Death of Leelah Alcorn

Leelah Alcorn
Leelah Alcorn in 2014
Born	Joshua Ryan Alcorn (1997-11-15)November 15, 1997 Kings Mills, Ohio, US
Died	December 28, 2014(2014-12-28) (aged 17) Lebanon, Ohio, US
Cause of death	Suicide by vehicular impact

Leelah Alcorn (November 15, 1997 – December 28, 2014) was an American transgender girl whose suicide attracted international attention. Alcorn had posted a suicide note to her Tumblr blog, writing about societal standards affecting transgender people and expressing the hope that her death would create a dialogue about discrimination, abuse and lack of support for transgender people.

Assigned male at birth, she was given the name Joshua Alcorn and raised in Ohio by a family affiliated with the Churches of Christ movement. At age 14, she came out as transgender to her parents, Carla and Doug Alcorn, who refused to accept her female gender identity. When she was 16, they denied her request to undergo transition treatment, instead sending her to Christian-based conversion therapy with the intention of convincing her to reject her gender identity and accept her gender as assigned at birth. After she revealed her attraction toward males to her classmates, her parents removed her from school and revoked her access to social media. In her suicide note, Alcorn cited loneliness and alienation as key reasons for her decision to end her life and blamed her parents for causing these feelings. She committed suicide by walking out in front of oncoming traffic on the Interstate 71 highway.

Alcorn arranged for her suicide note to be posted online several hours after her death, and it soon attracted international attention across mainstream and social media. LGBT rights activists called attention to the incident as evidence of the problems faced by transgender youth, while vigils were held in her memory in the United States and United Kingdom. Petitions were formed calling for the establishment of "Leelah's Law", a ban on conversion therapy in the U.S., which received a supportive response from U.S. President Barack Obama. Within a year, the city of Cincinnati had criminalised conversion therapy. Alcorn's parents were criticized for misgendering Leelah in comments that they made to the media, while LGBT rights activist Dan Savage blamed them for their child's death and social media users subjected them to online harassment. They defended their refusal to accept their child's identity and their use of conversion therapy by reference to their Christian values.