Realistically.

The money for transition isn't there.
No parental support.
Religious school, so no school support.
Living with parents.
No support from peers.

So with extremely poor mental health, would have to pass highschool with grades good enough to get into a university without the parents sabotaging it at the first sign of gender non conformity, even if she could pass and somehow didn't drop out, would be in debt at the end, would probably have to move back in with parents until a job could be found. Leelah can't take HRT while there's any dependency on the parents cos obviously they'll notice. So under the best scenario she'd have to go through University stresses, leave her family find some shelter or friend to stay with, get a job, start to pay off that debt, self medicate with hormones and T blockers bought online. Probably wouldn't pass as a cis woman, so would likely have to endure riducule, misgendering, a higher risk of violence, and extreme diffculty getting hired for work. All under the weight of crushing dysphora.

Either that or she lives with the dysphoria, keeps it botted up inside silently and presents as a man. Which is a worse option in many ways.

Leelah posted on ->-bleeped-<- looking for support and got the "It gets better" mantra.  What would that mean in this case? Emancipate from parents, get all the therapy she needs and succeed academically at highschool and University, get the medical interventions she needs, find work, save for surgeries, get them and live as a happy woman. Could that have happened? 

Not all parents have the skills to keep a child alive. Sadly, that's what  we saw in her case.

I'm not sure what the ->-bleeped-<-ors, who obviously meant well, have to do with it?

Hugs, Devlyn

They meant well, and I'm not blamig them, but I think it's bad advice. Getting a suicidal person to think of the future is a bad move. Its better to keep them in the moment as much as possible.

OK, but offering support and hope is about all that the average person can do. Suicide threads and threats scared the hell out of me when I first came here. Now I'll wade right in. I've had three suicidal people thank me for saving their lives. I  had no training, I simply offered them the mantras, the platitudes, and  the fact that I would care if they killed themselves. Sometimes that's all that needs to be said.

Hugs, Devlyn

That's true. But I think in Leelah's case and I think alot of cases, "It's gets better" gets read as "It gets better - after years of more suffering." 

That goes back to the parents who couldn't provide a loving, supporting environment for their child to live and grow.

She could have done what countless others of us have done.  However, when she killed herself I was still pre HRT and while I felt much sorrow the greater emotion was envy.  So, is what the rest of us did really better?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I was a hairs breath from ending myself 7 months ago. Its easy to see no hope when you are deep in the dysphoria hole.  Sometimes even the smallest hope is enough to get you started.

Even if someone's not suicidal the amount of time/effort/money transition takes is depressing to think about in itself. Thinking of the long haul didn't do much for me either, I had to stay in the moment with occasional glances at the future.

Yep I just kept thinking of the now and working for goals I had at the time, which led me to my work abroad and the privacy and peace of my own place to do whatever I wanted. It gave me everything I needed to re explore my feelings.
I hadn't much of a hope in the old days with strict parents 3 brothers and an all boys Catholic school.
It's up to ourselves to see the good side of life even if things are tough. Some people can't see the light, and that is sad

Quote from: Rachel_Christina on May 09, 2018, 03:50:54 AM
I hadn't much of a hope in the old days with strict parents 3 brothers and an all boys Catholic school.
It's up to ourselves to see the good side of life even if things are tough. Some people can't see the light, and that is sad

Hello Rachel Christina

I know the feeling - so sad. I am also a Catholic and my parents now deceased never understood my trans feelings.

Even now I find it disappointing the Catholic Church's hierarchy (and many other Churchs' hierarchy) are still "anti".

Best wishes

Pamela

This is a difficult topic, and as such I will lead in with a bit of a disclaimer: I make absolutely zero judgments against those who commit suicide. Being driven to suicide almost by definition means you are in a state of mind which foregoes all judgment.

However, I believe unequivocally, suicide is never, never, the answer in these sorts of scenarios (ie: not talking about someone who is terminally ill at the age of 95 and just suffering, entirely different discussion). Because when it comes down to it, the "it get's better" mantras are true. Does that mean her life would have been easy? Of course not. She faced an uphill battle in escaping family, getting an education, getting a job, affording needed medical procedures, and just being able to be herself. But... well... which of us doesn't? (Many of those issues aren't even trans specific by any means.) I don't need to go into the countless stories on this forum of depression, discrimination, poverty, sexual abuse, or pretty much anything else under the sun. And yet, people survived and went on to become happy(or at least as happy as the general populace which is really all anyone can ask for).

And honestly, while Leelah's issues listed in the original post are certainly horrible, they are also unfortunately extraordinarily common for trans youth. They absolutely could have been overcome in time. Would it have been easy? No, definitely not. But life isn't easy, never has been. Would it have been a guarantee? Nope, definitely not that either, but then that's just not how the world works, nothing is guaranteed. But then that's a good thing, because it also means it's not a guarantee it will be hopeless. I've seen quite a few stories of people escaping those sorts of situations and lucking into money, or finding love, or any of a number of things. (The "rich boyfriend paid for SRS" narrative seems oddly not that rare for example.)

(My experience with suicide: When my parents divorced when I was 16, after her marriage of 35 years that she had put everything into ended, my mother attempted to commit suicide a number of times. She saw no hope for the future, and she believed she was a burden on everyone else around her. Essentially, if my dad didn't want her, then it stood to reason no one else did too. Of course, this was far from the case, and the suicide attempts had far more dramatic impact on me and my younger brother than the divorce itself did. Over the following years, she tried a few more times, some in secret which she told me about much later (when they failed she wouldn't seek medical attention for it, ultimately damaging her liver pretty badly, her life only saved because she was very overweight at the time and she was taking dosages that would have been fatal for a smaller person). Ultimately... things got better. She was never happy about the divorce, and never dated again or anything like that, but she lived to see her grand children be born and grow and also was there when I needed her desperately during my own issues in my 20s. When she passed away from cancer in 2014, even if life was not what she thought it would be or what she may have wished for it to be, she was ultimately happy and did not want to die.)