“To have courage for whatever comes in life — everything lies in that.” – St Teresa of Ávila
As is the custom here at aoifeschatology.com, I’d like to wish all of you a most Happy New Year, one full of courage, love, and uncompromising solidarity.
My heart is in such tremendous grief . . . I cannot begin to compile, let alone assess — and certainly am far from being able to express — my thoughts on Leelah Alcorn’s suicide. Truly, this is really something I cannot fully reflect upon right now: the impact is raw, and my responses frayed and distraught. After my SRS recovery, I will attempt, and most likely fail, to discuss this awful, awful tragedy.
A young person has died. The world is dimmer for that.
I buried a transwoman suicide victim this year, a sex worker whose farewell video also circulated briefly but was soon forgotten, her name casually discarded in the attention deficits of trans activism, a movement eager for martyrs but negligent in virtue. Don’t pass on suicide notes: you’re inviting despair. As my wise friend Glosswitch rightly pointed out on twitter, “Suicide prevention charities know a little more than twitter’s performative call-out brigade.” There’s a reason the experts advise one not to toss around desperate last words like public confetti: you will encourage more in this reckless theatre of cruelty known as social media. That Leelah’s final words of extreme heartbreak, the staggering testimony of her suffering, have been heralded as a manifesto of revenge and death as programme of liberation is deeply upsetting. I can’t look at any more of it, begging your pardon. But my sensitivity balks at seeing any more hatred levelled at a grieving, gutted mum in the aftermath of a teen’s sudden death.
(For the love of God and His sorrowful mother, trans people, find yourselves some compassion and leave Leelah Alcorn’s family alone, I beg you!)
“I’ll make my life count, make it matter, by turning it into a suicide statistic integer” … I used to think this way as a solution to the unconquerable ache … it’s not — it never will — life and love have been the only consistent, universal answers to the problems of grief, pain, and personhood. Choose love so that love may choose you.
Choose life in order to live, or at least survive.
Causing someone else to functionally murder you, even in extreme distress of severe mental health crisis, is brutally selfish. That trucker’s life is shattered. He’s in my evening rosary, for he’ll wake up for the rest of his life with this nightmare of unconsented accomplice to suicide. Honestly. The furious despair will never leave him for a second. He became an unwilling destroyer of a young life. The sound of her body, the shattered windscreen. “What if I left for work five minutes earlier? What if . . . .” This, his guilt forever.
She’s not even been laid to rest yet.
… yet her death will be converted into the tweeter and tumblr hagiographies currently under preparation. Like so many of us struggling against gender, Leelah found help online in other trans people. This is the community that can raise tens of thousands of dollars for cosmetic surgery to install pert button noses on white media T-figures, but can’t come up with the cash for kids who need to leave harmful homes. Have a wee think on that; cos believe you me: if you want to witness the dodgy scruples of a Trans Inc, watch closely as they likewise narratologically exploit this tragedy for ideology. (By the way, taunting bereaved parents is utterly shameful and despicable.) Yet, encountering the abuse hurled at women over this event already would turn most stomaches to venomous rot: they know no shame and they know no bottom when it comes to how low and depraved they can be under the pink and blue blanket flag they’re preparing to lay, military funeral style, over her martyrological body.
Like sweet Chloe, I pray that Leelah is at peace now. Trans activists think I’m being cute and cookie-seeking; but I write this four days before my SRS, going in for an operation without a single word of health or healing from my own mother and family. Not a thought I convert to type right now, at five o’clock in the morning, comes without a dreadful echo in the harsh resonance of my own history of grief. And as for those blethering transwomen, the ones whose praxis is coffee-shopped haughtiness, telling me to detransition — I survived three suicide attempts. I returned to the Church. You haven’t any notion the joy in my life —
I quote GenderCoping, a brilliant transwoman who I respect and admire with all sincerity and a very, very dear soul whom I love: “It has never been easy. Transition lasts your entire life. But there are moments of joy, and you will have some.”
May you find them.
IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING SUICIDE, please reach out for help❤. Your life matters. I thank God each day for having survived my attempts.
(edit: I’ve removed the translifeline number. several of us attempted to speak with management as to their vetting and training processes for volunteer operators. given their response — lack of response, as miranda yardley documents — I cannot in good conscience recommend TransLifeLine. please contact trained, professional crisis workers if you are in distress.)
Pax,
Aoife
明けましておめでとうございます
今年もよろしくお願いします
(Photo courtesy of Prof Cody Poulton — the pic is taken near “Arashiyama, as far as Adashino, which name and place has been synonymous with mortality for over a millennium”).
