A transgender teen's suicide note has
gone viral on social media.
Zander Nicholas Mahaffey, 15, took his
own life on Sunday. In a heartbreaking Tumblr post that he scheduled
to be published after his death, Zander said, “I know in my heart I
am a boy,” still “the [world] doesn't see me as one” and blamed
his disabled mother for his death.
“It hurts so much to hate your
mother,” he
wrote. “It hurts to not know what it's like to have a 'mommy,'
to know what a mother's love is, to feel cared for by a maternal
figure.”
“You may be my mother but you are not
my mom. I certainly won't miss you. Goodbye forever, you abusive
piece of shit.”
Zander also spoke of being raped: “It
hurts so much for [my mother] to mention the man that raped you, even
though she knows it makes you angry and sad.”
According to his obituary, Zander was a
freshman at South Cobb High School in Austell, Georgia.
In his suicide note, Zander requested
of his friends that “if there are any memorials for me I want you
both to make sure my right name and pronouns are used.”
However, his family reportedly
used his birth name and female pronouns at his funeral. His
tombstone and obituaries list him as “Sandra Nicole.”
An online response included a memorial
Tumblr blog RIP
Zander and creation of the hashtag #HisNameWasZander, which has
been used over 8,000 times on Twitter. According to Vocativ.com,
his suicide note was posted by thousands of Tumblr blogs.
Zander's death comes two months after
an Ohio teen's highly publicized suicide. Leelah Alcorn also left a
Tumblr suicide note in which she blamed her Christian parents for her
death.
(Related: Transgender
teen Leelah Alcorn's suicide triggers drive to ban conversion
therapies.)