I clicked through to the article, and I read down to the end, and started to well up a bit. It was sad. It was as sad as every other trans girl's needless death, by her own hand or someone else's. But I felt a little numb to it, at the same time. When Leelah Alcorn died, I also felt sad, but her death had hit me harder than most. I had not written any new (pop) songs since my own gender revelation, primarily because nothing was really that horrible in my life. Even the bad stuff, I was weathering, and coming out okay. I had nothing so miserable to write about anymore. Until Leelah died.
The way that I found out about Leelah was what really turned the news of her death into an absolute suckerpunch. I had been browsing tumblr that morning, and I saw some trans girl's selfies of 2014, or whatever. I reblogged them and followed her, as I tend to for anyone I am sure is a trans girl. And then a little further down, I started seeing posts about someone named Leelah Alcorn, or maybe it was Joshua, but were they male, or female, who was saying what, I didn't know. Then I found a post with a link to her suicide note, and I was stunned. Because it was her. It was the girl I had just followed. The one I'd been looking forward to supporting and encouraging. The one who had a build just like mine.
I felt sick. I felt numb. I remember wanting very much to cry, but not really being able to. I had something inside me about it that needed to come out, and ultimately, it was a song. The first (and so far last) miserably depressed song that I've written since becoming basically happy most of the time. I had experienced challenges that would impact my mood since it had stabilized in a much better place, but I had not run across anything like this, any really traumatic event.
I joined with a lot of other trans people and tweeted under the hashtag RealLifeTransAdult, to try to help trans kids who were stuck in a hostile environment just keep their eyes on the future. But mostly I just kind of packed it away into the back of my head somewhere, and kept on just trying to work on me. Just finishing the degree so I could start fixing my own life to the point where I could start helping others. To be able to fight from a position of power, or at least not from a position of such absolute weakness and vulnerability.
Taylor's suicide brought all of what I had stuffed away when Leelah died back to the forefront of my mind. I briefly examined my reactions, wondering why I was feeling so incredibly affected by these two girls, but less so by so many of the other trans girls' deaths that I read about, and reblog. I wanted to be accountable to myself if I had some kind of unexamined, racially-motivated bias. And I decided that that didn't really fit. It didn't feel right. Because every trans girl's death hurts.
I have never been close to my immediate family. Trans girls everywhere are the closest thing to family that I have. That means some of them drive me insane, others inspire me; some have personalities that I struggle to deal with, and others just click with me right from the start. Some of them I just don't really have strong feelings about one way or the other. That is, I like some, I dislike others, and am ambivalent about the rest. But I love them all. Because they're my family.
When a trans girl dies, I realized, how much it impacts me has to do with how closely I feel her life experiences map to my own. With Leelah, it was the broader sense of total rejection from parents, a refusal to acknowledge who she actually was. That was, again, broadly, my experience growing up. My parents never had any interest in getting to know me. They had a plan for me, and I wasn't in on it. The further I drifted from it, the less they loved me, until finally, there was nothing left, and I was just taking up space at home. Leelah's death, with those immediately apparent first details of her parents rejecting her, struck a chord with me. So her death felt like the loss of a little sister that I had just been told I had.
With most trans girls, there aren't such potent emotional hooks that resonate specifically with my own life. These deaths feel more like the loss of a distant relative. One I may have seen from afar once or twice at the annual family reunion, or whatever. A loss that I feel, and a person that I will miss, and a shame, but less hard-hitting for me, personally.
Taylor's death felt like that, at first. I read the article, and welled up a little bit. I got a lump in my throat, and a couple tears fell. Maybe a few. But I didn't feel too terribly much in common with her specifically, beyond the fact that we were both trans. And then I watched her video.
And it shouldn't have hit me as hard as it did, because the thing that made me feel really connected to Taylor was at the very end. It was just word choice, on her part. Telling us about what she hoped to accomplish in the near future, and then saying "wish me luck!" It's not even a trans phrase, it's just a thing some people say when they're about to try some big thing that means a lot to them. It's the same thing I've been saying a lot lately.
I completely fucking lost it. I had been tearing up a bit throughout her video, but at the very end, I was absolutely done. I had spent the previous hour or so doubled over in my chair, trying to convince my guts to relax, so I could just sit up like a normal person and get some homework done. And there I was, doubled over again, but sobbing relentlessly, this time. And, objectively, in far more pain.
I ended up stumbling over to the bed. I couldn't see very well. I sort of fell over and scattered cats everywhere. Cream Puff Cow came up to me and started head-butting me gently while I cried. He's such an idiot when it comes to basic things like, "which way did the ball go that I just watched roll right past me?" but he's probably the most emotionally tuned-in cat I have, and one of the better ones I've ever met in my life.
Sorry, I start to really babble when I'm upset. It scatters me. Um. Yeah, so, anyway, I was sobbing on my bed, and I just started asking Cream Puff Cow, of all people, "why?" A million variations on the same question, for about an hour. But, in between sobs. I was probably not intelligible, but that was okay, because he doesn't understand English, anyway.
Why do people hate us so much?
What have we done to make anyone upset? What? Besides being born this way?
She just wanted to help people learn how to do their makeup better. Who could that have possibly hurt?
Why do they keep killing us?
And we all know the answer, right. It's because we're different. And it's the dumbest thing in the world. We are steeped in this culture of celebrating diversity in theory — thematically in stories, whether in music, text, or video with coming-of-age and fish-out-of-water archetypes — but burying it in practice. We want to see and celebrate diversity, but we only want to do it from afar, and we only want to do it with people that we can find pleasing in enough ways to offset the things about them that we do not understand, things which may disturb us.
And I get that. I just wrote about it. People who are different from us can sometimes seem so different that we get freaked out. What we do with that feeling defines us. When we are children, perhaps we respond by making fun of some aspects of that person that we think tie into whatever it is about them that we can't get our heads around. Of course, once the belittling starts, the target is gradually perceived as less and less human, and let's be honest, they didn't rate very high to begin with.
Believe it or not, I was actually part of bullying a kid in my middle school. Not an especially active agent, but active enough. Certainly not passive, and definitely not in opposition, which is where I really wish I could say I had been. There was a Korean kid in our grade who had some kind of mental or emotional disability. Possibly something developmental. I never really found out. Some of the other kids would get really nasty with him, physically violent.
I never got that bad, but I wasn't much better. Whenever someone made a crack at his expense, I laughed. Yeah. It was hilarious. This kid is different. What could be funnier. I probably made some cracks, myself.
One time, another kid in our grade held him, suspended by his ankle, over a stairwell, a one-story drop. I have no idea why. I walked up on this scene, and I can't remember doing a thing to stop it. I can't remember even wanting to. It was scary shit, looking back. Some real Lord-of-the-Flies shit.
But my real motivation, if I can be honest with myself, wasn't so much that I hated the Korean kid for any particular reason. It was that I was so relieved to not be the target. I was so relieved that nobody was coming at me for my bad teeth, or my shitty haircut, or my cheap hand-me-down clothes from my older brother, which had probably come from a thrift store or fucking K-mart before that, anyway. I was relieved that I could just be another asshole in a sea of assholes.
Because I knew. I fucking knew how much it hurt to even think that other people didn't like me. To even think that they were talking about me behind my back, making fun of me for god-knows-what. Being poor. Being short. Having glasses. Being shy.
I was once happily flirting with a girl in one of my classes. And I do believe she was flirting back. We were just chatting and being silly, not thinking at all about where anything might go. We hardly knew each other. It was the middle school equivalent of meeting someone really cool at a bar. Except that at this bar, her friend showed up, and asked her, without even looking at me, "when are you gonna stop talking to this nerd?" This was probably around 1987, and when someone called you a nerd in 1987, it was not a term of endearment.
The thing is, I know everyone in the entire world knows what it feels like to be the target. To be the object of ridicule. What I don't know is why, when we realize that, we keep being so fucking awful to each other.
Try to imagine the lives of these girls. Imagine knowing who you are, absolutely, unquestioningly, to the very core of everything you are and have ever been. The way most people do. Knowing your gender. The way most people do. Feeling secure in at least that, if nothing else. The way most people do.
Now imagine being challenged on that everywhere you went. From the moment you woke up and your parents denied your identity. To the bus stop where all the other kids ignored you, except when they all turned your way for a second to stare, before returning to their circle to burst out laughing. To school where you get beat up in one bathroom, but looked on with disgust in the other, as if you were some kind of awful beast. To lunch, where no one would sit with you. And then back home. To start it all over again the next day.
At first, you might fight back. After all, you know who you are. It's so obvious. To you. It's the truth. So you fight back. Someone calls you "faggot," you pick whatever you think might hurt them the most, and throw it back. Maybe it's "nigger," or "chink." Maybe you point out that they were adopted. Maybe you ask if they still live in a trailer.
Eventually, you get tired. You can't fight forever, so you stop fighting. But they don't stop attacking. You stop feeling, but you keep taking damage. And before you know it, every day is misery, and you long for death. You long for rest. You long for freedom. You long to be treated and seen as the person you know yourself to be. Your mind becomes very adept at shutting down positive trains of thought, and it becomes more and more fatalistic. Until finally, it kills you.
The next time you feel uncomfortable around someone, ask yourself if they're actually doing anything that warrants discomfort. Are they charging at you, brandishing a frozen-solid slab of albacore, while not wearing any pants, covered in cat shit and Goldschläger, screaming about the motherland? Feel disturbed. Be okay with feeling disturbed. Because that is some weird shit.
But are they just sitting there, having lunch? Are they just washing their hands in the restroom, not making eye contact, and clearly hoping to GTFO ASAP? Are they, in any other words, just existing? Because if that makes you uncomfortable, please be honest with yourself and realize that the problem is not that they exist, but that you are reacting in some particular way to that fact. And when you see other people who feel uncomfortable around that person starting to take it out on them, think long and hard about what you wanted the last time someone laid into you for basically just being who you were.
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