Guest Post: On Suicide and the Transfeminine Expereince

This is a guest post. One of my very dear friends Elly posted this on her facebook wall yesterday in reaction to the coverage and tragedy of Leelah Alcorn's suicide. It was too beautiful and full of truth for me not to ask if I could share it. I'm deeply grateful that she agreed to let me post her story. As someone with lived experience as a trans woman and someone who's been consumed by suicidal thoughts she is far more equipped to write about these things than I am. I thank her for her honesty and bravery in sharing this with me and her community.

[TW: Suicide.]
If you need something to make these things more tangible and real to you, then I want to tell you something: Before my transition, I was going to kill myself. Not maybe. There was no real sliver of doubt left in me, although I was being patient. I'd worked out my plan (carefully optimizing for lethality and viability of organ donation) and I'd composed my note in my head. I thought about it nearly non-stop for years on end, refining the details, hungrily imagining the act itself. The instinctual allure of self-annihilation was indescribably intense: I wanted to die like a drowning woman wants to breathe. Sometimes I fantasized about flaying myself alive. Many of you -- some of my oldest friends and acquaintances -- have never seen me in person in any moment in which I wasn't actively wishing I was dead, although I worked as hard as I could to hide it from you: because it wasn't fit for polite conversation, and because I couldn't allow you to try to stop me.

I started seriously contemplating suicide when I was in seventh grade, and I stopped a little while after I started my transition. I don't know quite when I lost my will to die, or how; one day I just noticed it missing. There was a span of time in which it was so strange and new to actually want to live, I wasn't sure how to deal with it. Now I'm looking back from the far side and it's increasingly difficult for me to empathize with how I know I used to feel. It's an eerie thing to so clearly remember feeling something like that -- to be able to touch every scar I carved into myself down through all those years -- and feel like I only sort of understand. I can't imagine wanting to die anymore. That's why I can tell you all of this.

I was essentially suicidal for fully half my life, and I never even had to worry about most of the things Leelah Alcorn had hanging over her. I never had to deal with the violent condemnation of parents or church. By comparison to her, I consider myself quite weak: I would have died surrounded by would-be allies, having admitted nothing to anyone, done in by nothing much more than my own internalization of the ambient transphobia of this culture. All the Ace Venturas and Crying Games.

I want so badly to live now. I relish every breath I take with a kind of euphoric desperation that I can't describe any better than I can my lost death wishes, and I can't fathom that anything will ever change that now. Still, I'd trade my life in a second for a chance to speak to all the Leelah Alcorns of this world before they leave it: to say, you're not as alone as I know you feel. To tell them: holy shit do I ever worry that I'm always going to look like some kind of ugly-ass man in drag, but I've also lived to figure out that there are much worse ways to be -- and you were beautiful anyway. To say I've felt enough varieties of loneliness now to know that none of them are quite as sharp as being in the love and intimacy of someone who still only sees the facade you've constructed for them. I don't know if my words would make any difference.

There are so many ways in which 2014 was a staggering breakthrough year for transgender equality, but it wasn't nearly good enough. 2015 needs to be better. Every year needs to be better than the last, until there are no more stories like Leelah's. Until the world looks back and knows it can't even rightly imagine what it was like for us.