Basic decency includes treat people—you know, like transgender people—with basic courtesy. Basic decency excludes fabricating reality simply in order to placate your own bigotry. The living (cisgender and transgender) have a right to the transgender among us, including our transgender dead.
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Again, a private funeral is not an appropriate venue to broach the subject.
She cannot be humiliated. She is dead and gone. How her parents choose to remember her is no one’s business but theirs.
I’ve had intimate relationships with a couple of transgender people.
There’s nothing to add; I was just bragging.
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What about other people in her life? Those who would prefer to remember her as she ultimately chose to live. Why should the parents’ wishes trump those who accepted her as she was?
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It’s not a matter of how her parents remember her, but rather how they treat her. You keep harping on about this being a “private funeral”, but their public statements have shown a complete lack of respect for her.
And while I appreciate that you don’t care how you’re treated after you die you shouldn’t presume that everyone feels the same way. Not everyone agrees with you on the purpose of funerals, or what’s appropriate at funerals. You want to defend the parents and apologize for their bigotry. Good for you. Try offering a defense without lecturing others about how they should feel.
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People who self-identify as LGBT, intersex (and any other label) are first and foremost people. All people deserve basic courtesy.
I find this story so sad because its indicative of an ownership attitude that so many people have towards others. You cannot possess another person. As a parent you have to let your kids go when they grow up.
namenotreserved. You are wrong. This woman’s body does not ‘belong’ to her biological parents. At least not morally. I believe they surrendered any rights as parents they had when they refused to see her as she wished the world to see her.
If they wanted to have their bigoted little memorial service privately then that’s their business but what you do with the body is significant. The body plays a big role in the way most societies deal with death and as someone else mentioned above this is “tantamount to desecration”. Other people (whom on the evidence, she was likely closer to in many ways) have the right to grieve and to bid farewell too. The body for many of us is paramount in that respect.
Of course we don’t know the whole story but I don’t think I’m jumping to any greater conclusions than others here.
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In no way have I done that. I have simply pointed out that it’s inappropriate to call people bigots at their child’s funeral. Even if they are, it’s not the time or place. Let them grieve in peace, in their own way.
You may feel differently now, but you won’t care about anything after you’re dead.
No it isn’t. They’re honouring their child in the way they feel best. You may disagree, but it’s not about you.
I’m hoping someone’s in for a little serious haunting.
And I can’t help hoping some of Jennifer’s friends are tech-savvy enough to pull it off. If I knew her, I’d put a lot of effort into making sure her parents have a serious attack of conscience. And an appropriate lack of sound sleep for many, many months to come, along with birthdays and anniversaries.
Ten years from now, noises coming from the attic… “WHHHHHYYY DID YOOOUUU CUT MYYYY HAAAIIIRRR???!!”
("…and if it wasn’t for you damned nosy kids, we’d have gotten away with it!")
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??
So glad I haven’t started drinking my hot coffee yet.
Unbelievably clueless.
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I’m not calling them bigots at their funeral. I wasn’t invited. Besides wasn’t their funeral. It was a memorial service they held for a person they wanted to be their son, and who they couldn’t accept as a daughter.
It’s not about you either, but that hasn’t prevented you from telling me that the parents deserve more respect than their daughter because they’re alive.
According to you it’s okay for the parents to choose clothes their daughter wouldn’t have wanted to wear and to bury her, and speak about her publicly using a name and gender that were not hers because she’s dead. Where’s the “common decency” in that? You expect everyone but the parents to act a certain way. I’ll just point out again that I’m responding to public statements they’ve made. I understand, though, that you may be unwilling to acknowledge that because it undermines your defense of them.
As I said previously, don’t lecture others about how they should feel. I may not care what’s done with my corpse, but for the sake of those who care about me as long as I’m alive I’m going to hope that it’s treated with respect. I’d like to be remembered as I was, not how some bigots would have liked me to be.
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Bullshit Shame on you. A private funeral is not appropriate to enact transphobic bigotry.
Shame on the face in your mirror.
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[quote=“namenotreserved, post:23, topic:46871, full:true”]
She cannot be humiliated. She is dead and gone. How her parents choose to remember her is no one’s business but theirs.[/quote]
If they want to hide the shame of their transphobic bigotry in the privacy of their own home, that’s great (in as much as hateful bigotry is ever great). But a public viewing in a funeral home is public, as are public funerals, as are public obituaries. The public desecration of their transgender daughter’s corpse is a public enactment of transphobia, which indeed you are an apologist for.
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Thought experiment:
White man marries black woman. His parents are horrified, They basically disown him.
He dies suddenly.
For the funeral, his parents come attired in full KKK regalia.
May we call them bigots?
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I think I might have to stipulate being buried as a woman in my will, to balance the universe out here. Ah shit, I want to be cremated.
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Not to mention public death certificates, which Jennifer Gable’s parents are also using in an attempt to make her conform to their vision of who they wanted her to be rather than who she was.
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Putting anything about your funeral in your will is too late. It needs to be part of your medical directive, and the person who is named as your medical power of attorney needs to be trustworthy.
I have the medical power of attorney for someone whose parents had a funeral home and were Catholic. One of my directives is to ensure she is cremated rather than embalmed and then buried. Her parents are dead now, and her surviving siblings are fine with this decision (I’ve spoken with them), so it’s not a big deal anymore, but if she had pre-deceased them there would have been an ugly confrontation; fortunately, I had the documentation to back up her request, so that would have been that.
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False equivalence. The parents aren’t disrupting anyone else’s memorial.
If the parents in your narrative were to hold a memorial that ignored the marriage it might be bigoted, but bringing that up wouldn’t be appropriate at the time.
No one disrupted the memorial held for person called Geoffrey Gable. Her parents simply refused to acknowledge the latter part of her life and the fact that, while she may have been biologically male, she was their daughter, not their son.
The memorial was held last month. Can we call them bigots now, or do you have some reason other than “she’s dead so I think their actions are irrelevant” why they should not be subject to criticism?
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They’ve made it pretty clear that they don’t want public input. The decent thing to do is to let them grieve in peace.
Like it or not, that’s exactly what they’re doing from their perspective.
