As a bisexual and gender fluid individual, I tend to follow what is happening in the LGBTQ community more closely than most people. Transgender issues interest me in particular, and when 17-year-old transgender Leelah Alcorn committed suicide in Ohio in Dec., it came to my attention pretty quickly. 

Transgender activists instantly blew up the web, writing songs about Leelah, holding vigils, proposing anti-conversion therapy legislation and raising Leelah to celebrity status almost overnight.

Now before I go on, I want to make something clear: While I would absolutely support Leelah’s Law, the proposed legislation to end harmful (and usually religion-driven) conversion therapy, I do not agree that Leelah should be raised to celebrity status for jumping out in front of a truck. 

Now, I understand that Leelah had issues – she was the child of conservative Christian parents who refused to recognize her gender identity and sent her to conversion therapy. While they’ve claimed in interviews to have loved their child “unconditionally,” it seems obvious when Leelah’s side of the story is reviewed that they had little, if any, respect for their child. When she came out as gay at school, they took away her computer and social media and took her out of public school, effectively isolating her for five months. 

It doesn’t take a genius to see how this child came to the conclusion, as stated in her suicide note, that “People say ‘it gets better’ but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse.”

And herein lies the actual problem. 

Leelah’s suicide doesn’t help transgender kids at all – it doesn’t show them that it gets better. (Which it does, I assure you.) It shows them that if they can’t have their way, right this instant, then suicide is an easy out, and parents are easy to blame. 

Leelah’s choice of action was both selfish and shortsighted. People everywhere are raising their flags in support of Leelah, but who is starting a fund for the truck driver that she jumped out in front of? That guy is probably going to need therapy for a while. Who is supporting him? Leelah made a choice – the wrong choice – because she couldn’t see a future beyond the roadblocks her parents were throwing up in front of her. 

Being a teenager is partially to blame for that – kids want everything now, and everything in the world is of equal importance, from the choice of what socks to wear in the morning all the way to whom to marry. But these days we also live in a society that traps people in a bizarre cycle of dependency that has somehow become acceptable and makes it easy for a young person to think they’ll never escape. 

As a teenager, I remember wanting and wishing to be grown up and in charge of my own life. Looking back, perhaps that was amplified because of the dysfunction in my home: Watching my parents screw things up made me much more aware of how I would do things differently when I finally got to adulthood myself. 

Regardless of my parents’ problems, there was one thing that my mother always told me that stuck with me: “When you turn eighteen, you’re out of this house.” I looked forward to that day with all my heart, and prepared for it.

You see, my mother understood – and passed along – a vital piece of information that somehow seems to have gotten lost in today’s society, by both children and parents. And that is that children are to be weaned. My mother’s point was that a parent’s job is not to raise children to be dependent on her forever, and a child’s goal shouldn’t be to milk her parents for the rest of their lives when she should be providing for herself. 

Parents won’t be around forever, and it’s their responsibility to raise offspring that can function without them. It’s the offspring’s responsibility to rise to the challenge. You break away from your parents and begin functioning on your own. That’s what it’s all about. 

When I was young, I couldn’t wait to be on my own and away from my parents. Even beyond my sexual orientation and gender issues, I understood that there were certain things I could never do under my parents’ roof. If my parents wouldn’t let me do something, I didn’t dwell on it, I merely got a little angrier and a lot more determined.

Leelah asked her parents for gender reassignment surgery at 16, knowing full well that they were going to say “no.” I can’t even figure out why she bothered to ask, and I see this time and time again in chat rooms and groups on Facebook. I understand that kids want everything now, but that never outweighed common sense for me, and I can’t understand why young people seem to lack that common sense now.

Young people are consistently upset with their parents for not shouldering the burden and forking over dough for things they want. First off, even if they support your gender reassignment, that’s not your money. They earned it, not you. They have every right to say no to you, regardless of how you feel about it. And second, if you already know they don’t approve, don’t cause yourself the stress of asking and having to deal with the fallout of the answer. 

You live your life and let them live theirs. If you’re over eighteen, your life is your responsibility now, and no one else’s. If you’re under eighteen and need help, there are resources for you. If you’re local, the Persad Center, Gay and Lesbian Community Center and FamilyLinks are good places to start. 

Part of growing up is realizing that not everyone, not even your family, is always going to be in your corner. You let go of painful connections and you forge new ones. It hurts, and that’s life.

It gets better, but the nightmare doesn’t begin to end until the day you stop relying on everybody else and start taking responsibility for yourself, and not a day sooner. Incidentally, that goes for non-trans people, too. I moved out of my father’s home the day after I turned eighteen and never went back. Progress was slow, but it happened, and today I am proud of where I’ve landed. 

Trans or not, Leelah Alcorn made the wrong decision and traumatized an innocent man for the rest of his life because she was too shortsighted to be patient enough to wait another year and a half so she could legally take control of her own life. Leelah is not a hero; she is a tragedy. She is not a cause; she is a person who made a mistake. She is not an example to follow.