In a statement posted to the White House website today, the President paid tribute to a transgender teenager, Leelah Alcorn – born Josh – who committed suicide in despair at being transgender.
Obama says therapy aimed at trying to ‘repair’ or ‘convert’ gay and transgender young people needs to stop.
Leelah stepped into traffic after saying her parents could not understand that she wanted to live as a girl.
In response to a petition to enact a bill in honour of Leelah aimed at banning ‘conversion therapies’ the president released a statement which read:
“Tonight, somewhere in America, a young person, let’s say a young man, will struggle to fall to sleep, wrestling alone with a secret he’s held as long as he can remember. Soon, perhaps, he will decide it’s time to let that secret out. What happens next depends on him, his family, as well as his friends and his teachers and his community. But it also depends on us — on the kind of society we engender, the kind of future we build.”
The petition has already garnered more than 120,000 signatures of support.
Within the petition response senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett offered passionate support from the administration toward efforts to ban such “therapy”.
“Often, this practice is used on minors, who lack the legal authority to make their own medical and mental health decisions,” wrote Jarrett. “We share your concern about its potentially devastating effects on the lives of transgender as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer youth.”
In a note posted to Tumblr before her death, Leelah she said she feared living life as a lonely man who secretly wanted to be a woman, and that therapy she was offered was aimed at making her accept life as a man.
“I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was 4,” she said.
Leelah’s traumatised mother, Carol Alcorn, says that she only had one conversation with her child being transgender, saying: “We don’t support that, religiously. But we told him that we loved him unconditionally. We loved him no matter what. I loved my son. People need to know that I loved him.”
