paging Billy Joe Mcallister...

By now most if not all of you have heard of the suicide of a trans girl named Leelah Alcorn. To summarize, she was a victim of horrible parenting.

There have been some people and organizations with considerable experience of suicide generally who've said that publicizing Leelah's suicide is a mistake because it may inspire copycats. That's wrong, plain and simple. Many if not most suicides in the cis population have their roots in mental illness. In the young queer population, including trans kids, it's because the people they should be able to trust the most - their parents - are abusing them.

Abuse isn't too strong a word for what happened to Leelah. "Reparative therapy" is torture. Just like the more conventional forms of torture that have been in the news lately, it doesn't work, and even if it did work it would still be wrong.

No young trans people showed up for Lambert House's trans group on Monday night. I hope that isn't a bad sign. I take comfort in the knowledge that even in the few years I've been volunteering there, I've noticed an upward trend in the way parents have been handling their trans children, at least as reported by the small sample I've heard from. I hope that the publicity surrounding Leelah's suicide accelerates that trend.

I may be contagious.

The word from my Aspiring Ex is that one of her cousins has just come out to her parents as a trans girl. This particular cousin is 19 and has been Aspie-flavored since she was a young child, complete with the usual deficits in social skills and therefore friends. She has always been, in AX's words, a weird kid.

AX expressed concern, repeatedly, about the quality & quantity of therapy this cousin might get in college out of state. She didn't use the phrase "just a phase", but she came asymptotically close to it. I called her on her bullpucky. Good grief, the cousin's taking girl 'roids. People who are just in phases* don't do that, at least not for long. And just getting her hands on hormones means she's convinced at least one professional that she's for real.

Fun fact: the cousin's college covers SRS in their student health plan. (!) AX says there are 60 colleges that do.

Apparently the cousin doesn't want to talk to me about trans things because I'm too old. I can't say I blame her too much. I may be talking to her parents soon, though. I certainly hope they're more sensible than AX.



*Being trans or, especially, genderqueer has in recent years been a flavor of the month among younger queers. Other Lambert House grown-ups have observed a few teens who said they were genderqueer, and then decided they weren't after they got pregnant, etc. So yeah, phases happen, but they're vanishingly rare among orthodox binary trans people who seek hormones or surgery.