Dissed In Death

Or why a will is important. When we died, we have no control over what happens to us, we are at the mercy of our family or loved ones. We hope that they will do the right thing.

The first thing that we do not have control over is our death certificate, there is no law mandating what gender to put down on the death certificate. Some say it must reflect the gender on our birth certificate but nowhere does anything say it has to be the same.

The next thing is something that we can have control over and that is who will be our administrator of our estate. Hopefully the courts will follow our wishes, but there are many cases where they do not and maybe an estranged family might be in control of our estate. In the Windy City Times there is an article about this,

Denying LGBTQ identities in death
By Dana Rudolph
2015-02-04

Some transgender people have faced a somewhat different but no less tragic erasing of their selves upon death. When transgender teen Leelah Alcorn died by suicide in December, her mother refused to use her preferred gender pronouns when talking with the media. They put Leelah's legal name, Joshua, on her gravestone, and banned her best friend, Abby Jones, from the funeral, reported the U.K.'s Daily Mail. After Leelah's death, Abby had posted online a photo that Leelah had taken of herself wearing a dress and it quickly went viral, which apparently angered Leelah's parents.

Her mother told CNN that she and her husband "don't support that [Leelah's transgender identity], religiously," although she added, "But we told him that we loved him unconditionally." Hmm. Refusing to acknowledge a child's gender identity isn't quite what I think of as "unconditional."

One might imagine an adult would escape the same treatment. Not always. In November, a 32-year-old transgender woman in Idaho, Jennifer Gable, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. After her death, her parents referred to her exclusively by her birth name, Geoffrey, and with male pronouns. The memorial Web page they established at the funeral home website uses a photo of Gable pre-transition. Even worse, she was presented in the open casket at the funeral dressed in a man's suit and with her hair in a man's cut, reported the Miami Herald.

So give it some thought who you would want to look after you when you are gone, will they follow your wishes, or will they impose their biases on you in death.