Quoted for truth.
Holy crap.
There’s no need for me to even try to get involved when there’s this level of “understanding.” :rolleyes:
I don’t believe this is correct; I believe they only referred to her as Josh in direct quotes from the parents. Unless I missed a part?
Considering that Leelah’s last post on her Tumblr page was to say “Fuck you, Mom and Dad”, I think we should accept her wishes, and not those of the parents who drove her to suicide.
However, my mind keeps going to the truck driver whose truck she threw herself in front of. Is anybody thinking about him?
Yeah, it was one of my first thoughts too. 
Yes I was thinking what an awful way to commit suicide, that truck driver is probably traumatized as hell and is going to agonize over this thinking how they could have avoided the collision. Especially with this story blowing up and the sad circumstances that caused the suicide.
I’d look for the telltale feminine brain characteristics that will be present in such a person.
That’s not how human biology works.
Not when it kills people.
If the parents are unhappy, good. They drove their child to suicide, and continue to show contempt for her.
No; you insist that belief trumps biology. Specifically, you insist that your belief trumps biology. And science. Reality is not going to reshape itself to make you happy.
The first paragraph called her Josh, outside of a direct quote, but the rest of the article always referred to her in the feminine, or at most gender neutral (calling her their ‘child’, ‘the teen’ and avoiding pronouns), and as Leelah, except when directly quoting her mother. (Unless I also missed something.)
Please elaborate on this psuedoscientific bullshit.
To what extent can a person will themselves to become someone they were not? I ask this because tumblr-wackos are pioneering the ideas of “transethnic” and “otherkin”. Can a person will themselves to be a mailbox?
From the journal Nature, Brain development: The most important sexual organ.
Smapti, you appear to be literally saying that you would refuse to call someone what they wish to be called if you didn’t consider it accurate – even if you knew for sure that refusing to go along with it would result in their suicide. Is that really what you’re saying?
The consequences on the one hand are maybe you feel that you misused a pronoun. The consequences on the other hand are someone dies. How can you possibly think one is more important than the other?
I’ve got a daughter who swaps her pronouns every other sentence. By your standard, she’s Ted Bundy.
None of us have the right to insist that reality alter itself to what would make us personally happy.
I’m not comfortable being a liar.
Thanks for poisoning the well. I would also have liked to have had more clarification of this, as it’s something I don’t know about, but I now have to go out of my way to dissociate myself from the ugly way you phrased it.
Yea I was going to ask if any medical examiner does MRIs of cadaver brains looking for such, but oh well.
Asking someone to call you X instead of Y isn’t “insisting reality alter itself”, regardless of the values of X and Y.
Are you more comfortable being a liar or driving someone to suicide?
It’s not a hypothetical – this is the choice Leelah’s parents faced: Go along with what they considered a lie, or insist on the “truth” (as they saw it), and have their kid kill herself. Maybe they can claim ignorance, that they didn’t know how it would all end… but you seem to be saying that given that same choice, knowing where that path lead, you’d still do what they did.
You’re right, religion should be banned.
You have an interesting idea of pseudoscientific. Yes, this is a new area of research - although post mortem examinations have previously revealed differences - but it’s not particularly controversial.
Let’s not kid ourselves and pretend a coroner is going to perform an MRI on a cadaver to determine it’s sex.
Maybe it’s a generational thing, in fact I know it’s a generational thing, but I learned in college that sex refers to your biological organs and gender is a social construct reflective of your behavior.
I.E. if you have a penis but wear dresses and carry a purse your sex is male and your gender is female.
I was never entirely happy with these definitions, particularly since it only seems prevalent on college campuses among bleeding-heart liberal professors, but I kind of wish we would all just adopt and accept them so as to avoid the kind of debate that has been raging in this thread.
I do not acknowledge a difference between the meaning of those terms. If your sex is malez then your gender is male.
I despise the word “normalcy” and can’t stand the concept of “closure” regarding tragedy or death, but I’m grown up enough to realize the rest of the society has voted differently so I have stopped stamping my food with indignation and recognized I’m an outlier.
Society’s views on transgender issues has changed, and so are the definitions of certain words. It’s not about what you “ackonwledge”, it’s about how the rest of society views the social issues involved.