thoughts on leelah alcorn and fixing our community

if i had one message for leelah alcorn, it would be this:

i'm sorry the trans community wasn't there for you in time.

yes, her parents' abuse had a big hand in her death. it's not wrong to be angry at them. but what's more worrying to me, and hopefully more within my power to change - as another trans woman and a member of the trans community - is that we were unable to present leelah with a community she could see herself as a part of.

i've read letters to leelah (a little too late, alas) about the "sisterhood" she would have been welcomed into. but the trans community i know is not the most welcoming place, especially for women of color, women of size, disabled women, bisexual women. i didn't start hormones until i was pushing thirty, so hard a time did i have seeing myself as the kind of woman the trans community would accept. that's too long a wait for some girls.

the trans community i know is petty and divisive, aloof, and too often shelters predators who take advantage of the sort of inexperienced trans women leelah would have arrived on our doorstep as. in some ways (not all ways, for sure, but some), it doesn't get better. as a real live trans adult, leelah might have struggled with poverty, homelessness, lack of real community, and the isolation that victims of prominent community abusers are subjected to.

in our rush to uphold the "it gets better" narrative, we write leelah letters (that she'll never read) and post in hashtags about our real adult trans lives (that she'll never have). i saw a headline about "remembering leelah," though how many of us knew her before her death? as too many women have, she seems to have skipped straight to being a name the white and afab people who survived her will read every trans day of remembrance.

and of course we doxx her parents, because many of us have had parents just like hers: the kind who will never not see themselves as the victims. i think the harder task than to make leelah's parents accountable for her suicide is to hold ourselves accountable for the ways in which our community fails trans women all the time. we need to make sure the next girl like leelah - another every day - has a real, safe, supportive community to turn to, instead of a truck.