I have an autism spectrum disorder, and despite the common myth that autistic people lack empathy, some of us over-empathize. Some stories cause me so much pain, I hover near depression for weeks. Leelah Alcorn's tragic story has done that to me.
In addition to Leelah's anguished suicide note, she posted about her life at Reddit as nostalgiaprincess. She shared the pain she felt when her parents told her they did not love her. She wrote bitterly about receiving boy's clothes for Christmas while her sisters got pretty dresses--dresses she would be permanently evicted from her home for wearing.
Her parents' comments to her were beyond religiously misguided. They were intentionally hurtful. Any human with an average IQ knows rejecting a child and withholding your love can have negative consequences on that child's emotional well-being. Yet when Leelah confided to the people she trusted most, they told her they did not love her and signed her up for psychological abuse (aka conversion "therapy"). Even after Leelah's death, her parents continue to reject HER. Other parents have fought for the right to keep their child's Facebook page up as a memorial after death--yet Leelah's entire Tumblr blog has been deleted.
I have my own "Leelah," and I'd like to share what I've done right and what I've done wrong in the hope that it will help other parents make good choices when discovering they have a transgender teen.
C. Comes Out
I alone had always suspected my middle son (C.) was gay and was the only person not surprised when he outed himself as bisexual a few years ago, at age 15. Over the next 12 months, this was amended to "gay" and then "transgender." That last one caught me unprepared. "I never thought I would be happy if only my son were gay," I told my boyfriend.
*The misgendering in the first part of the story is intentional and reflects my wrongheaded perspective at that time.
Not as tolerant as I thought I was
I was convinced my sorrow at learning C. was transgender was due solely to my concerns for my teen and not because I had a problem with witnessing my son transition to a daughter. After all, I was a tolerant liberal.
No, I assured myself, I was upset because I knew being transgender was associated with high rates of depression, suicide, abuse, assault, homicide, and discrimination in pretty much every aspect of life; because taking hormones and having gender reassignment surgery might negatively affect his physical and emotional well-being; and because he would have trouble finding a life partner (a gay man, I theorized, would want to be with a gay man and a straight man would be hostile toward dating a transgender woman). Also, I feared having Asperger's syndrome would leave him vulnerable to bigoted people who befriended him as a pretense to harm him.
Although many of these hardships are real for transgender men and women, I later realized that despite self-congratulating myself for being a liberal who embraced LGBT people as equals, I did not consider transgender women as real women. Thus, I feared my son's 6'3" frame and jutting Adam's apple meant society would treat him like a man dressed as a woman--after all, that is how I was seeing him--and would gawk at us or harass us.
Denial
Like Leelah Alcorn's mother, I hoped the transgender "phase" would pass. I suspected people in the Brony forums he frequented were encouraging this unwanted change. I read some of his posts and he mentioned BDSM, which made me worry he had confused "forced feminization" fantasies with transgenderism. I found and pinned my hopes on a scientific study that reported people with Asperger's syndrome were more likely to be transgender but that men with Asperger's who became transgender often changed their mind. The authors speculated that men with Asperger's assumed they did not interact well with other men because they were actually women.
What I Did Right
Unlike Leelah Alcorn's mother, I expressed my unwavering love for C. when he came out as bisexual, then gay, then transgender at the start of his senior year. I thanked C. for trusting me enough to confide in me, asked how she felt, and emphasized that nothing he told me would ever change my feelings. I told C. I'd do my best to be understanding but that I'd probably make mistakes and say the wrong thing sometimes. I asked her to please forgive me and correct me whenever that happened. C., who struggles to express her feelings, enthusiastically accepted my offer to explain the situation to my sons and my ex-husband.
*The confused pronouns above reflect my confusion at that time.
After C. admitted periodically feeling sad and confused, I found a counselor who had experience working with adolescents on the LGBTQ spectrum. At C.'s request, I joined in for the first session and have assured her I am available for any session any time. I also encouraged C. to join a community support group for LGBT teens and the Gay-Straight Alliance at her high school. The groups and the counseling helped a great deal.
Making and Fixing Mistakes
I've made many mistakes during this process and will likely continue to make more. The following are a few that I regret the most.
Starting with the clothes
I gave C. some make up and clothes of mine that fit her and said she could order what she needed on the Internet (few stores carry clothes for 6'3" women), but I failed to navigate her through a new world of sizes and styles. I believe subconsciously I wasn't ready for "him" to be a girl, and it took her wearing my old Capris well into October before I took charge of her wardrobe. I learned what a gaff was and spent hours researching falsies and the best bras for trans women who have broad shoulders. I am sure when she started college that September, she had become acutely aware that she did not look very fashionable or stylish but she never said a word. Yet her happiness at getting the new clothes that October reminded me of Christmastime when she was little. She especially loved the shoes. Do you know how hard it is to find size 14 women's shoes?
When I was younger, my parents often bought me boy's clothes because I was so hard on my clothes, and I felt so ugly in my Toughskins jeans and plaid shirts. A transgender person feels the same way when made to wear clothes of the opposite gender. It pained me greatly to realize that all Leelah's selfies in female clothing were taken in a store dressing room because it was the only time she had access to girl clothes. Please, if you have a transgender child, make sure they have the clothes they need to feel good about themselves and realize they may be afraid to ask or not know what to ask for.
Putting my fears over C.'s needs
Another mistake I made was telling C. about my worries that she would face violence or discrimination as a trans woman. She interpreted this as an insinuation from me that she would never pass. In an attempt to fix my mistake, I reassured her I would have the same worries for any daughter.
I also once told her I had always thought gender identity issues emerged during childhood, whereas she said she did not realize until age 15 that she was a girl in a boy's body. I asked whether she was sure this was who she was. I also noted that she did not seem to have any stereotypical female interests and still shared the same interests as her brothers--namely violent video games. I assumed being a trans girl meant she would be interested in hair, makeup, clothes, and hygiene, but she isn't. However, we discussed it and agreed that a lot of girls with Asperger's do not have stereotypical female interests and that perhaps my idea of what women liked was outdated.
Another mistake was urging her not to dress as a girl her senior year because bullying might affect her stellar academic career. She is a strong young woman who decided not to listen to me. Her friends remained her friends, and no one at school said a harsh word. She graduated with a 4.2 grade-point average.
Pronoun malfeasance
The worst mistake I made was using male pronouns and her given male name for far too long. I wasn't intentionally being insensitive, but neither was I intentionally being sensitive. C. never asked us to make any changes in how we addressed her, and I misinterpreted her passivity as indifference. A few months ago, when prompted, C. informed us she wanted to be referred to by a female permutation of her "boy" name. My boyfriend and I sometimes remembered to call her by this name but essentially stopped trying after she continued referring to herself by her "boy" name. For example, I'd hear her voice and mistakenly call her by her brother's name, and she'd say "It's me, [boy name]." To be honest, it also felt awkward and for me has probably been the most difficult part of this change. To use a female name and female pronouns required me to start thinking about her as a girl.
My Ex Slowly Comes Around
My ex-husband (also an Aspie) had no problem when he thought C. was gay. However, when I broke the news about her being transgender, his response was, "You can't change what you are. That attitude is why parents used to take their kids behind a shed and hit them with a switch, to knock sense into them." He is not violent, so I am not really sure where that came from; perhaps it was a small remnant of his conservative Oklahoma upbringing.
I stressed how critical it was to support C. and inundated my ex with articles and statistics on the risk of depression and suicide for transgender teens. I sent him links to PFLAG and other support groups. I badgered him in text messages about what NOT to say. His response was to tell C. he didn't understand but he loved her--and to buy a really secure gun safe.
At first, he said it would not be a good idea for C. to live with him as planned while going to a nearby college. He added that he would not pay for college if C. started taking hormones. But his love for our teen and his desire for her to be happy overpowered his prejudices, and she moved in with him this past September. Initially, he also said he would not pay for counseling (primarily because he thinks psychology is junk science), but after I told him how much C. said it was helping, he started to pay for some of the sessions and drive her to appointments.
C.'s Brothers Don't Care What Gender She Is as Long as She Plays Video Games
The person who influenced me the most in how I learned to think about transgender people was not my trans daughter. Instead, it was my youngest son, who recently turned 16 and has Asperger's. He is my role model for what it means to be truly accepting. I watched him become C.'s staunchest defender. He told my ex-husband that his decision to forbid C. to wear her "girl clothes" when they all went out was "stupid" and "wrong," when C., who fears confrontation, was unable to do so. "Who cares what other people think?" my youngest asked. C. gave all her boy clothes to her 6'4" baby brother and now wears her real clothes everywhere.
My oldest son, who is 23 and on the autism spectrum but not a full-blown Aspie, has always been C.'s best friend despite the 5-year age gap. He is bewildered that he never saw signs of C. being transgender, but he has been fully supportive and has never shown any discomfort hanging around with his transgender sister in public (except when we went bra shopping once) or around his friends. Also, as the only one of us with access to C.'s Facebook profile, he informs me whenever C. posts about feeling unhappy because I have the best chance of getting her to open up about what is bothering her.
Getting It Right (or Thank You Woman At the Deli)
One day, I was at the grocery store with my trans daughter and oldest son. They left me at the deli counter to head toward the bakery, and a woman asked, "Is that your daughter?" I'd never had to answer that question and hesitated before saying with a smile, "Yes, it is."
"My daughter is really tall, too," the woman said. "Where do you get her clothes?" Like many with Aspergers, C. has a flat affect and does not show a lot of expression, but when I recounted the conversation to her, she beamed. I saw that same look a week later after a waiter asked "What would you ladies like to order?"
I announced to everyone that we were going to call her by her girl name from then on. I pointed out that if any of them had asked for a different nickname, we would do our best to comply. I mentioned that I had a childish nickname growing up and had persuaded my family and friends to switch to my full name during high school and we should do no less for C. I suggested it would be easier if we did it together and corrected one another's slip ups. When I told C. we all agreed to call her by her new name, she thanked me and said it meant a lot to her. It's hard for C. to correct others, so sometimes I do it for her, especially with people who knew her first as a boy.
I now almost always succeed in calling her by the correct name and using the right pronouns--even when she is not here and I'm talking about her to a friend or co-worker. Her father is the only one who still refuses to use her girl name, although I will not stop badgering him about it. When he goes out with C., he must look silly referring to this statuesque woman beside him by a boy's name.
Other People
Sometimes people do stare rudely when we go shopping or attend a movie together, but people also stare rudely when your autistic toddlers have a meltdown, and I had never let that affect me or avoided bringing my children to public places. I cannot name one direct negative consequence C. being transgender has had on me, other than costing me a lot more for haircuts and clothes. I am actually impressed with the people in my state. No one has said anything negative and everyone addresses my daughter as the woman she has become. Everything is not perfect; in college, when the professor has them partner up, she is usually left alone if there is an odd number of students that day. If you're in college, please reach out to trans students like my C.
Sorry This Is Ridiculously Long
I had never planned to make a diary on this, partly because it is very personal and partly because I am ashamed for not handling things the way I should have. I have apologized to my daughter, but I also want to apologize to all trans people for failing to appreciate you fully as your true gender. I was wrong.
I hope one day Leelah Alcorn's parents will realize how wrong they were not to accept their wonderful intelligent daughter and will work to convince other parents not to make their mistakes. Sadly, Leelah is no longer with us to hear those apologies should they ever come.
RIP Leelah Alcorn. I know you didn't think you were beautiful, but you were so wrong.
12:42 PM PT: Leelah Alcorn's parents demanded that Tumblr take down Leelah's note and blog:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/...
In the past, other parents who lost a child persuaded Facebook to change their policy and preserve these sites as memorials. If I lost one of my kids, I would want to preserve their memory and share their words and talents with others--to keep that little piece of them alive. It is one more example of their inability to repent for how they treated their child and their rejection of who she truly was.