Leelah Alcorn, transgender girl, kills self due to bigoted parents

[Sol]

Why are people such bigots?

This is horrible

[Sol]

This story is very sad, but the reporting is problematic.

I fear that giving someone who committed suicide this kind of platform and retroactive affirmation is going to encourage more suicide.

Statements made by a teenager who did something very stupid (Can we all agree that suicide is dumb in this case?) should be taken with a grain of salt.

She was ing bullied to death by her vile family because of their bigotry. She was forced to live as someone who she did not identify as. She was deliberately isolated from her friends and endured conversion therapy. Her life was made hell.

It's not 'retroactive affirmation' to say that she was driven to the breaking point by the ultra-transphobic attitudes held by her parents--it is a mere statement of fact. Nearly half of all trans* people have attempted to commit suicide. And simply put, her voices and the voices of people in similar situations need be given a gigantic platform--people need to be screaming for justice right now!

So maybe think before you post next time, asshole.

[Sol]

But gender isn't a social construct - that's why this happened. Nobody constructed Leelah to be a girl, she was a girl on the inside; they tried to construct her to be a boy and it didn't work out. The fact that transgender people exist means that gender is innate. I don't know how, I don't know why, I'm not a biologist or a psychologist or any of those sorts of things, but I do know that it's not a matter of whether we "need" gender identities, it's a matter of what to do with them.

The reason Leelah killed herself wasn't because she was being "forced to change genders", it was because she was not allowed to change genders (or rather sexes - transgender people change the sex to match the gender, not the other way around).

Sex is what is biological, and what can only be changed by surgery and hormones. There's a reason that gender grew into what it now is out of its earlier role as a grammar term: gender is a linguistic construct that is built into all of the ways we view society. Gender governs everything from "the man is a Mr., but the woman can be a Ms. or Mrs. depending on her marital status" to "the generic singular pronoun with indeterminate gender is 'He'" to things that don't seem directly connected to grammar rules, how we talk and think about the differences between the sexes in general.

Put more simply, surgery and hormones can turn a man into a woman or vice versa, but it takes language to change a male into a female or vice versa, right down to changing the fundamental building blocks of language like pronouns.

That's not how language works.

Firstly, you seem to be going from hard Sapir-Whorf. Which is BS and totally disproven.

Secondly, there is very little correlation between grammatical gender and sexism, or transmisogyny. Compare and contrast Farsi to German.