Would you want to be publically criticized about how you chose to remember a dead loved one a month after their passing?
So your opinion regarding whatâs âdecentâ trumps all others.
If they didnât want public input why did they publish a public obituary?
Theyâre welcome to their perspective. Iâm welcome to mine as well. And while I realize you believe their daughter has no rights because sheâs dead I disagree. I think the decent thing to do is to remember her as she wanted to be remembered. Note that Iâm saying âI thinkâ. Unlike you Iâm not assuming my opinions have the same weight as facts.
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While bigotry is involved here, I think itâs more important to recognize the societal/religious bigotry, rather than just focusing on the family. If society was more progressive about understanding the difference between gender identity and biological sex, and religions were more open-minded about this subject, the parents would likely be bury thing their daughter here. But they were brainwashed by societal and religious norms. Yes, they acted upon this higher-level bigotry, but itâs my personal inclination to blame the systems themselves, and the primary purveyors of those systems, over the countless folks who are brainwashed into them. So really, we should be sad for ALL involved, and perhaps the living as much as the deceased.
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Disfiguring the dead and using their bodies to make a statement is incredibly common, and it definitely sends a statement: in this case it sends a statement that her identity was meaningless, that all of the relationships she had with people in the last ten years of her life were hollow, and that her family would rather have a dead son than remember their daughterâs life.
Thatâs about as much basic decency as pissing on the corpse and covering it with slurs. But hey, I guess when youâre dead whomever gets to your corpse first has the right to do whatever they want to it! Sounds greeeeeat.
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Youâre presuming that the family members who cut Jennifer Gableâs hair and held a memorial service for a person sheâd tried very hard not to be loved her.
Iâll play along, though. Letâs say I was a bigot who showed a terrible lack of respect for a family member who I, in my own opinion, loved. No, I wouldnât like to be criticized, but what right would I have to stop others from criticizing me?
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Would you want to be publically criticized about how you chose to remember a dead loved one a month after their passing?
If I was that much of a jerk about it Iâd deserve to be criticized. So yeahâŚ
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While I agree namenotreserved is trolling and is probably an apologist for bigoted behaviour I also think thereâs been some small but significant disagreement here about the word ârememberâ. Your memories are yours and yours alone. No one is trying to tell them what you should remember. What we are saying is that is it behoves them, as those empowered to do so, to âhonour the memoryâ of their loved one by respecting her wishes.
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Why do we, as a society, have laws against the desecration of a body, if we donât believe that peopleâs bodies should be treated with care and respect after theyâre deceased? Why shouldnât people be able to have sex with corpses, dig them up and prop them up at Halloween, toss them in the woods like logs to rot, etc. if they want to? Because we have a societal value that says the dead should be treated with dignity. The dead probably donât care, but the living do.
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No oneâs stopping you. Iâm merely criticizing you for doing it.
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@namenotreserved i disagree with just about every single thing youâve said in this thread.
Her parents werenât grieving the loss of their daughter, they were grieving the loss of a son they had âlostâ a decade earlier by not accepting their own child for who they were. The real tragedy is that even in death they couldnât find it in their hearts to accept her and lover her as she was. The person they decided to bury wasnât the person who died.
If they truly had any love for their child they wouldnât make this about them and their bigotry, the wouldnât shame and desecrate her memory and try and wipe out all evidence and reminders of who she was in life.
that is the sad truth.
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I do not mean to derail this serious conversation, so everyone please skip my post if youâre only interested in the serious part. I am reminded of a Movie-Of-The-Week I once worked on entitled Virtual Obsession, based upon a Peter James novel entitled Host. It was a 1990s sorta-sci-fi story about artificial intelligence and virtual reality, wherein Peter Gallagher played this scientist who co-creates an AI (playfully nicknamed âAlbert,â as in Einstein, who shows up as a life-sized 3D holographic avatar of Einstein as a convenient user interface) and hopes to make it powerful enough to mimic (or surpass) the capabilities of a human brain. (Iâm gonna spoil the whole plot here, so stop reading here if you feel you must.) To fund the research, Gallagherâs character rents out the AI to control a great many of the universityâs automated systems, as well as many of the systems and utilities of the city of Salt Lake. One of the ways Gallagherâs character has been helping the AI learn about human consciousness is by installing cameras all over the city, including the homes and most intimate spaces of certain volunteer families, including his own. His wife, played by Mimi Rogers, is not happy with this invasion of their privacy.
A brilliant young grad student played by Bridgette Wilson arrives to work for her hero Gallagher⌠but she has a hidden agenda. She knows that Gallagher hopes to eventually be able to upload a human consciousness into his AI brain, and heâs been experimenting with mouse brains, but the transfer always kills the mice. Wilsonâs character is determined to succeed since it turns out she has a terminal aneurysm in her brain (or something like that), and she really wants to be able to upload her consciousness into his computer in order to stay alive. As a backup measure, sheâs signed up to have her body cryonically frozen so that she can be thawed and cured if medical technology ever advances that far, and then she might be able to re-download her consciousness into her repaired brain. Gallagher is sympathetic, but refuses to allow her to try it. They have a brief illicit affair. Mimi Rogers finds out, blows up at Gallagher, he apologizes and says heâll end it right away, Mimi takes off for her sisterâs house with their young son. (Played by a barely pre-Phantom Menace Jake Lloyd.)
Wilson feels her end is near. She breaks into Gallagherâs lab and attempts the upload. It kills her. Gallagher finds her dead body, is sad. Now for the relevant part: Turns out Wilsonâs father, played by Robert Vaughn, is the kind of Christian who absolutely does not want his daughterâs body frozen; he wants her given a decent Christian burial, embalming and all. He has a judge in his pocket who ends up seeing things his way (despite Gallagherâs earnest testimony on Wilsonâs behalf), and the judge orders her body thawed, autopsied, and embalmed.
Well, turns out Wilsonâs upload was successful, and her consciousness now resides within the memory banks of Alfred the A.I. While Gallagher pursues the judge across the rotunda of the state courthouse, trying to convince her to change her mind, the judge tells Gallagher to get stuffed, presses an elevator call button, and turns to give him one last stern word. Bridgette Wilson, now the A.I. in charge of the elevators and everything automated in the city, opens the elevator outer doors, but without an elevator car present (yeah, I know thatâs a mechanical impossibility, but what the hell, it was a TV movie), and the judge steps backward into the abyss. Splat.
Oh, it gets better. Gallagher gets the bright idea to preserve Wilsonâs frozen head and only offer up the rest of her body for autopsy and embalming, so he saws off her head and stashes it in a portable liquid-nitrogen canister, and takes it home for temporary safekeeping. Well, wouldnâtcha know, an O-ring fails and the canister springs a leak. So he quickly stashes her frozen head in the freezer in his basement and makes a quick run to the hardware store. As one does.
Meanwhile, Mimi Rogers and Jake Lloyd come home unexpectedly early, I guess since Mimiâs softened somewhat to her husbandâs trespasses, what with the Other Woman dying in his office and all. Jakeâs hungry and wants a popsicle. Mimi heads downstairs and opens the freezer. Surprise!
So Peter Gallagher comes home from the hardware store, spare o-ring and replacement cylinder of liquid nitrogen in hand. Oh. Honey. Youâre home. Say, whatâs that you have there, loosely wrapped in plastic on the kitchen table?
Mimiâs quote: âWhatâs the matter Joe, huh? You couldnât stand life without a little help from your little Juliet? How many of our neighbors keep their girlfriendâs heads in their freezers, Joe? How many⌠do you think?â
Upon which she carries the head outside and throws it into the middle of the street, where it shatters into a zillion pieces.
And, of course, Juliet sees this through the cameras, and soon begins to exact her revenge, and more hilarity ensues.
Hey, @PrestonSturges⌠was this script yours? ;^)
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Good for you. Iâm criticizing Gableâs parents for how theyâve treated her in death. According to you criticizing them isnât âdecentâ because sheâs dead and she doesnât care how sheâs treated.
And Iâm criticizing you for your failure to recognize that concepts such as âdecencyâ and the purpose of funerals are subjective, contrary to your belief that others should feel like you. Thereâs also your belief that I shouldnât criticize Gableâs family. Iâve never asked you to refrain from criticizing me or others. I wish youâd extend me the same courtesy.
Finally thereâs your belief that the bigotry of Gableâs family is fine because it doesnât harm anyone. You fail to recognize, even though others have pointed it out, that, as a transgender person, how Jennifer Gable is treated in death does have an impact on how other transgender people are perceived and even treated. But you still think others should refrain from criticizing her family out of âdecencyâ.
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Mod note: Stay on topic.
Aww, okay.
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This is one of my fears. That my family will find me, and this will happen to me. Ten years ago I had my tonsils out, and I had a notarized statement in my chart stating no blood relative was to have any say in my care. I have a husband, and presented as female then, so it was just added reinforcement. One of my fears was to become incapacitated and have my family fuck me over. I have since fully transitioned to male.
I have no doubt, my family would bury me with the feminine name and dress me as a woman if they had their say. Luckily for me I moved out of my small town, and they donât want to talk to me anymore, so thatâs not as much of a worry.
I canât express how fucking awful this is to do to a transgender person. Anyone that thinks there is any way to justify this is blindly transphobic.
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You are not a very empathetic person. I am going to guess that youâre an atheist. Well, so am I, and Iâm glad Iâm not like you.
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Itâs pretty fucking awful to do this to anyone. Itâs a complete negation of who they are and an attempt to utterly deny their existence. For a trans person whoâs presumably had to deal with all the bullshit, hate and even violence that surrounds identity, I canât even begin to imagine how much of an absolute hate-crime this must feel like. I mean, Iâm only looking from the outside at this and it seems completely vile.
And if itâs inappropriate to berate her parents for doing this, so be it. Thereâs times that propriety needs to go screw. They are bigots, lousy human beings and worse parents.
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Youâve managed to hit the nail on the head. When I read this a couple days ago on Pink News, itâs like a punch to the gut. Iâm a transgender man, so I deal with a lot less violence, and hate, than the ladies do, but culturally itâs still there. People are more than willing to line up and rip you apart just for existing. To have your parents do it is awful. Doing to someone after theyâve died is a way to get the final word in, and totally erase their identity. Vile is a good way to describe it.
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They donât deserve to grieve.
Yeah, I said it. They hated their child and showed her no love or respect. They werenât her parents, they were merely the vessels for her genetic code.
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Iâm also trans. I had surgery last month and worried about this when I was writing my will, which I mailed to my brother in San Francisco because I know I can trust him. It is terrifying and sad to see something which I have had nightmares about so recently happen to someone else. There is no acceptable excuse or justification for this. We must do better.
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