Carol H Tucker Passionate about knowledge management and organizational development, expert in loan servicing, virtual world denizen and community facilitator, and a DISNEY fan
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beladona Memorial Be warned:in this very rich environment where you can immerse yourself so completely, your emotions will become engaged -- and not everyone is cognizant of that. Among the many excellent features of SL, there is no auto-return on hearts, so be wary of where your's wanders...
It was around Christmas time when Leelah was hit by a truck and that death sparked a deluge of internet outrage, an outpouring of empathy from an embattled community, and came to my wandering attention because one activist changed a tweet the mother sent:
Now without getting into the family history and the travails of the transgender community, I saved the story in my “scribbles” file because of that correction. You see, I could identify with that mother who at the time of her grief over the loss of her child, reverted back to the name she gave her son – after all, I still call my son “Tommy” at times and my daughter “baby daughter” and “Gem”, and if I was under a great deal of stress, I would definitely revert back to those names no matter how politically incorrect. I thought the article scolding them that “this isn’t about you” was cruel and cold, after all I can’t imagine many things that are worse than burying one of my children, especially if there is a question of whether or not they chose to commit suicide! I can put myself in the role of the grief-stricken mother all too easily, and I thought everyone should just give them a break
Definitely in the category of “I don’t know what I don’t know”
Courtesy of Vanity Fair’s cover of Caitlyn Jenner, there has been a lot of mainstream conversation about transgender, some of it helpful and some of it not so much when it comes to comprehension. The whole concept that I should be somehow aware of “cis-gender privilege” has me scratching my head, quite frankly – I never even heard of the term before this past week! And since most of my perceptions about gender switching was based on movies like Mrs. Doubtfire, Victor/Victoria and Jack Lemmon prancing around in drag, seasoned slightly by personal exposure to women who preferred to present themselves as male for one reason or another and by men playing women in my 2nd Life, I have to admit to ignorance. I had no idea that the community was so large, the needs were so varied and the problems so difficult. Now and then a story will float around about a kid who gets in trouble in school for wanting to be the opposite sex, but I guess I didn’t pay much attention. For the record? My rather cynical response to the Bruce-to-Caitlyn transition was that it was a good think he could afford extensive surgery and wondering if most transgenders are members of the 1% -- talk about an economic barrier! Can you imagine the medical bills? Wow.
The latest Netflix show Sense8 has a transgender woman playing a transgender woman, which apparently is a first. The mother of Nomi is totally unsympathetic to that woman, seeing her as mentally ill and stating in no uncertain terms that she was “Michael when you came out of my womb and you will be Michael until I die.” And I finally found out that the reason Leelah’s mother’s tweet about her son Jason was so offensive to the community was that it was considered “dead-naming”: “when you intentionally disrespect a trans person by using their birth name instead of their chosen name to invalidate their identity” , which certainly gives me a better explanation the amount of virulent rhetoric it unleashed. While I have little sympathy for Nomi’s mother’s total rejection of her child, I still can feel the deep grief of the mother who had to mourn not only the loss of her child in the middle of the Christmas holidays, but do it in the harshest, most judgmental light the internet could possibly throw upon them.
When all is said and done, though? I still feel sympathy for that mother who lost her son without ever knowing her daughter, for whom Christmas will always be a time of mourning, and who forever will be haunted with the hurt of wondering if she really caused the suicide. How will she ever live with such a burden?
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