Brandon Krampert
In Motion Staff Writer
It was in the middle of the night, a quiet time in late December on Interstate 71 in Kings Mill, Ohio where 17-year old Leelah Alcorn walked from her home to the front of an oncoming truck and was found dead. What was left behind was a suicide note on Tumblr that has since been taken down.
“The life I would’ve lived isn’t worth living in… because I’m transgender,” Alcorn said in the note.
Transgender is a term used to describe an individual who does not identify with the gender that they’ve been assigned at birth. The contrary term is called cis-gender.
Alcorn described how her parents refused to accept her gender identity as a girl due to their conservative christian values, confiscated means of communication such as her laptop and cell phone, removed her from public school and put her in conversion therapy for 5 months. They completely isolated her.
Conversion therapy is a set of methods used to change a patient’s sexual orientation or gender identity. It has widely been condemned in the fields of psychiatry.
The American Academy of Pediatrics said, “Therapy directed at specifically changing sexual orientation is contraindicated, since it can provoke guilt and anxiety while having little or no potential for achieving changes in orientation.”
The American Psychological Association released a report in 2009 stating that this therapy subjects patients to increased risks of suicide. Yet the only states that ban this practice are California, Washington D.C. and New Jersey. There have been efforts to ban it on a federal level but it’s unclear if there’s the political will for such changes. It would certainly be a step in the right direction to protect trans youth who are unable to protect themselves from their abusers.
This suicide is not isolated by any means, especially among trans people, an entire class that is vulnerable to increased rates of sexual assault, homelessness and violence compared to the general population. According to the most comprehensive study available, the 2011 National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that 41 percent of trans people have attempted suicide at some point in their life. To put it into context, the rate for the general population is 1.6 percent.
The NTDS also found that the rate was 51 percent with trans people who had unsupportive families.
What makes these trends invisible? There’s certainly been a more positive representation of trans people in media like Laverne Cox, an actress in the popular Netflix series Orange is the New Black; Laura Jane Grace, the front-woman of the Gainesville-based punk rock band Against Me; and Zoey Tur, Inside Edition’s first trans reporter to name a few.
This year’s state of the union address was the first time a U.S. president even uttered the word transgender during such a high profile event. Although it is significant, there have been political moves that have taken steps back. Bills have been introduced in the Florida legislature aimed to prohibit trans people to use public bathrooms that are designated toward the gender they identify with and there still hasn’t been a federal law passed for non-discrimination at the workplace that includes them.
At the end of Alcorn’s Tumblr post, she said, “My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. Fix society. Please.”
How can it be fixed? Transphobia is relative to the ideas and values we learn about gender just as acts of violence and abuse are. People must make efforts to reverse the root causes that are prevalent within our culture: throw away the belief that being cisgender is the norm, unlearn the idea that sex and gender is the same, to not make trans people as a butt of jokes and at least develop some understanding.
That is a start. Only then can we start to imagine a world where it doesn’t take a viral story of a teenage trans girl committing suicide for people to even acknowledge that they exist and that they are human beings.