Leelah Alcorn’s blog and suicide note deleted from Tumblr
The blog of transgender teenager Leelah Alcorn has been deleted – removing a suicide note that she had left on the website.
In the message, she said her Christian parents refused to respect her gender identity, and had attempted to put her through conversion therapy because “God doesn’t make mistakes”.
However, the girl’s blog has now been entirely deleted – scrubbing her allegations of mistreatment from the internet.
Attempting to visit the site now displays the standard error message: “There’s nothing here. Whatever you were looking for doesn’t currently exist at this address. Unless you were looking for this error page, in which case: Congrats! You totally found it.”
It is unclear if her parents were responsible for removing the blog, or if it was deleted by Tumblr.
Vigils were also held today in memory of Leelah across the world, with large gatherings in Ohio and in London.
At the London vigil, campaigner Sarah Brown called for a ban on ‘conversion’ style therapy.
She said: “These [conversion therapists] are killing our young people through their fraudulence, their negligence, their incompetence. The lawmakers and regulators who should be stopping them are not. Leelah’s dying wish was that we work to make these things better.
“A good start would be to stop frauds and charlatans from pushing trans people into suicide through fraudulent, negligent and incompetent therapy that is worse than useless, and if they do, to ensure that they face justice for it.
“I, for one, intend to make our lawmakers try.”
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article and need to talk to someone, visit samaritans.org or call 08457 90 90 90.
