Suicide of Leelah Alcorn
Leelah Alcorn was born and raised in Kings Mills, Ohio. She was assigned male at birth and grew up in a family affiliated with the Churches of Christ movement. At age 14, she came out as transgender to her parents, who refused to accept her female gender identity. When she was 16, they denied her request to undergo transition treatment, instead sending her to Christian-based conversion therapy. After she revealed her attraction toward males to her classmates, her parents removed her from school and revoked her access to social media.
About Suicide of Leelah Alcorn in brief
Leelah Alcorn was born and raised in Kings Mills, Ohio. She was assigned male at birth and grew up in a family affiliated with the Churches of Christ movement. At age 14, she came out as transgender to her parents, who refused to accept her female gender identity. When she was 16, they denied her request to undergo transition treatment, instead sending her to Christian-based conversion therapy. After she revealed her attraction toward males to her classmates, her parents removed her from school and revoked her access to social media. In her suicide note, Alcorn cited loneliness and alienation as key reasons for her decision to end her life and blamed her parents for causing these feelings. Alcorn used Tumblr’s timer feature to publish her suicide notice online several hours after her death, and it soon attracted international attention. LGBT rights activists called attention to the incident as evidence of the problems faced by transgender youth, while vigils were held in her memory in the United States and United Kingdom. Petitions were formed calling for the establishment of a ban on conversion therapy in the U.S., which received a supportive response from then-president Barack Obama. Within a year, the city of Cincinnati criminalized conversion therapy; Alcorn’s parents were severely criticized for misgendering her in comments to the media, while LGBT rights activist Dan Savage blamed them for their child’s death. There were also questions about whether her parents’ treatment of her constituted abuse, while she revealed that she sought out help on Reddit, asking whether the treatment by her parents constituted child abuse.
She described herself as one of several children being raised in a conservative Christian environment; she and her family attended the Northeast Church of Christ in Cincinnati, and she had been featured in a profile of that church published in a 2011 article in The Christian Chronicle. She believed that identifying as a gay male at that point would be a stepping stone to coming out as a transgender female at a later date. She later related that there she only encountered more Christians telling her that she was’selfish and wrong’ and’should look to God for help’ Aged 16, she requested that she be allowed to undergo transformation treatment, but was denied permission. She wrote that she felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life. On my 16th birthday, when I didn’t receive consent from my parents to start transitioning, I cried myself to sleep. They wanted me to be their perfect straight Christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted. They cut her off from the outside world for five months as they denied me access to many forms of communication. According to Alcorn, according to friends, she continued to feel isolated and she was an embarrassment to them. She signed her suicide notes as ‘Josh Alcorn’ Alcorn died on November 15, 2014, at the age of 20. She left behind a husband and two children. She is survived by her mother, Doug Alcorn.
You want to know more about Suicide of Leelah Alcorn?
This page is based on the article Suicide of Leelah Alcorn published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
