19 Facts About Leelah Alcorn

Leelah Alcorn was an American transgender girl whose suicide attracted international attention.

At age 14, she came out as transgender to her parents, Carla and Doug Leelah Alcorn, who refused to accept her female gender identity.

Leelah Alcorn used Tumblr's queue feature to publish her suicide note online several hours after her death, and it soon attracted international attention across mainstream and social media.

Leelah Alcorn's parents were severely criticized for misgendering and deadnaming her in comments to the media, while LGBT rights activist Dan Savage held them responsible for their child's death, and social media users harassed them online.

Leelah Alcorn was born in Kings Mills, Ohio, on November 15,1997.

Leelah Alcorn described herself as one of several children being raised in a conservative Christian environment; she and her family attended the Northeast Church of Christ in Cincinnati, and she had been featured in a profile of that church published in a 2011 article in The Christian Chronicle.

Leelah Alcorn rejected the name she was given by her parents.

Leelah Alcorn stated that this made her hate herself, and that she developed a form of depression.

Leelah Alcorn described this as a significant contributing factor towards her suicide.

Two months before her death, Leelah Alcorn sought out help on Reddit, asking users whether the treatment perpetrated by her parents constituted child abuse.

Leelah Alcorn expressed her wish that all of her possessions and money be donated to a transgender advocacy charity, and called for issues surrounding gender identity to be taught in schools.

The suicide note was later deleted after Leelah Alcorn's parents asked for it to be removed, and the blog was made inaccessible to the public.

In that statement, staff from Alcorn's former school, Kings High School, declared that "[Leelah] Alcorn was a sweet, talented, tender-hearted 17-year-old", adding that counselors would be made available to students affected by the incident.

Leelah Alcorn cited the successful prosecution of Dharun Ravi following the suicide of Tyler Clementi as a legal precedent for such an action.

Leelah Alcorn added that legal action should be brought against the conversion therapists who had counseled Leelah, and suggested that the Alcorns should lose custody of their other children.

The day after Leelah Alcorn's suicide note was published online, Chris Seelbach, the first openly gay councilman on Cincinnati City Council, shared it as part of a Facebook message in which he stated that her death showed how hard it was to be transgender in the US His post was shared over 4,700 times and increased public awareness of the incident.

When contacted by The Cincinnati Enquirer, Shane Morgan, the founder and chair of transgender advocate group TransOhio, stated that while 2014 witnessed gains for the trans rights movement, Leelah Alcorn's death illustrated how "trans people are still being victimized and still being disrespected", highlighting the high rate of transgender people who had been murdered that year.

Since the incident, TransOhio has received letters from parents of transgender children describing how Leelah Alcorn's death affected them.

Allison Woolbert, executive director of the Transgender Human Rights Institute, informed The Independent that Leelah Alcorn's case was "not unique"; the newspaper highlighted research from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicating that LGBT youth are about twice as likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual, cisgender teenagers.