“There’s No Winning” — Leelah Alcorn
The State of Transgender Americans
By WH
Leelah Alcorn, a 17 year-old transgender girl in Ohio, recently committed suicide on a highway when she stepped out onto the road in front of a speeding semi-trailer. She left a suicide note on Tumblr. It went viral, in its own morbid way, and she has already raised a media storm. With positive prospection, she has informed many about transgender and LGBT+ people overall.
She was assigned male, but realized she was a girl stuck in a boy’s body at age four. She couldn’t understand what that feeling was, if anyone else had similar feelings, or if she should be feeling that way. When she learned about being transgender at fourteen, she cried tears of joy: she finally understood herself.
Her tragic suicide highlights the ongoing oppression and cultural prejudice against transgender people. They are subject to cruel and gruesome forms of violence, hatred, and bigotry — even more extreme than most forms of homophobia.
Transphobia is deeply entrenched in American culture.
Religious organizations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention, often deny the very existence of people like Leelah.
Leelah came out to her parents on her 16th birthday. She asked her parents if she could undergo the long and arduous process of sex change therapy. She felt that was what she needed to accept herself for who she was; her parents retorted with a sharp denial. Her mother responded that “God doesn’t make mistakes,” inferring that God put her in a male body, so she must stay in it. Leelah was crushed. She wept herself into a hibernation and would go on to suffer from severe depression, as many trans people do, because of her predicament.
The mistreatment of LGBT+ people within a state is correlated with their religiosity, as evident in a report from Rolling Stone. The worst transgressors of LGBT+ people’s rights are as follows, according to Rolling Stone. It is important to note that Michigan (one of the states on the list) is a neighbor state to Ohio, where Leelah committed suicide; the two states share many of the same cultural attributes.
Her parents sent her to therapy.
The therapies were conducted by Christians doing unchristian things.
They would shame her for who she was, compounding the mental abuse she received from parents, who were supposed to support her. Her parents took away nearly all access to the outside world — whether it be public school or social media. She was also bullied by her peers; such an amalgamation of ostracization and public shaming battered her psyche, and it proved too much for Leelah.
Leelah summed up that time of near complete deprivation of positive social contact as:
“No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.”
When she was finally allowed back on social media and talk with her friends, she came out as transgender fully. Some reacted in an disgusting manner; they dropped any semblance of an amicable relationship with her, worsening her depression.
In Leelah’s suicide note, she stated:
There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say ‘it gets better’ but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse.
For those last few months of her life, she was devastated about what her future would entail. She thought it was:
“never going to have enough love” and that she would never “find a man who loves [her].”
In her adolescent mind, her future was between existing either as a “lonely man who wished he were a women” or “as a lonelier woman who hates herself.” It is hard to fathom — she wasn’t even old enough to drive the semi-trailer that hit her.
There should be no questioning of why Leelah killed herself in such a world of psychological torture; the question is how she withstood against the forces who thought of her as a walking mistake for a year.
Rightly, many within the thinking public now are looking into the mistreatment of this oft-forgotten segment of society.
One of the first crimes to pop up would be the recent murder of Deshawnda Sanchez, a black transwoman murdered in an apparent hate crime on December 3 in Los Angeles. She was frantically knocking on a resident’s front door after she was chased, and she was shot several times by an unknown assailant, reports the Advocate.
The commonality of cases like Sanchez and Leelah constitute a decadence on the ever-ingratiating moral slate of American society. The Inter-American Commision on Human Rights found in the western hemisphere nearly 600 murders of LGBT+ people in a 15-month period of time, reports the Washington Blade. The two subgroups most susceptible to cold-blooded murder were gay men and trans women.
The Commission used reportings from police departments, who often neglect fully reporting the extent of crimes against trans people. The number is most likely higher and consequentially more condemnable and outrageous for the police’s poor recording.
Often many LGBT+ people, including trans people, turn to drugs and alcohol to ameliorate their suffering: rates of tobacco use are double (men: 35 percent; women: 45 percent); alcohol abuse at most quadruple (25 percent compared to 5–10 percent among the general public); and they are significantly more likely to use a variety of illegal drugs compared to their straight counterparts, reported the Center for American Progress in 2012. To compound those negative health factors, it is less likely for them to seek help with their abuse and addiction, one of the more prominent reasons is a widespread lack of access to healthcare.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention also states LGBT+ youth were significantly more likely to contemplate and commit suicide than their peers. The National Transgender Discrimination Survey, the largest poller of the American trans experience, showed that 41 percent of trans people have attempted suicide, compared to the national average of 4.6 percent. On average, 4 percent of teens attempt suicide; 25 percent of trans teens attempt suicide, according to one study.
Leelah is not an outlier; she is well within the norm. The world is full of Leelahs who are rejected and attacked because of a fundamental part of their character.
Some trans communities also face the social vice of prostitution coupled with human trafficking. In an Argentine government study, the researchers found that 95 percent of transgender people in Argentina turn to prostitution to support themselves, reports NPR. When Cincinnati’s City Beat investigated and documented the underworld of sex-for-sale, one of the factors that immediately popped out was the fear among the sex workers of being killed for their trans identity. Undoubtedly, the Argentine situation exists in some circles in the US, where it is still legal to discriminate in employment, housing, and health care coverage and service.
An overall air of dispossession and vitriol is concocted oftentimes from the deadly confluence of these cultural features. This atmosphere, besides the effects already mentioned, increases stress among all in the LGBT+ community, and ergo contributes to stress-related illness. This phenomenon is called “minority stress.”
The result for trans people: a life expectancy of about 30 years. Such levels of outright oppression and consistent mistreatment have lead Think Progress’ Zack Ford to conclude that trans people are suffering from a genocide vis-à-vis American culture.
The United Nations checklist for genocide asks if the oppressor is:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The culture is undoubtedly committing these acts, aside from (d). Killings of trans people have occured, serious psychological harm and serious physical harm are rampant, social ills inflicted, and parents often throw out their child upon learning of their gender identity. Part (d) is impossible in many cases, since sex change therapy often renders people sterile.
Overwhelmingly culturally conservative cultures increase mortality rates of those within the LGBT+ community, as documented by Think Progress. In “high-prejudice” communities, as the study called them, nearly three times as many people died compared to those in “low-prejudice” communities. The study was conducted for twenty years — between 1988 and 2008.
Throughout her suicide note, Leelah repeatedly wrote,
“My death needs to mean something.”
Hopefully, her suicide will be more than a needless death, and the moral conscience of American society will awaken to the tarnishing influence of the twin demons of transphobia and homophobia.
