This is another heartbreaking story of a beautiful soul gone too soon. Prayers to Leelah Alcorn’s family.
-A transgender teenager who committed suicide by walking in front of a tractor trailer in Ohio left a heartbreaking letter in which she blamed her religious parents.
Leelah Alcorn, 17, died in the early hours of Sunday on highway I-71 in Warren County, Ohio, a few miles from her family home.
The high school student left a poignant suicide note accusing her devout Christian parents of refusing to acknowledge her gender and forbidding her from transitioning.
The suicide note was posted on Leelah’s tumblr account through scheduled publishing just a few hours after her death.
The note begins: ‘If you are reading this, it means that I have committed suicide and obviously failed to delete this post from my queue.’
Leelah, from Kings Mill, Ohio, writes that although she was born a boy, she began identifying as a girl at the age of four.
‘When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was.
‘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 goes on to reveal that her parents refused to allow her to transition and instead took her to ‘Christian therapists’ who told her that she was ‘selfish and wrong’.
‘I formed a sort of a “f*** you” attitude towards my parents and came out as gay at school, thinking that maybe if I eased into coming out as trans it would be less of a shock.
‘Although the reaction from my friends was positive, my parents were pissed. They felt like I was attacking their image, and that I was an embarrassment to them.
‘They wanted me to be their perfect little straight Christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.’
‘On my 16th birthday, when I didn’t receive consent from my parents to start transitioning, I cried myself to sleep.’
Leelah then adds: ‘I’m never going to be happy. 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.
