It’s been a bad week for queer kids. First we had the Lawrence King shooting in Los Angeles. Now we hear that a British boy who wanted to be a girl hanged himself: “Cameron McWilliams liked to wear girls underwear and asked if he could start using make-up just days before committing suicide, [a] hearing heard. His mother, who described him as a lonely young boy, told the coroner: ‘It was apparent he was unhappy and said he wanted to be a girl. He did like girls’ things.'” Shame… [Daily Mail]
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praenomenal
Goddess Bless and keep this child.
SO much sadness this week.
Nitesurf
This is just horribly sad, that poor little kid.
Aged Party Boy
Look at the joy in that child’s face. The post implies that he killed himself because he wanted to be a girl, but I wonder if something else was going on. This is disturbing and more than sad.
SeaFlood
@ Aged Party Boy
I don’t think you know or remember how intense gender was as a kid. As a transfluid person, I do. I remember how you had to fit in this box or that box, but you couldn’t be in the middle. Or stay in “that” box if you didn’t have the “right” parts. It was brutal.
When I was 11, I attempted to kill myself, too, in a much more innocent world… obviously I didn’t succeed, but I didn’t have access to anything that would have really told me how. Maybe I wasn’t invested enough. Still, kids are raised to not only expect norms and standards but reproduce them as well and to attack, viciously, anything that does not fall within them.
Whether this child was bullied or not, she killed herself because she wanted to be a girl in a world that reflected to her it was not ok to want to be a girl if you have a penis. Period.
It is so sad… it makes me angry.
Joey
Such a shame. The massive rate of attempted suicide amongst young people with gender “disorders” shows you with a starkness unmatched by anything else just how badly it can be taken by society, by schools and by parents. Playground bullying is particularly fierce when aimed at transkids and there are few that haven’t wanted to end it. I just wish more people knew that there are other ways of dealing with this.
There remains, as ever, much work to be done.
Joey Taylor,
Trans Officer,
Queer Youth Network.
Alex
I hope Mrs McWilliams is pleased with herself. If she’d let Cameron wear make-up,around the house, if not in public, she would have had a happy child today. Instead, she was so focused on not allowing Cameron to do anything which didn’t fit her narrow-minded beliefs about what is ‘normal’ for boys,that the only place she can see her child now, is in the cemetary.
Cameron never got the opportunity to find out where he belonged on the sliding scale that is gender and sexuality. Whether he was transgender, gay or transvestite, we’ll never know for sure. No matter what he grew up to be, however, he would’ve been alive and, hopefully, very happy.
Instead, Cameron killed himself, tormented and afraid. Perhaps,after she had forbidden him from wearing make-up, Cameron felt like he was a disappointment to his mum, or a source of shame to her. No one will ever know what went through his head in those tragic last minutes of his lfe, but we can say for certain that Cameron’s death was entirely avoidable. Because she, and others, had refused to allow Cameron to express himself as he wished, Cameron died alone, hating himself. Mrs McWilliams will have this on her conscience for the rest of her life. I hope it was worth it. I, personally, wouldn’t be able to live with myself.
Alex
Another Cameron, Cameron Macdonald,11,from the same town as Cameron McWilliams, hanged himself after reading about Cameron’s death.
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/news/article-518754/Boy-11-copycat-suicide-tragedy-cross-dressing-10-year-old–town-name.html