every day and the jails and prisons are stocked full of those kinds of people, this isn't quite that. 'Good' people, 'decent' people--not cold blooded psychopaths are committing the acts that I am talking about here. People very close to this benevolent 'god' that they claim to believe in. If these parents truly believed that 'God does not make mistakes' then it stands to reason, by their own account, that they wouldn't find anything wrong with their child to begin with. Their god made their child the way they are in the first place, correct?
Instead, they take this poor kid off to be tortured by fanatics (Christian 'therapists') who think they can change the child's inner make up to fit better into some bullshit 'standard' of what society calls 'correct' and 'true'. Tortured, the child tries to conform and when the child can not the child is rejected. A lot of the time, these children are put out of their households and forced out onto the streets -- defenseless against the predators that are out there waiting for them. A lot of the time, these children just up and kill themselves unable to be what is wanted--unable to be anything other than who they are.
I'd like to say that I can't imagine the pain, etc., but I can. It only takes being human to put yourself in the shoes of a person like this. It's not as hard as some people try to make it out to be. We are all people and we all have empathy. Imagine what it is like to be like this person, imagine the kind of rejection one would feel being cast off from one's family, reviled, discussed like there's something wrong with you all the time, talked down to, belittled...
Imagine the hurt ... and change.
This murdered kid could be the person that cures cancer for us all. And, yet, this life is snuffed out for the stupidest reason imaginable -- an ideology, a fucking idea of how things are 'supposed' to be.
I despise labels--and the way human beings have of putting things into neat little boxes that are, more often than not, labeled incorrectly and for convenience. My convenience is not more important than someone's LIFE.
Please don't be sad, it's for the better. The life I
would've lived isn't worth living in... because I'm transgender..."
She would never truly be a girl, her mother said, because God
doesn't make mistakes.
"If you are reading this, parents, please don't
tell this to your kids, even if you are Christian or are against transgender
people don't ever say that to someone, especially your kid...That won't do
anything but make them hate them self. That's exactly what it did to me."
"All I have to do is jump, and then everything is
over."
Maybe I'm wrong and my imagination is not good enough. There is a school of thought that seems to believe that you can't understand a thing unless you are that thing yourself. I have my own demons, and while they are not the same, they are similar--because I'm a fucking person and we are not as different as we'd like to claim. I can not even imagine doing something like this to my own. The agony in this kid's death note is palatable, and I wouldn't want to make my child feel that way about anything, especially something they can't change like: WHO THEY ARE.
I wouldn't want to be responsible for that kind of pain, and then claim, somehow, to love that person. These are things you do to someone you hate, and, even then, only if you are a monster.
Then again, if Da Lord told me to slit my son's throat on the top of a mountain, I'd have told him to go fuck himself.
Currently in my kitchen making Lean just like Trayvon Martin--even though you can't make Lean with Skittles and Iced Tea. With this new hate driven recipe, I'm going to create that Imaginary Lean that's just as tasty as Walter White's Blue Sky and I'm going to get so fucked up that I float right off this shitty little planet with its judgmental, cave-thinking, twisted humans who think they are sooo much better than the animals around them but put the animals to shame for the horrific, selfish, bullshit they do to one another like its NOTHING ...
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