Chasity Rose - 19, sister, friend. Heart of gold. With hands of steel. Talented; she could sing anything. Artistic; she could draw anything. Murdered by the Donald Trump movement.
Kyla Reeves - 13, Transgender girl with a trans brother. Felt it was necessary to take her own life so that her brother could have his transition after her parents told her that, with this election, they can only afford to focus on one child’s transition.
Tyler Morgan: 16, Nonbinary. Took his own life after being told to do so by his community (a town full of white supremacists and Trump supporters.)
Michelle Earnest: Transgender woman of color, wife, and mother of two children.
Lorie Murrano: Transgender woman of Latin decent, girlfriend, and civil rights activist.
Alex Murrano: Transgender man of Latin decent, brother to Lorie, and civil rights activist.
Madigan Alvarez: Transgender woman of Latin decent, cousin to Lorie and Alex, and communist revolutionary activist.
Aiden Baxley: Transgender son of two white supremacists; boyfriend, brother, father of one son, and civil rights activist.
Reyan Fletcher: Transgender son of two highly supportive and very amazing fathers, fiance, father (fiance is 7 months pregnant), and communist revolutionary activist.
Ituha: A Native American two-spirit, beloved tribes councillor, and mother of three.
Hello! Happy Hallow’s Eve. I’ve been working on this mini-comic, Ghost Stories, for a couple months between other stuff, and I’m happy to finally be posting it near Halloween. If you’d live in Philadelphia, you can buy a physical at Atomic City Comics if you’d like (starting in a week or so)! Otherwise, if you would like a copy, message or email me and I can mail you one for $5 plus shipping. The mini-comic is 4″ x 6″ with 13 pages.
I hope you enjoy reading this short story as much as I enjoyed writing and drawing it.
please dont forget sai„, oh my god dont forget him this is the link to his blog, where his note is; boyvore tw for suicide/attempted suicide sai was a poc trans boy, and he needs to be remembered. if you dont mind, spread awareness. dont let anyone forget sai. please.
Dan Savage has extremely strong words for the parents and therapists of Leelah Alcorn, the trans teen who died by suicide after leaving a note on Tumblr.
“The suicide of Leelah Alcorn this week actually made headlines – something, sadly, that the mainstream news media too frequently ignores. Alcorn is the transgender teen who committed suicide by walking in front of a truck early Sunday morning. On her Tumblr page, she had scheduled a suicide note to post, which it did when she was no longer alive to unschedule – or postpone – it.
Alcorn also scheduled an apology post, which was published sometime after her suicide note. It was an apology to some, but not to her parents, who apparently had caused her great misery.
"Mom and Dad: Fuck you. You can’t just control other people like that. That’s messed up,” were her final words to her parents in the apology note.
Dan Savage on Twitter went on a bit of a rant, posting tweets saying Leelah’s parents should be prosecuted for her death.”
Trans Lifeline opened up in November to provide a resource for transgender people with suicidal thoughts. In the US, the organization can be reached by phone at 877-565-8860.
Although a lot of the notes are calling the poster’s bluff, (while I was writing this, I checked on the posts and saw that the last user I used for picture deleted their original post), I’m still afraid with Tumblr’s policy of let-hate-this-person-with-no-proof-what-so-ever, users will still blame him on something he couldn’t have possibly controlled.
That driver will feel guilty for the rest of his life that he killed someone, and I can guarantee doxing him or sending him death threats will only make things worse. We don’t need another person to lose their life over this.
Oh my God, no, out of all the people to blame! Please don’t think it’s the driver’s fault. He has to live with this for the rest of his life as it is.
I just saw a post where someone was talking about donating to something which included the sentence “Please help me to ensure that Leelah didn’t die in vain.”
And you know what? Fuck you. I know the intention was good, but this just summarises exactly what seems off about the way a lot of poeople having been reacting to this.
Because it doesn’t matter how many charities you donate to, how much awareness is raised. She will always have died in vain. Because there is nothing honourable in dying. Because it should never have fucking happened in the first place.
Yes, maybe this is what it has taken to make you want to do something. But nothing will make her death “worthwhile”.
Do not use Leelah’s death as a tool - a means to achieve an end. Do not treat it like one. Treat it like the fucking tragedy it is.
When random strangers on the internet are more accepting of your daughter’s pronouns and her name then you fucked up. When news articles are more respectful of her pronouns and her name, you fucked up. When you try to claim she was just ‘on a walk’ after she posted a scuicide note online, you fucked up.
This makes me so angry. She dishonors Leelah’s identify and memory even in death, pulls attention to herself as the grieving parent, and clearly still doesn’t get that it is her actions and treatments that pushed Leelah to take that step.
RIP Leelah Alcorn.
God dammit! OK, listen up, my dear trans babies. I know that you’re hurting. Probably hurting a lot like Leelah was, but I want you to see two things here.
Leelah committed suicide because she couldn’t see any way to escape. Her voice was actively silence and her story ignored in favor of a fantasy that her parents wrote. She felt powerless, alone and afraid. That’s because her parents WANTED that for her to make her feel like the only choice available to her was to conform to their narrative. She found a different choice, but one that ultimately gave her parents the final control over her story, her life, and now, her death.
She realized she couldn’t begin transition until she was at least 18 and legally responsible for her own medical care, and someone gave her the terrible, wrongheaded and dangerous belief that that was TOO LATE to transition and “pass” and find love.
She was wrong. I know many gorgeous and happy trans men women who transitioned in their 20s, 30s, 40s and later and have found the life they always wanted. Please don’t internalize that bullshit that your chances to transition end at 18 or 21 or 25 or 30 or whatever. It’s never too late. Never.
But the real lesson I want you to take from Leelah’s death here is that she’s gone, forever, and even though she did everything she could to make sure that her story was known and heard by queueing up that post, her mother is still ignoring all of that for this fucking bullshit narrative she made up about her darling SON accidentally being hit by a truck on a morning walk, instead of facing the fact that her daughter committed suicide because she saw no other way out.
If you’re feeling like Leelah, alone, afraid, powerless and like there’s a ticking clock counting down your chance to transition, please know that there is no peace in death.
There is no guarantee that your suicide will make anyone see anything they don’t want to.
This mother is still willfully and actively ignoring, denying and mythologizing her child’s life and death. Leelah has finally lost her voice forever. The news articles will fade, the tumblr posts will vanish, and this horrid person will be telling tales about the tragic accident that took her son from her until the day she dies. Her suicide solved nothing for her. She will never see the amazing woman she’d have grown up to be. And neither will her mother.
The only chance you have to be the narrator of your own story is to stay alive, get out, get away, find your power, find your voice, find your real family - the people who know you and see you for who you are, people who hear you when you tell your story, people who will defend and protect you at all costs. We are here, waiting for you with our arms and our hearts open. Please, I know you’re in a terrible and seemingly unbearable place and environment. The only comfort I can offer is that the world doesn’t stop turning, time doesn’t stop and this moment isn’t the last moment. Please find a way to bide your time, to hold on for one more day, one more hour, one more minute, though it seems eternal, this moment is temporary.
I can’t guarantee your future happiness or that your life will be easy, but none of us, trans or cis, get any such guarantee. The only guarantee you get is that if you kill yourself, you’ll NEVER have the chance to find and build a happy life.
Every storm passes, every rain cloud moves on, and nothing in this world is permanent. This pain of your present will become the aches of your past.
Please stay alive. Please hold on until you can escape from there and come home. Our light is on and our door is open.
do not let them lie about the circumstances of leelah’s death on facebook to save face among their friends
message all of their facebook friends if you have to to make sure that everyone knows what happened to leelah alcorn. i am sick and tired of this shit happening and I am not going to let carla and doug alcorn get away with what they put leelah through.
Carla Alcorn has deleted this post from her Facebook (or changed her privacy settings; either way it isn’t available):
Do not let this go unnoticed. Do not forget how she tried to hide the fact that she and her husband abused their daughter for being transgender. Plaster this screenshot everywhere.
