Advice

On Leelah

Your thoughts on Leelah Alcorn and the circumstances surrounding her death? The whole situation with her was so horrible and sad, and yet her parents still deny and refuse to acknowledge who she was and why she died. Some say good may come out of it by bringing awareness to the plight of transgendered persons forced to live and grow up in such hostile and judgmental environments, but I’m not that optimistic.

Right now, Carla and Doug Alcorn are grieving the loss of their son Joshua. In the fog of their religious ignorance, they simply don’t know any better. My only hope is that there will eventually come a day when they grieve a second time for the loss of their daughter Leelah.It may take many years, but I hope that they grieve a second time, because Carla and Doug Alcorn deserve to feel twice as much pain for the direct role they played in their daughter’s suicide. I hope that they grieve a second time, because Leelah deserves for her parents to ultimately understand who she was. She deserves to be acknowledged by her family as a transgender teenage girl instead of a sexually confused teenage boy, and she deserves to be called Leelah instead of Joshua.

I hope that they grieve a second time, because it will mean that even narrow-minded Baptists like Carla and Doug Alcorn are capable of rejecting the ugly and hateful interpretations of their stupid fucking religion. It will mean that society as a whole is changing for the better, painfully slow though that change may seem, and it will also mean that Leelah Alcorn’s life, tragically shortened though it may have been, still wasn’t lived in vain.

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