Andrew Sullivan

Leelah Alcorn’s Last Words

If you are reading this, it means that I have committed suicide and obviously failed to delete this post from my queue.

Please don’t be sad, it’s for the better. The life I would’ve lived isn’t worth living in… because I’m transgender. I could go into detail explaining why I feel that way, but this note is probably going to be lengthy enough as it is. To put it simply, I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was 4. I never knew there was a word for that feeling, nor was it possible for a boy to become a girl, so I never told anyone and I just continued to do traditionally “boyish” things to try to fit in.

When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong. If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.

My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.

When I was 16 I realized that my parents would never come around, and that I would have to wait until I was 18 to start any sort of transitioning treatment, which absolutely broke my heart. The longer you wait, the harder it is to transition. I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life. On my 16th birthday, when I didn’t receive consent from my parents to start transitioning, I cried myself to sleep.

I formed a sort of a “fuck you” attitude towards my parents and came out as gay at school, thinking that maybe if I eased into coming out as trans it would be less of a shock. Although the reaction from my friends was positive, my parents were pissed. They felt like I was attacking their image, and that I was an embarrassment to them. They wanted me to be their perfect little straight christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.

So they took me out of public school, took away my laptop and phone, and forbid me of getting on any sort of social media, completely isolating me from my friends. This was probably the part of my life when I was the most depressed, and I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. I was completely alone for 5 months. No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.

At the end of the school year, my parents finally came around and gave me my phone and let me back on social media. I was excited, I finally had my friends back. They were extremely excited to see me and talk to me, but only at first. Eventually they realized they didn’t actually give a shit about me, and I felt even lonelier than I did before. The only friends I thought I had only liked me because they saw me five times a week.

After a summer of having almost no friends plus the weight of having to think about college, save money for moving out, keep my grades up, go to church each week and feel like shit because everyone there is against everything I live for, I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say “it gets better” but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse.

That’s the gist of it, that’s why I feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me. As for my will, I want 100% of the things that I legally own to be sold and the money (plus my money in the bank) to be given to trans civil rights movements and support groups, I don’t give a shit which one. The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please.

Goodbye,

(Leelah) Josh Alcorn

More on the story here. Leelah scheduled one final post before signing off:

And now for my sorry notes to some people I knew…

Amanda: You are going to have such a wonderful life. You are the most talented and pretty little girl I’ve ever met and I love you so much, Amanda. Please don’t be sad. I’m going to miss you so very much. I love you.

Tiffany: We haven’t talked much recently since we’re both so busy but I’m so happy you’re my sister. You are so courageous and determined to achieve what you want, you can accomplish anything. I love you.

Justin: We’ve been jerks to each other a lot recently but I really do love you. You get on my nerves almost all the time but no matter what a part of me will always love you. Sorry for picking on you so much when we were kids.

Rylan: I’m so sorry I’m never there for you. I love you so much.

Abby: Thank you for dealing with my pathetic problems, all I did was make your life harder and I’m sorry.

Mom and Dad: Fuck you. You can’t just control other people like that. That’s messed up.

I don’t really feel the need to apologize to anyone else… odds are you didn’t give a shit about me and if you do, you did something that made me feel like shit and you don’t deserve an apology.

Also, anyone who says something like “I wish I got to know him better” or “I wish I treated him better” gets a punch in the nose.

Chart Of The Day

Christopher Ingraham captions:

Relative to other searches, interest in “hangover cure” is nearly 10 times higher than average on New Year’s day. The reason? Everyone’s out partying on New Year’s Eve. No other day in the calendar year comes close. The next-most hungover days of 2014 were the Saturday after Halloween, followed by a seemingly arbitrary Sunday in May, and then by the 5th of July. The Ten Most Hungover Days of 2014:

Wednesday, Jan. 1
Saturday, Nov. 1
Sunday, May 18
Saturday, July 5
Sunday, Feb. 23
Sunday, Sept. 28
Sunday, Oct. 26
Sunday, July 20
Sunday, Sept. 14
Sunday, March 16

The Ball Dropped, Prices Surged

Alison Griswold says New Year’s Eve is both the best and worst night for Uber:

In 2013, the company generated $10.7 million in gross revenue from an estimated 200,000 rides in 60 cities, according to internal documents obtained by Business Insider. This year, Uber has extended its reach to 266 cities and 53 countries. It’s projecting 10 times more rides than it delivered in 2013. Since the surges could be different this year than in 2013, you can’t really extrapolate those numbers to project how much revenue Uber is likely to make tonight. But clearly, it will be a lot.

So in terms of the financials, it should be pretty clear why New Year’s Eve is the best night of the year for Uber. But looking at [CEO Travis] Kalanick’s Twitter grief from last year, it should also be evident why it’s the worst. No matter how many times you explain that surge pricing does not take unfair advantage of drunk people, they are still bound to get upset by exorbitant fares. Spiking fares also incentivize drivers to forgo their own New Year’s celebrations to pick up passengers and provide safe transport. I’ll hazard a guess that people wouldn’t be too happy if Uber rides were as hard to come by as standard taxicabs on New Year’s Eve. And Uber, to its credit, is trying harder than ever this year to warn customers about high surges and advise them on the times when it will likeliest be the most expensive to hail a car.

Tim Lee continues to defend surge pricing:

If Uber and Lyft charged the same rates on New Year’s Eve as they did on a typical night, the result would be people facing long waits to get home. Indeed, that’s how things worked in major cities in the pre-Uber world:

when you tried to take a cab home from your post-New-Year’s bash, you’d find that all available cars were taken. Surge pricing addresses this problem by setting prices high enough to bring supply and demand in balance, ensuring that you can always get a ride if you’re willing to pay enough. To some extent, this means that richer people get rides and poorer people don’t.

But that’s not the only factor affecting peoples’ willingness to pay. For example, some people have an inconvenient-but-doable option to get home — a 30-minute walk, say, or a bus ride — while others’ only option to get where they’re going is by taxi. At the margins, surge pricing will cause people who can get home some other way to do so, reserving the taxi rides for people who don’t have alternatives.

Ilya Somin wonders if people will ever be okay with surge pricing:

If Uber surge pricing does become established over time, it is possible that people will come to accept it as “normal,” and opposition may potentially diminish. That may be the reason why few people protest increased prices at hotels during peak vacation season, or increased prices for plane tickets at times when more people fly (though the relative lack of protest may also be because these price increases are less visible to consumers than Uber’s practices). At some point, status quo bias might outweigh the effects of biases cutting the other way. But before Uber surge pricing can start to benefit from status quo bias, it has to survive long enough to begin to seem “normal.” That may not happen if protestors get their way, and government forces the firm to abandon surge pricing before it becomes well-established.

Previous Dish on the practice here.

A Poem For New Year’s Eve

“Red Hook: December” by George Oppen (1908-1984):

We had not expected it, the whole street
Lit with the red blue, green
And yellow of the Christmas lights
In the windows shining and blinking
Into distance down the cross streets.
The children are almost awed in the street
Putting out the trash paper
In the winking light. A man works
Patiently in his overcoat
With the little bulbs
Because the window is open
In December. The bells ring,

Ring electronically the New Year
Among the roofs
And one can be at peace
In this city on a shore
For the moment now
With wealth, the shining wealth.

Please consider supporting the work of the Poetry Society of America here.

(From New Collected Poems © 1975 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Also reprinted in Christmas Poems © 2008 New Directions Publishing Corp. Photo by Sam Howzit)

What Hitch Would Be Drinking Tonight

In a speech from 2009, he name-dropped his favorite drink in his inimitable way:

In an excerpt from his memoir, Hitch-22, he further elaborated on his drinking habits:

I work at home, where there is indeed a bar-room, and can suit myself. But I don’t. At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No “after dinner drinks”—most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. “Nightcaps” depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there.

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the Seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.

(Hat tip: Ilia Blinderman)

The Best Threads Of 2014: “Why Aren’t Gay Men On The Pill?”

Dozens of readers this year added their very personal perspectives to the breakthrough drug Truvada and the baffling resistance to it by many gay activists. Read the whole discussion thread here. Below are a few previously unaired emails to add to the mix:

Most of the coverage of Truvada has been about the idea of “Truvada whores” who take the drug so that they can have indiscriminate sex with any number of people. I wanted to write you with a different perspective. I am a HIV-negative guy in a relationship with an HIV guy. I’m 33 and he’s 30. Unfortunately he made some poor decisions in his very early 20s but he’s been very proactive since. He’s remained at an undetectable viral load for 7 years now and his more recent T-cell count was excellent, as it has been for a while. He was very straightforward with me when we started dating and that has helped a lot too.

Recently I began taking Truvada as an additional step to protect me. It’s very very inexpensive through my insurance and after a few months I’ve had no side effects. Not only does it provide physical aid but it also provides a great deal of emotional assistance. It puts me at better ease and it makes him feel better that there is basically zero chance that he could infect me. It also gives us a daily ritual in which we each take our daily medication, using each other to ensure that we are very strict on taking medication every day. Hopefully, as more news comes out, he’ll one day be free of his decade-old bad choices and we’ll live together totally and completely free.

But another reader cautions:

Your ongoing coverage of Truvada as pre-exposure HIV prophylaxis is fascinating and reaches a large number of gay men. This is why it’s important to correct a error that keeps occurring in Dish pieces on PrEP:

the notion that Truvada “reduces your risk of contracting HIV by 99 percent” (for example). PrEP does not reduce the risk by 99%; it reduces the risk by less than half.

As a young physician, I realize that the medical community does a crappy job of explaining statistics related to treatment. For your readers (a generally sophisticated bunch), here’s a breakdown of the numbers:

In the Truvada study in gay men (found here), 1248 men were given a placebo pill and 1251 men got Truvada. In the placebo group, 64 men subsequently got HIV (rate of infection: 64/1248 = 5.1%). In the Truvada group, 36 men subsequently got HIV (rate of infection: 36/1251 = 2.87%).

So what does Truvada do? With general sex practices, risk of HIV is low. Without Truvada, there’s a 95% chance you won’t be infected and a 5% chance you will be infected. With Truvada, there’s a 97% chance you won’t be infected and a 3% chance you will be infected.

Truvada does reduce HIV infection. And that change is about 2% in absolute terms (5% down to 2.87%) and about 44% in relative terms (5% reduced by 44% is 2.87%).

Saying Truvada “reduces your risk by 99%” mistakenly implies an enormous effect of the drug – one that was not shown by the trial. Rather, it would be true to say that men taking Truvada had a 97% chance of remaining HIV-negative. But even without the drug, the chance of remaining HIV-negative was 95%. Truvada does make a difference, but it’s not a magic bullet.

Thanks for shining a light on this important issue.

Drinking Away Your Defenses

Just in time for New Year’s Eve, Max Ufberg reviews a study that links binge-drinking to a weakened immune system:

A new study in the journal Alcohol, led by Loyola University Chicago’s Dr. Majid Afshar, asked 15 testers—with a median age of 27—to drink, depending on their weight, between four to five vodka shots. (Consuming that much alcohol in such a short period of time certainly constitutes binge drinking.) Afshar and his researchers took blood samples 20 minutes after the subjects reached “peak intoxication,” and again two and five hours later. Afshar found that the subjects’ immune systems first revved up—working hard to fight off any sickness—after 20 minutes, but then slowed down significantly by the two- and five-hour measuring points.

To get more specific, Afshar saw higher levels of immune system essentials like proteins and white blood cells—specifically leukocytes, monocytes, and natural killer cells—after the 20-minute mark. But after two hours, and again at five hours, Afshar noted the opposite: Fewer monocytes and natural killer cells circulated around the immune system. This whole process is known as a biphasic immunologic response, but in practical terms, the immune system is significantly weaker a few hours after someone’s drunkenness has hit full force.

A Poem From The Year

“Tinsel” by Robin Robertson:

Tune to the frequency of the wood and you’ll hear
the deer, breathing; a muscle, tensing; the sigh
of a fieldmouse under an owl. Now

listen to yourself—that friction—the push-and-drag,
the double pulse, the drum. You can hear it, clearly.
You can hear the sound of your body, breaking down.

If you’re very quiet, you might pick up loss: or rather
the thin noise that losing makes—perdition.
If you’re absolutely silent

and still, you can hear nothing
but the sound of nothing: this voice
and its wasting, the soul’s tinsel. Listen . . . Listen . . .

Please consider supporting the work of The Poetry Society of America here.

The View From Your Window

Prescott, Arizona, 10.45 am. “Spending a very snowy New Year’s here!”

“A Virtual Work Stoppage” Ctd

Matt Ford focuses on the “benefits of fewer NYPD arrests”:

Fewer arrests for minor crimes logically means fewer people behind bars for minor crimes. Poorer would-be defendants benefit the most; three-quarters of those sitting in New York jails are only there because they can’t afford bail. Fewer New Yorkers will also be sent to Rikers Island, where endemic brutality against inmates has led to resignations, arrests, and an imminent federal civil-rights intervention over the past six months. A brush with the American criminal-justice system can be toxic for someone’s socioeconomic and physical health.

And petty criminals are probably less likely to become career criminals if they can avoid the hardening experience of prison and the stigmas associated with it, especially when it comes to future employers. Allahpundit considers the political risks the NYPD is taking with its “virtual work stoppage“:

[M]aybe the slowdown in arrests is more of a protest, partly against de Blasio for being too sympathetic to “I can’t breathe” protesters and partly to give the public a taste of what life with a force that’s less aggressive in policing minor offenses would be like. That’s a tricky line PR-wise, though.

Now that voters know there’s an informal police boycott of punishing lesser offenses, how much will they blame de Blasio if the quality of life in NYC starts to decline and how much will they blame the force? Or does it matter? The political endgame for police here, I assume, is to have voters so disgusted with the state of the city under de Blasio that they’ll bounce him out of office in 2017 even if they blame the police for the uptick in crime. You can replace the mayor, after all, but you can’t replace the force.

A reader introduces another angle to the story:

I think that reporters covering the current unpleasantness ought to be focusing a bit more on the police contract negotiations. I think the police erroneously believe that throwing a permanent tantrum against the duly elected mayor of the city will somehow result in better negotiating leverage.

If I were the mayor, I would offer the police a contract with a cost of living increase and literally nothing else different than their current agreement. I get the tensions, I get the hurt feelings, but there is something unseemly about asking for a big fat raise after such rampant and unacceptable insubordination like we’ve seen lately. Since the union representatives have all but called for the mayor’s removal over this, why on earth should the mayor reward them for this? They serve the city and its citizens, not the other way around.

Friedersdorf remarks on that union-contract angle:

The right should greet [a planned police rally on January 13] with the skepticism they’d typically summon for a rally on behalf of government workers as they seek higher pay, new work rules, and more generous benefits. What’s unfolding in New York City is, at its core, a public-employee union using overheated rhetoric and emotional appeals to rile public employees into insubordination. The implied threat to the city’s elected leadership and electorate is clear: Cede leverage to the police in the course of negotiating labor agreements or risk an armed, organized army rebelling against civilian control. Such tactics would infuriate the right if deployed by any bureaucracy save law enforcement opposing a left-of-center mayor.