Adolescence is a wretched place—a charnel house chock full of freshly formed skeletons waiting to be shoved into closets and strange erogenous urgings that spring up at the most inappropriate moments. It is a time of kinky little hairs that never used to be there and dozens of little oily eruptions—Vesuvian ranges of whiteheads and blackheads that blossom across your forehead at the very moment you begin caring about your appearance. Your once straightforward childhood existence lies in tatters, turned overnight into a pubescent maelstrom of insecurities and hormones that attract drama and self-loathing to you like iron shavings to a Wooly Willie's mouth. Adolescence is when you need to fit in.
I repeat, adolescence is when you need to fit in.
Not want to fit in. NEED.You need to fit in. It is a biological imperative every bit as important as sleep and procreation. If Maslow wrote a teenage hierarchy of needs, “fitting in” would be down at that 1st level sitting beside food, water and shelter, because fitting in means acceptance and acceptance is everything. For a teenager, there is no greater currency in this world than the ability to walk into a room or a conversation and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you belong. More so than in any other part of your life, that sense of belonging is crucial in adolescence because that is the time when you begin to form your own identity and it is damn difficult to make that identity a positive one without a peer network that encourages and understands you. In the absence of this sort of support, your only real hope of making it into adulthood with your sense of self worth intact is to have a family that tries to accept you for the way you are.
Accept you for the way you are. By all accounts, Leelah Alcorn couldn't get many of her peers and her family to acknowledge her for who she was, much less accept her. Fitting in is hard enough for teens living a gender normative adolescence, but for a transgender girl like Leelah growing up in hyper-conservative confines of Warren County, Ohio(1), it was nearly impossible. At the age of 14, Leelah (who was born Joshua Ryan), learned what it meant to be transgender and wept with joy. Not that she hadn't always known that she was “a girl trapped in a boy's body” (she had known that since she was 4), but that she wasn't alone in feeling the way she did and wanting the things she wanted. There were other teens in the world just like her—teens who looked at their bodies in the mirror and watched their peers and heard their names being called and realized that the life they were living wasn't right, like every day the world was forcing them to put their left feet into right footed shoes and act like it didn't hurt. For the rest of her truncated adolescence Leelah tried everything in her power to convince her parents that she had been born with the wrong shoe on the wrong foot, that she wasn't “Joshua”, but it was to no avail. And so, on the morning of December 28th, Leelah Alcorn stepped in front of a tractor trailer on I-71 and took her life.
