If you’ve spent any amount of time on the Internet at all in the last couple weeks, you’ve heard about the suicide of trans teenager Leelah Alcorn. In the week since he took his own life, the online queer community has been quick to milk the tragedy for political leverage – no matter how many actual teenage trans kids are endangered by their pontificating. Combine their reckless treatment of teen suicide with their propensity for threatening Carla Alcorn, his mother, with absurd fantasies of jail time, and you have perhaps the grossest single incident of trans nonsense yet. And that’s saying something.

In this maelstrom of wild speculation and reckless accusation, it took about fifteen minutes for the circumstances surrounding Leelah’s death to be misrepresented, exaggerated, and otherwise twisted into the traditional tropes that fit the trans narrative. One specific claim I’ve seen repeated over and over is that Leelah’s parents sent him to “conversation therapy.” It’s hard to tell whether or not this claim is true, as the only mention made is of “Christian counseling” – an undeniably gross concept, but not necessarily on par with what most of us think when we imagine ex-gay ministries and the like.

Either way, this half-truth has of course led to the surprisingly common and also batshit crazy comparison between radical feminist opposition to transition and fundamentalist conversion therapy. The argument (if you can call it that) goes something like this: Just like some children are born gay, some are born transgender, so radical feminist theory that denies the existence of gender as an innate quality one is born with is equivalent to Christian conservative ideology that sees homosexuality as an aberration that can be cured.

There are so many reasons why this comparison fails. First off, quite a few (but not all) radical feminists see orientation as a social construction and reject the “born this way” narrative in regards to a child’s sexuality. Secondly, the concept of someone being “born transgender” is just about as close to meaningless as you could possibly get. Saying you’re “born transgender” is like saying you were “born a convert to Islam” – or do we need another study about what the latin prefix trans- means?

Even ignoring the inanity that orders the argument’s premises, the central thrust – that radical feminists are engaging in “gender conversion” the way fundamentalists engage in conversion therapy for homosexuals – is just not reasonable. Conversion therapy is a practice in which individuals are subjected to serious psychological, behavioral, and chemical modification in order to (supposedly) change their sexual orientation. For radical feminism to be in any way equivalent, it would have to recommend an equally serious regimen of serious psychological, behavioral, and chemical modification in order to (supposedly) change someone’s gender…You know, like transition.

That’s right: Despite all the nonsensical false equivalences queer theorists throw out, the fact is that transition bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to conversion therapy. For example:

Both transition and conversion therapy exist for individuals who are engaging in behaviors that are not allowed by their designation inside the heteropatriarchy. For gender non-conforming males or females, it’s identification with the presentation and mannerisms of the other sex; for homosexuals, it’s same-sex love.

Both transition and conversion therapy have the end goal of an individual who is aligned with their designation inside the heteropatriarchy. Gender non-conforming males are supposedly transformed into gender conforming females and vice versa, while gays and lesbians become heterosexuals.

Both are about altering an individual – whether psychologically, behaviorally, or chemically – to fit socially constructed stereotypes. Males who transition are encouraged to act with “feminine” mannerism, just as females who go through the same process are taught to ape masculinity. Homosexuals endure the comparable experience of being indoctrinated into traditional heterosexual notions of desire.

Both trade in essentialist notions of “true” orientation or “true” gender. Much like young trans folks are taught that they have an “inner woman” or “inner man”, homosexuals are encouraged to see their desire as an illegitimate aberration of a fundamental heterosexuality.

There are quite a few more similarities – especially when you start getting into comparing their relative rates of failure – but they do admittedly diverge in one major way: Liberals condemn one as a human rights abuse while lauding the other as a major step forward for society.

To illustrate this amazing cognitive dissonance, imagine two scenarios:

Scenario One: A male child wants desperately to be female and demands that his parents allow him to transition. They withhold their permission, and he commits suicide.

Scenario Two: A gay child wants desperately to be heterosexual and demands that his parents allow him to attend an ex-gay program. They withhold their permission, and he commits suicide.

We’ve just shown that, in the end, these are not all that different from each other. In fact, they could be rewritten like this:

Situation One: A child who is currently engaging in behavior not permitted by his designation inside the heteropatriarchy (engaging in or desiring activities traditionally deemed ‘female’) wants desperately to engage in a regimen of psychological, behavioral, and/or chemical modification in order to align with an alternate designation in which his behavior would be approved.

Situation Two: A child who is currently engaging in behavior not permitted by his designation inside the heteropatriarchy (engaging in or desiring homosexual love) wants desperately to engage in a regimen of psychological, behavioral, and/or chemical modification in order to align with an alternate designation in which his behavior would be approved. 

Most liberals in America would call the parents in the first scenario heartless monsters with blood on their hands while sympathizing deeply with the parents in scenario two. What’s more, these liberals would almost certainly not threaten the parents of the gay child with jail time for refusing to administer hormones to curb his sexual desire. I also doubt they would demand that anyone making posthumous mention of the deceased child go out of their way to identify him as heterosexual, as queer theorists have done with their insistence on a “correct” headstone.

Instead, I imagine these liberals would do exactly what they ought to do: Point the finger at a culture that teaches gay children to hate themselves and idolize heterosexuality. I imagine they would turn their anger towards the message boards, forums, and blogs that present an absurd and unrealistic portrayal of conversion therapy and make wild promises about life “after homosexuality”. And I imagine they would hold their children tight and say, “Gay or straight, I love you just the way you are.”

So why does the exact fucking opposite happen the moment we switch from sexuality to gender? Why is the tragedy of Leelah Alcorn’s death not a moment for us to condemn an entire community that tells teenage boys that any sign of femininity is evidence of womanhood? Why are we not speaking out against the hundreds of trans folks online peddling nonsense about transition and the post-op experience? And why, most of all, are we not telling our male children point-blank that, far from being a birth defect, their dissatisfaction with manhood is the most wonderful thing in the world?