We Are Leelah

In light of the recent suicide of teen Leelah Alcorn, I have found myself thinking about and discussing my own history with suicide. For those who do not know, she committed suicide and later a suicide note appeared on her tumblr account (from her queue) explaining that she’d been dealing with parents who had been denying her access to hormones for transitioning, and who had also been forcing her into conversion therapy to try and make her stop being trans.

I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone with a shred of human decency why that is not okay. And it doesn’t take much imagination to understand why someone in that situation would have thoughts about committing suicide. For me, it doesn’t take any imagination, because I was on the verge of committing suicide at three different points in my life.

Writing this has been a little tough for me. I’ve never told anybody the details about these before, though in recent years I’ve tried to be open about their existence. But I think now is the appropriate time for full disclosure.

The first time was also the least severe. I had hidden one of my mom’s bras and taken to occasionally wearing it in my room. It was comforting. But then my dad caught me wearing it. He blew up in my face, yanking down my shirt fast enough that it hurt me (and permanently stretched the shirt) and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing. It’s important to note that my dad never swears, and it was only on this occasion and the time I accidently dropped a riding lawn mower on his foot that I’ve ever heard him do it. But it was what he said next that really did the permanent damage: “You had better not be gay.” It wasn’t just the words; it was his tone. There was utter disgust in his tone and in his eyes, and I got the feeling that if my response was anything different than what he wanted that he would throw me to the ground and squish me out of existence. Thinking back, perhaps I wanted him to discover me. As scared as I was, I wanted to stop hiding, to stop pretending. But if that was testing the waters, all signals came back screaming “Retreat!” at the top of their lungs.

I mean, I wasn’t gay. I’m still not. I’ve never been straight; I’m bisexual. But my sexual orientation had nothing to do with wearing the bra, and so I was completely honest with my response to him: “I just wanted to know what it felt like.” I also wanted to continue knowing what it felt like, every day for the rest of my life. But I left that second part out. And that moment was the first time I felt like I was never going to be able to be me. Later, when I took a shower, I broke down and cried, imagining what it would be like to kill myself. I could plug up the tub and lay face down, closing my eyes and releasing myself to the universe. Maybe the universe would actually like me.

But instead of plugging the tub and floating away, I just hugged my knees and sobbed my heart out, the shower water muffling my tears. I have wondered time and time again how my life would have been different if I had come out at that point (I was twelve). My parents have told me that of course they would have loved me and been as awesome as they are now, but that confrontation with my father certainly made me think they wouldn’t have been. And so as I see article after article reporting Leelah’s death, I wonder if that could have been me. I wonder if my (very Christian) parents would have shoved me into conversion therapy. I wonder if they would have denied me access to hormone blockers and then HRT when I became old enough.

I think I did a little bit too good of a job of hiding myself after that. Acting came easily to me – likely due to my 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week performance – and I began doing shows regularly, including being involved in some way with all but one of the shows my high school put on while I was attending. And during my junior year I auditioned for the All-State Production of Les Miserables at the Illinois High School Theatre Festival, and wasn’t cast. I was certain that it was because of how I looked. I had never liked my image post-puberty (as you might imagine), and had already been dealing with on-again, off-again anorexia for several years. And so without any specific prompt that I can remember, I felt crippled by the disappointment and transferred that frustration to my feelings about how I looked. I looked wrong and felt wrong, and I didn’t think I could ever possibly look right, much less ever feel right. I wanted to rip my consciousness out of my body. I wanted to leave the hurt and the awfulness and the “not-me-ness” behind. I didn’t care if there was nothingness or eternity waiting. Anything was better.

And so I made plans to end my life. I wrote a suicide note. I gave my stuffed animals to my sister. The plan was the same as before: in the tub, face down, relaxed. But instead of taking my shower that evening, I sat on my bed. I struggled against myself, and the only way the part of me that didn’t want me to go through with it could manage to stop me was by not letting me do anything. If I moved, then I was dead. But I didn’t move, and eventually I fell asleep. When I woke up I was still upset, still depressed, and nothing looked better, but I didn’t feel like ending my own life that day. At that point I was completely certain that the way that I would die was by suicide. I just didn’t know when.

Several years passed. I left home for college. I graduated from college. The job market was awful, so I struggled to find a job, but I eventually found one that was *slightly* above minimum wage. And I began dating a girl who lived several states away. Our relationship was really never a good one. I did all the traveling to her, we only saw each other about once a month, and we were constantly texting/messaging/skyping. After several months of being together, she kissed someone else and told me about it, and we had the conversation of me not being okay with that, but trying to figure out how to make things work; it went downhill from there. No matter what I did or what I said, she took the opposite position. She would constantly block me on facebook and refuse to answer messages/calls, then yell at me when I stopped sending them or calling. So the next time I wouldn’t stop (as per her request from the last time), and then she’d get mad at me for not stopping. This back and forth lasted for about three months. I’m terrible at ending relationships, even really bad ones, but finally we broke up, she began to date someone else (not the person she had kissed), and I was completely heartbroken. I felt worthless and that everything bad was happening because I wasn’t made right. Once again those feelings of desperation and hopelessness rose up within me, and I knew that this was the right time to end it. My extra rationale was that no one would ever suspect that it was because I was really a girl; they’d just think the breakup hit me hard. I didn’t feel like I’d be missed by anyone, and my roommate was out of town for the weekend. So I got undressed and got in the shower, turned on the water and plugged up the drain, and sat down waiting as the water filled the tub. And I hated myself and I hated my body, and I hated everything that was wrong with me. But with the water filling up, I couldn’t stand the thought of someone seeing my naked body. I knew I didn’t want to be an anonymous façade, and for the first time in my life I actively thought about what I might be able to do to fix my situation. I pulled back from the brink long enough to investigate one last sliver of hope, and the moment was past.

Unfortunately for me, I didn’t know where to look, and I didn’t have the words to even ask the right questions. So everything I discovered was either an easily debunkable “magic” spell or potion, or used words like “tranny” or “he-she” that made me feel icky about my body. My lack of results combined with quickly getting into another relationship put a damper on discovering the right words and the existence of HRT for another few years.

* * * * *

In the comments sections of the articles about Leelah, many people continue to misname and use the wrong pronouns. Several of the articles even include or supplant her name with the wrong name in their titles. And this really doesn’t make any sense to me. One set of my grandparents have yet to use the appropriate name or pronouns to refer to me, but instead they use my first initial (which is the same as the first letter of the name I was given), and awkwardly refuse to use any pronouns when referring to me. I’ve never understood why something like this is so hard for people to do. For anyone else in the world who was dissatisfied with the name their parents had given them, people would honor their nickname or chosen name without batting an eye. Robert likes to be called Bob. Gertrude wants to be called Lexi. It doesn’t matter what a person believes about trans people, it is one of the most basic human decencies to refer to someone in the way they want to be referred. I mean, in the play, Arsenic and Old Lace, “Teddy” is still called Teddy, even though he only wants to be called that because he thinks that he is Theodore Roosevelt! And nobody says crap about them extending this courtesy to someone who is *actually* suffering from delusions or some other form of mental illness.

And that leads me to my final point of the evening: why do people even have a stance on trans people anyway? It’s a bit like people having a “stance” on blondes. “Yeah, I don’t believe in blondes. They’re really just brown haired people who are confused.” The reasoning behind their logic for “not believing” in trans people is even more sketchy: “You have an experience that I have not had, but I’m sure it’s not actually real, because it’s not something that I’ve had to deal with.” By that same logic: I’ve never liked grapefruit, so clearly anyone who says they like grapefruit is lying or confused. Possibly both. Regardless, I should clearly make it my duty to make their life miserable if they insist on perpetuating this “delusion” that they like grapefruit.

And it is people like that who killed Leelah Alcorn. When a person “decides” to commit suicide, it’s not the kind of decision where you decide to hit the snooze button or where you decide what type of bread to order at Subway. When a person commits suicide, it’s because they’ve been struggling. And their “decision” is to stop swimming against the massive current. To let it pull them under. And those currents that pulled Leelah under? They’re the transphobia that is perpetuated by our society. We’re all responsible, every one of us who has ever perpetuated anything transphobic, every one of us who remains silent when someone else perpetuates something transphobic. The good news is that we’re not too late. Countless kids, teens, and adults are standing right where Leelah was standing. They’re standing there right now. I’ve stood there before. One day, I might be standing there again. I need you – we all need you – to end this cycle of hatred. We are Leelah and we are dying.

The Dating Game

For a while now I’ve been using online dating. There’s quite a range of people whom you end up talking to. There are certainly pros and cons of using online dating – pro: getting some inside info on someone you’re interested in without the awkward asking questions; con: ‘Hey baby ur sexy’ – but this article isn’t a review of online dating. Instead I want to talk about an experience that many transfolks experience, both in online dating and in real life, and the implications of that experience. I’m talking about when someone finds out that you’re trans and they no longer are interested in pursuing a relationship because of that.

It is always transphobic when someone says, “I don’t date trans people” or even “I’m not attracted to trans people.” Always. It’s the same thing if someone stops being interested in or declines to even consider interest in dating trans people, though these are often harder to gauge by an outside audience. Of course, often people respond to the revelation with one of the statements above which usually is indicative that that is the only reason that they are no longer interested.

First off, such statements operate on the assumption that transpeople are all the same, or at least can fit into some large, general categories. In fact, this is no truer for transpeople than for cispeople. Transpeople –like cispeople– come in all shapes and sizes, types and qualities, personalities, prejudices, likes and dislikes. The thing is, trans and cis are both labels that don’t actually tell you anything about the person except a shared experience that that person has. For transpeople it is the experience of discrimination and disenfranchisement that society imposes. For cispeople it is the experience of privilege in those areas. But apart from such an experience, neither trans nor cis people share any single quality.

More specifically, even the assumptions about the state of a transperson’s genitalia are unfounded. No matter their gender, trans people come with all kinds of genitalia, some having changed theirs through surgical process and others who haven’t –both by choice and by necessity. It’s the same deal with cis people, where a person might have a surgical process (usually medically induced) to alter their genitalia in some way, not to mention intersex people (both cis and trans), who may have had their genitalia altered or not. The point I’m trying to make is that a neither a person being cisgender or transgender says anything about the status of their genitalia despite the assumptions people make both ways.

Not to mention, of course, that caring more about a person’s genitalia than about the person themselves is somewhat of an outdated way of viewing things. Whatever the genitalia of the participants, there are ways to enjoy sexual activity for any partner, in whatever kind of way they wish. There’s an entire industry that exists solely about making apparatuses for just such kinds of practices, not to mention the many ways the body supplies people with ways to enjoy sexual activity. I’m not going to say that preference for a certain kind of genitalia is never justified, but from a practical standpoint, there are options for everyone.

Of course, it’s pretty common for people to say things like, “but (so-and-so) doesn’t look like a woman/man!” and try to use that as an excuse for making such blanket statements. But no one is saying you have to be attracted to (so-and-so). The point is not that you have to find every transperson attractive, just as no one expects you to find every cisperson attractive. In fact, maybe you’ve never met a transperson to whom you were attracted. That’s cool, and there’s no problem with saying that. But if the only reason for not being attracted to someone is the fact that they are trans, it’s transphobic. It would be like not being attracted to someone just because they saw (in person) the events of 9/11/2001 at the World Trade Center. That is a shared experience that those people have, but they might have any number of other qualities. Perhaps you’ve never met someone who witnessed those events in person to whom you are attracted. But yet people would look at you strangely if you make a similar blanket statement about your lack of attraction to them. It’s no different for transpeople.

On the other side of all of this, it is similarly transphobic to be attracted to someone *specifically because of* them being trans, and for the exact same reasons as listed above. Only this one goes a little bit further: if you are ignoring all of a person’s qualities in favor of a single experience that they have had, you are objectifying a person. Of course this gets more tricky in conversation, because there is nothing wrong with being physically attracted to someone who might fall outside the traditional “conventions” of gender. So being attracted to taller women who have more square jawlines, higher foreheads, and broader shoulders isn’t transphobic, despite the fact that a good number of people who find these traits attractive might shorthand their attraction into the words “I like transwomen.” The problem is when someone, instead of being attracted to a person, is only attracted to their experience. It’s the same kind of problem with the fetishization of people of color. There’s nothing wrong with being physically attracted to darker skin. But when your attraction is to the experience of being a person of color, rather than the person, it becomes objectification.

It also is in no way the responsibility of a transperson to announce being trans at the beginning or early on in the relationship. While things such as lying about transness have their own issues for a relationship (you know, the whole lying thing), but an omission of stating something is not the same thing as lying. Each transperson is entitled to inform their partner or potential partner at whatever time they so choose, and in the way that they choose, just as with any other information about a person’s history. The same reasons above apply to this: there is nothing special about being trans that makes it something that should be mentioned. At the end of the day, if a person is upset because of not being told right away, or upset because of the other person’s transness, then that is their choice. People can choose to be transphobic, but beyond that, it is important to realize how much such a response can hurt a transperson. You have boiled down everything in their existence to be completely mitigated and overshadowed by the fact that they are trans. You have taken their hopes and dreams and personality and hidden them under a blanket of transness. I’m not sure what kind of a heartless person you’d have to be to do such a thing knowingly, so I have to assume that the majority of people who have done so and who continue to do so don’t understand the implications of their actions.

In the end, of course no one is here to police your sexual or romantic preferences. But it is important to realize that your preferences can be transphobic, and be mostly based on misconceptions, stereotypes, and a lack of understanding. This is a subject that often is difficult to talk out, oftentimes because a lot of transpeople have internalized the idea that being trans is someone an *undesirable trait,* in the same ways that a lot of cispeople have. But it isn’t an undesirable trait and it shouldn’t be deemed socially acceptable for someone to lose interest in someone else when they find out that that person is trans. If you’re ever confused about how to avoid this, ignore the fact that a person is trans when figuring out if you like the person. If the answer is yes, then go for it. If the answer is no, then you don’t really like the person. That’s how you move forward without being transphobic. Please, spread a little more love in the world.