[ot-caption title=”Leelah Alcorn, 17 (via Alcorn’s blog lazerprincess, 2014)” url=”https://pcpawprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/6d83c2452c8926155e4095b417dd6cc5-e1421244115186.jpg”]

While most people were preparing for their New Year’s celebration, the family of Leelah Alcorn was preparing to bury their seventeen year old daughter after she committed suicide. Alcorn was raised in a conservative Christian household throughout her life. She was born in November of 1997 as Joshua Ryan Alcorn. According to the suicide note she wrote on her Tumblr, she said, “To put it simply, I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was four.”

Unbenownst to her, there was a name for people like her. She only found out about transgenders and what that meant around the time she turned 14. She wrote that she immediately came out to her mother who reacted very negatively. In Alcorn’s words, she said “I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong”.

Throughout the rest of the note, Leelah continued to explain how her parents sent her to a very Christian enveloped “conversion” therapy. The people who treated her agreed with the parents, in that Leelah was sinning and that God would never make a mistake. In a way to try to appease her parents, Leelah tried to come out as gay instead of transgender, hoping to ease the transition for them, but  this only seemed to further their anger towards Leelah.

After therapy appeared to not be working, Leelah was pulled out of public school and had all technology taken away from her. She was isolated for a period of about 5 months from her friends and any form of social media. In her words, she described this time of her life as “no friends, no love, no support. Just my parents disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness”.

Despite her parents allowing her to be reintroduced to social media and interact with her friends again, Leelah still felt alone and that things would never get better. So on the night of December 28th, Leelah Alcorn decided to take her own life. In the final paragraph of her suicide note, she says, “The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights”. These were some of her final words on Tumblr, just hours before stepping in front of a tractor-trailer on Interstate 71.

In recent interviews with Leelah’s mother, Carla, she said “He was a good kid, a good boy.” Alcorn’s mother told CNN this week, stressing that she and her husband “love him unconditionally.” She continues to only refer to Leelah with male pronouns and call her by her birth name of Joshua. There are many trans activists that feel that Mrs. Alcorn only continues to disrespect her daughter, even after death, by continuing to not see her as who she saw herself.

Through recent discovery of going through Leelah’s reddit account, nostalgiaprincess, she asked the transgender community whether or not her parents’ treatment of her was considered abuse. Her parents did not physically her hurt her, she wrote, but they’d say things such as: “You’ll never be a real girl” and “God’s going to send you straight to hell.”

Since the death of the teen, a worldwide discussion has been sparked; and a whole new level of awareness for trans people has been raised. Many are saying that Leelahs parents are directly to blame for the suicide. Writer Dan Savage, of the It Gets Better Project for LGBT youth tweeted that Leelah’s parents “threw her in front of that truck. They should be ashamed — but 1st they need to be shamed. Charges should be brought.” Cristan Williams, executive director of the Transgender Foundation of America, says that some parents who put their child through conversion therapy are contributing to the death of their child. This is one of the reasons why this treatment is illegal in some states throughout the country.

Leelah noted that, “The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something.”

She then added, “My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year.”

Her wishes are already being addressed by the Transgender Human Rights Institute, who have started a petition on Change.org to try and ban conversion therapy. The law being proposed, called Leelah Alcorn law, already has close to 200,000 signatures. Very influential people such as Laverne Cox and Janet Mock, are becoming very involved in pushing this law to be passed.

Sources: Tumblr, CNN, Reddit, Yahoo parenting, Twitter