A tragic end to the life of a 17-year-old transgender happened early on Sunday morning when Leelah Alcorn walked a few miles from her home to the Interstate 71 highway in Ohio, stepped in front of a tractor-trailer and got killed in the process.
A few hours later, a suicide note appeared posthumously on Alcorn’s Tumblr page and the lengthy letter has generated an extensive outcry online from the transgender community trying to bring awareness to issues related to the way transgenders are treated following Leelah’s suicidal death.
“Please don’t be sad, it’s for the better,” Leelah, who was born Joshua Alcorn, wrote. “The life I would’ve lived isn’t worth living in… because I’m transgender.”
In the note, she also narrated the moment she expressed her situation to her conservative Christian parents.
“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,” Leelah wrote.
“If you are reading this,” she continued, “parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid.
“That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.”
“I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound,” she wrote. “I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me.”
She further said “Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out.”
Altough Leelah wrote that there was no hope for her, she included in the note that she wanted her death to bring some form of change regarding how transgenders are treated.
“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,” she wrote.
“Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better,” she pleaded. “My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number… and fix it. Fix society. Please.”
Leelah’s mother on the otherhand described her child’s death as an accident in a Facebook post saying “He was out for an early morning walk and was hit by a truck.” Leelah’s mother also referred to her by her birth name Joshua but the post has since been taken down.
Photo Credit: LazerPrincess/Tumblr
