Abstract
In 2014, a trans teenager named Leelah Alcorn posted a suicide letter to her public Tumblr account. Almost a decade later, in 2023, Eden Knight, another young trans woman, posted a suicide letter to her public Twitter account. Both suicide letters went viral and inspired memorial hashtags on the platforms where they initially circulated. In this article, I identify similarities between the cases, conceptualizing both as rituals of commemoration aimed toward restoring value to trans lives lost too soon. My analysis shows how ordinary users leverage the connective affordances embedded within popular social media platforms to sustain structured, value-laden acts of remembrance and mourning. In doing so, I elucidate four stages of the ritual process: (1) sharing suicide letters, (2) enshrining selfies, (3) modulating memories, and (4) casting blame. Ultimately, I argue that trans-led rituals of commemoration can function as justice-oriented tactics of resistance against engrained systems of oppression that perpetuate disproportionally high rates of early death within trans communities.
An Anti-Suicidist Content Warning
In what follows, I study social media content circulated after the suicides of two young trans women. I acknowledge that themes of suicide and transphobia may be distressing for some people, which is why I have chosen to preface this article with a content warning. By creating conditions for a consensual reading experience, my goal is to diminish the risks accompanying exposure to suicide-related subject matter, such as the triggering of a suicide contagion.
However, I also want to make clear that any danger posed by open communication about suicide does not justify abandoning the difficult work of grappling with its complex reality, especially in scholarly environments like this one. Too often, well-intentioned methods of suicide prevention (e.g., content warnings) perpetuate a culture of institutionalized silence around suicide, owing to a broader system of “structural suicidism” that stigmatizes suicidal people and anyone who may experience symptoms of suicidality during their lifetimes (Baril, 2023, p. 7, emphasis in original). Resisting this mode of marginalization, particularly its tendency to render suicidal people voiceless in both life and death, I adopt an anti-suicidist ethics that treats suicide as a subject meriting representation, analysis, and a robust multi-disciplinary dialogue. I invite my readers to join me as interlocutors in this pursuit.
Introduction
On 12 March 2023, 23-year-old Eden Knight published her suicide letter to the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, 1 month before its official rebrand as X. Knight used the third-party application TwitLonger to host the letter because it far exceeded Twitter’s then 280-character limit for text posts. A link to the letter survives on her still publicly available account, where it has received over 36 million views (eden knight O_o, 2023). 1
After her death, an anonymous group of Knight’s friends released a document titled “Eden Abduction Details” via Google Docs (Anonymous, 2023) and a blog post titled “A timeline for Eden Knight” via Substack (SocDoneLeft, 2023). The former document reported background details on people Knight mentioned by name in her suicide letter; the latter provided a chronology of events in the final year of Knight’s life. Several journalists wrote about Knight’s suicide, and some verified the factuality of the online documents (Dodds, 2023; Klee, 2023; Summers, 2023; Zoledziowski & Marchman, 2023).
Knight, an immigrant to the United States from Saudi Arabia, faced an extraordinary set of circumstances during the last year of her life. After briefly attending George Mason University as an international student, she moved to Georgia in 2022. There she began her gender transition, which she regularly posted about to her Twitter following. Her father, a powerful leader of the Saudi Central Bank, hired two private investigators to lure Knight back to the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area on the promise they would help her obtain asylum in the United States. By November 2022, Knight was no longer able to contact the private investigators and was under the supervision of Bader Alomair, a lawyer featured in the Washington Post for assisting Saudis facing legal charges in the United States (Harris, 2021). Alomair allegedly convinced Knight to re-immerse in her Islamic faith, abandon her trans identity, and return to Saudi Arabia.
In her suicide letter, Knight claimed that after a mundane first month at home, her parents subjected her to daily searches of her belongings and electronic devices. In February 2023, Knight’s parents confiscated her passport and supplies for hormone replacement therapy (HRT). They also coerced Knight into attending conversion therapy. Already experiencing suicidal ideation, Knight briefly regained access to HRT before it was once again found and stolen by her parents on the date Knight posted her suicide letter to her Twitter account. It is still unclear exactly when or how Knight died. The following day, a Twitter account belonging to Knight’s family confirmed her death in an Arabic text post that misgendered her and referred to her by an assigned birth name she no longer accepted as her own.
As news of Knight’s suicide spread online in the days following her death, the hashtag movement #JusticeForEden materialized through Twitter. Tweets within the hashtag included speculative reports of her death, commentary on the supposed details of the events that led her to choose suicide, and a slew of memorial tributes. One commemorative post contained the following comparison: in 2014, a suicide note from a trans girl appeared on my dash. with less than 200 notes at the time, #LeelahAlcorn begged others to fight for people like her. It’s 2023 and another suicide note from a trans woman is circulating. FIGHT for trans ppl, please #JusticeForEden
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The tweet brings to the fore the memory of another young trans woman named Leelah Alcorn, who, like Knight, died by suicide after becoming fatigued by her parents’ refusal to accept her trans identity and after undergoing the traumatic experience of conversion therapy. Nearly a decade earlier, in 2014, Alcorn also posted her suicide letter to a popular social media platform, Tumblr, which inspired a viral memorial hashtag and calls for justice.
The similarities between Alcorn’s and Knight’s suicides provide evidence of a structured sequence of action that has emerged in response to trans suicide in an era marked by the proliferation of digital social media technologies. I conceptualize this activity as a “ritual of commemoration” that provides social media users with an organizational pattern for participating in a public process of remembering and mourning (Trillò et al., 2022). Like all social media rituals, rituals of commemoration are constituted and arranged by shared values among users. The rituals of commemoration performed after the suicides of Alcorn and Knight were made possible by a collective affirmative valuation of trans life.
I argue that users who participated in the rituals sought to restore value to trans lives lost too soon by saving and sharing Alcorn’s and Knight’s memories as trans people across the very social media platforms where they distributed their suicide letters. By leveraging the affordances of popular social media platforms in this way, participants revealed a positive dimension of the “connective turn” in human memory, an ongoing cultural transformation marked by “the sudden abundance, pervasiveness, and immediacy of digital media, communication networks and archives” that is supported by the widespread absorption of social media into everyday life (Hoskins, 2018, p. 1). For trans individuals who have long lacked official channels for properly mourning deceased members of their communities, the accessibility of tools for enacting large-scale public memory rituals amid the connective turn offers a profound opportunity for commemorating vulnerable trans pasts that would otherwise be forgotten. Hence, trans-led rituals of commemoration require a nuanced acknowledgment of how constructive instantiations of human sociality may still materialize even within the profit-driven and often shallow systems of connection made available by major social media companies.
Importantly, such rituals of commemoration publicly preserve proof of harms afflicting trans people, and, in doing so, function as justice-oriented tactics of resistance against systems of oppression that give rise to increased rates of early death within trans communities. With attention to this issue, my analysis contributes to a long-standing conversation on the cultural politics of secular rituals within the field of cultural studies (Hall & Jefferson, 1975), as well as a growing interest in this journal on collective grief and mourning practices in social media contexts (Giaxoglou & Döveling, 2018; Krutrök, 2021; Pasquali et al., 2022). Unlike social media rituals publicly performed after a celebrity death (Burgess et al., 2018; Klastrup, 2018) or those privately mourning the loss of family or friends (Acker & Brubaker, 2014; Gibbs et al., 2015), the rituals I examine are situated in tension with normative concentrations of power, clarifying their relevance as methods of advocacy in the presentera.
Valuing Trans Lives After Suicide via Commemorative Social Media Ritual
Trans communities are disproportionally affected by suicidality, an umbrella term encompassing suicidal ideation, suicide planning, and suicide attempts. Data from the largest survey of trans people ever conducted in the United States confirms that 82% of trans people have experienced suicidal ideation, while 40% have attempted suicide (James et al., 2016). Suicidality especially impacts young trans people, with approximately 40% reporting having struggled with suicidal thoughts, plans, and attempts during their adolescence or early adulthood. A range of factors contribute to these harrowing statistical circumstances, including the increased likelihood that trans populations will experience internalized self-stigma, anti-LGBTQ+ microaggressions, and rejection or physical/emotional abuse by family members and peers (Austin et al., 2022). As I explain in a genealogy of representations of trans suicide circulated in the United States from the early twentieth century onward (Hatfield, 2023), trans people have long recognized the presence of suicide within their communities as a crisis sustained by the intersection of transphobic systems of oppression and other forms of discrimination, such as racism and classism.
Despite historical documentation of the enduring threat posed by suicide within trans communities, the virality of Alcorn’s death brought unprecedented mainstream public attention to the link between suicidality and challenges faced by trans youth living in conditions of rampant transphobia. Stryker (2017) chronicled Alcorn’s impact in the second edition of Transgender History, noting how digital social media platforms offer new opportunities for promoting diverse forms of trans visibility and raising awareness of often hidden crises affecting trans communities. I support Stryker’s observations by showing how, in the aftermath of Alcorn’s suicide, users across social media networks established a ritualized pattern of behavior that was later duplicated after Knight’s suicide to render trans suicide legible as a chronic cultural crisis attributable to transphobic ideologies and policies. In both cases, users participated in a type of social media ritual that Trillò et al. (2022) characterize as a “ritual of commemoration,” which “mark the passage of time and signify that something or someone should be remembered, celebrated, or respected” (p. 7).
As rituals mediated by the participatory affordances of popular social media platforms, those enacted after Alcorn’s and Knight’s suicides were formed around a set of values reflecting the investments of the group engaging in the ritual action. Values materialize in cultural beliefs and practices that designate worth. Values have always operated as key organizers of rituals, influencing religious rites of passage that deliver one from the routines of everyday life in moments of divine encounter and purification (e.g., a baptism in Christianity), as well as more mundane behavioral patterns that shape the ordinariness of the social world (e.g., brushing one’s teeth at the same times each day). Couldry (2003) argues that values are similarly a central component of all media rituals. Hallinan et al. (2023) extend this claim by showing how culturally specific values pervade and formalize user communication during social media rituals. In a comprehensive typology of social media rituals, Trillò et al. (2022) associate rituals of commemoration with values of loyalty “(people should consistently support and align with something or someone that they deem important)” and respect “(people should be treated with consideration or dignity)” (p. 7). Because instantiations of anti-trans violence entail a lack of loyalty to or respect for trans life, rituals of commemoration are essential resources for restoring value to lives lost to transphobia.
Indeed, publicly affirming the value of trans lives is a crucial showing of solidarity with a minoritized community whose identities and rights have become the center of a global culture war and moral panic. Three decades into the twenty-first century, transphobic politics have unified the interests of once vociferously opposed anti-feminist conservatives and liberal feminists who have adopted a trans-exclusionary worldview based on biologically essentialist conceptions of womanhood (Bassi & LaFleur, 2022). Mainstream celebrities, pundits, influencers, and elected politicians alike have helped popularize this new articulation of transphobia, which is rooted in an earlier but enduring “ideology of transgender impossibility” that reduces transness into a set of “abject, undesirable, and untenable” behaviors in need of immediate correction (Cavalcante, 2018, p. 13). The entrenchment of such an ideology produces an atmosphere of violence wherein the regularity of early trans death—exemplified, for example, in high rates of suicidality within trans populations—creates the impression that trans life in general is always “already gone” (Stanley, 2021, p. 33). In a predominantly transphobic social economy where trans life is made to seem valueless and impossible, the rapid killing of trans people is not abnormal; it is a routinized and arguably ritualistic facet of day-to-day living.
Thus, rituals of commemoration like those honoring Alcorn and Knight counter rhetoric and policy that devalues trans life and normalizes trans death. These rituals do so by allowing ordinary people to publicly memorialize and establish a place in history for trans lives lost due to injustice. Rawson (2014) has examined how trans people and organizations have leveraged the affordances of web-based media to generate participatory networks that publicly share memory to fill the void left by the long-standing lack of statistical data on rates of violent deaths within trans communities. Such “trans historical activism” involves participants who recognize the difficulties of establishing a singular, comprehensive historical account and instead strive toward the circulation of “local, specific, personal, experimental, even playful and ephemeral histories” (p. 40). These efforts, in turn, are vital because they can inspire a collective “identification with suffering, which carries transformative political potential for trans communities often cast outside the dominant logics of grievability and mourning” (Butler, 2004, p. 30). Likewise, the rituals of commemoration centered in this article exemplify how, in the absence of official institutional resources and infrastructures, trans and trans-allied social media users can exploit the connective properties of popular platforms to build public memorials, grieve the dead, and assert and defend the value of trans lives.
Methods and Materials
Shortly after the posthumous publication of Alcorn’s suicide letter in late 2014, Tumblr users coordinated a large-scale networked ritual of commemoration using the hashtag #leelah alcorn. 3 In December 2018, Tumblr officials announced the prohibition of all pornography from the platform after multiple legal scandals. As someone aware of the plethora of research on sexually explicit content as a conduit for queer and trans networking within popular digital social media channels, specifically Tumblr (Engelberg & Needham, 2019; Haimson et al., 2021; Mondin, 2017; Oakley, 2016; Ogden, 2022), I predicted that the banning of pornography from the website could lead to the removal of Tumblr user accounts and segments of data stored within #leelah alcorn.
One week before the execution of the anti-porn ban, I utilized the webscraping tool Reaper to salvage posts circulated through the hashtag. Reaper, an open-access software created by developers at the University of Queensland, allows researchers to easily collect data from major social media networks. Requiring only an application programming interface (API) key and a search term (e.g., #leelah alcorn), the program produced a spreadsheet of 13,056 individual Tumblr posts circulated through the hashtag #leelah alcorn between December 2014 and December 2018. The dataset contained organized columns of metadata indicating the blogger’s username, the time and date of posting, hashtags, the URL for the post, URLs for all image attachments, and other information. I copied the URLs for all images into a bulk image downloader, which produced 2,192 images. I then began analyzing the entirety of the text and image-based corpus, focusing on how users engaged the hashtag as a form of ritualized memorialization.
When Knight’s suicide letter spread across Twitter in March 2023, I was struck by the similar circumstances connecting her and Alcorn’s deaths, including not only how they chose to publicly disseminate their final words and the networked rituals of commemoration that followed but also the major changes affecting the platforms upon which all this activity occurred. Just before Knight’s suicide, Elon Musk acquired Twitter and began instituting new policies to moderate communication around gender identity. In late 2022, the newly minted CEO faced criticism from right-wing users after the film “What is a Woman?” produced by neo-conservative figurehead Matt Walsh was censored by Twitter for “violating rules on hateful conduct” due to its advocacy for the banning of gender-affirmative care for minors (Squire & McDade, 2023). Musk responded by sharing the video and encouraging all parents to view it. In later months, Musk (2023) liked and shared a large quantity of transphobic content, abolished a previous policy against intentional misgendering, and announced that terms like “cis” and “cisgender” would be considered slurs on Twitter. Musk’s actions helped concretize the rebranding of Twitter as X throughout the first half of 2023, transforming the once seemingly progressive social network into a platform conducive to the unbridled circulation of anti-trans discourse.
Against this tense backdrop, I witnessed #JusticeforEden proliferate. I found myself similarly anxious about the hashtag’s future, much like I was when Tumblr faced major policy changes a half-decade prior, so I again utilized webscraping technology to create a copy of the accrued data. For this purpose, I relied on TAGS (Twitter Archiving Google Sheet), an open-access Google Sheets template powered by an API key that authorizes the automated collection of search results from Twitter within a limited period. I entered a search query for all tweets circulated through #JusticeforEden from 15 to 20 March 2023, the highest period of activity within the hashtag and its first 5 days of movement. TAGS generated a dataset of over 14,495 tweets, including re-tweets, organized by metadata categories. I cleaned the data by removing all duplicate tweets, leaving just over 1,282 unique tweets. I used URLs to obtain all images and videos circulated through the hashtag. I then conducted a preliminary analysis of the corpus, attending to its ritualistic features. I compared it to my earlier examination of #leelah alcorn by identifying formal commonalities between the datasets.
Methodologically, I conceive my study as an exercise in data backup informed by thick description. In computing contexts, creating backups entails making a copy of data and storing it in more than one location, so that the data is protected if the original data is lost. Because some of the data collected from #leelah alcorn and #JusticeforEden has already disappeared from their original platforms of circulation (and because I suspect the datasets will continue to erode over time), I understand my labor in this article as a variation of data backup, insofar as I safeguard some of the data here and offer a context from which to understand its meanings. To this end, I perform a “thick description” of the data that clarifies its ritual significance for the communities who created and circulated it online (Geertz, 1973, p. 10). My descriptive analysis transforms the data into what Mandolessi (2023), following Brügger (2018), calls “reborn digital media” (born-digital media that have been collected and preserved and changed during this process) (p. 1517).
I organize my research into four sections. Each section coalesces around a primary feature that endows the ritual of commemoration performed after Alcorn’s and Knight’s suicide a distinctive sequential structure. Throughout, I draw on samples of textual and visual data to support claims about the ritual’s stages, which include (1) sharing suicide letters, (2) enshrining selfies, (3) modulating memories, and (4) casting blame.
Sharing Suicide Letters
The first stage of the ritual is the sharing of suicide letters. Both Alcorn and Knight wielded the affordances of popular social media platforms to ensure their final words would be witnessed unedited by a wide variety of users and other online audiences. Alcorn used the queue function embedded in Tumblr to schedule her suicide letter to be released posthumously to her account after her death (See Figure 1). Despite her parents eventually removing her Tumblr account, copies of her suicide letter continued to circulate widely. Meanwhile, because it far exceeded the platform’s character limit for a single post, Knight used a third-party application to host her suicide letter on her Twitter account, where it survives to this day (See Figure 2). In both cases, the capabilities of the platform for content delivery enabled both letter writers to publicly establish a material “breach” in the existing social order, setting into motion circumstances demanding reparative ritualized responses to ameliorate the crisis posed by the transgressive shock of suicide (Turner, 1980, p. 149).
A screenshot of Alcorn’s suicide letter as it appeared on her public Tumblr account (http://lazerprincess.tumblr.com/) on 31 December 2014. A complete reconstruction of Alcorn’s now deleted Tumblr account can be found at the following URL: https://thelazerprincessarchives-blog.tumblr.com/.
A screenshot of Knight’s suicide letter as it appears linked to her public Twitter account on 1 April 2023. The letter can be accessed at the following URL: https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1ss8nph.
Two criteria generically typify suicide letters. First, suicide letters are written by the person who has chosen to die by suicide sometime before the agent has completed the act. Second, suicide letters typically list the reasons informing the author’s decision. Sharing a suicide letter is motivated by an archival impulse because it is fundamentally about preserving one’s autobiographical account of self for future witnessing readers. Relatedly, the reception of the suicide letter by a reader is an inherent component of its capacity to create both linguistic and extra-linguistic forms of meaning. The emotional resonance of the suicide letter derives from its expression in the subjunctive voice, a rhetorical form through which individuals often represent the complex subject of death, whether in written texts or visual images (Zelizer, 2009). The subjunctive voice permits a recognition of death’s finality and, paradoxically, an exposure to its contingency and even a temporary postponement of its closure. Likewise, a suicide letter “positions the action at the ‘about to’ moment, the moment at which an individual or group is going to die, but not after they are already dead” (p. 165). As Zelizer notes, “By freezing the representation of death before people actually die, we mark the moment before death, rather than after, as the most powerful and memorable moment of representation in the sequencing of events surrounding human demise” (emphasis in original). Across both Alcorn’s and Knight’s letters, common themes emerge written in the subjunctive voice, providing readers the ability to reside in the “about to die” moment, which galvanizes cravings for community and justice for those left in the aftermath of the breach of suicide. The repetition of these features prepares audiences who read and share the letters for further ritualized action.
First, throughout their letters, Alcorn and Knight implicate their families, specifically their parents, as barriers to accomplishing their gender transitions and thus causes of their ailing mental and emotional states. In her letter, Alcorn recounted, “My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to Christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression.” 4 Alcorn holds her mother accountable as the culprit for the traumatic experience she endured while undergoing religious conversion therapy before blaming both her parents for the depression she experienced while isolated during a period when she could no longer contact her friends because she was not allowed to attend public school or access social media. Knight makes similar claims throughout her letter, disclosing: “My mom searched all of my electronics whenever she got the chance. I was berated for being a freak when my mom found my private photos, my dad called me a failure and an abomination.” Unlike Alcorn, who never acquired access to HRT or other methods of gender-affirmative care, Knight had already begun a physical gender transformation that her parents later impeded in Saudi Arabia. Articulated in the subjunctive voice, these revelations convey how their parents’ actions negatively impacted their physical and mental well-being and so much so that they concluded self-imposed death was the only viable solution to correct their plights.
Second, Alcorn and Knight express grief for a future version of themselves that they could not embody. Burdened by the thought of delaying her physical gender transition until adulthood, Alcorn bereaves the loss of a life she wished she was able to have lived, lamenting, I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound . . . Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself.
Her words encapsulate the grief for the unfulfilled potential of a life lived authentically as her true self due to societal and familial constraints. Meanwhile, Knight’s letter reflects the sorrow of a person whose self-evolution was abruptly halted by seemingly unconquerable mechanisms of power. Knight expresses her desire to have experienced an alternate version of the future, writing, I wish this message was a message about how I won, how I escaped and built a successful life. How I managed to get FFS, SRS, and beat my dysphoria. I wish I was speaking to you about how proud I am of myself to have done the impossible. But that’s not my reality.
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These passages illustrate how Alcorn and Knight engaged the subjunctive voice to grieve alternate futures they were denied, allowing readers the chance to also dwell in the temporal apertures before the choice of suicide.
Finally, Alcorn and Knight impart their dream of better outcomes for future generations of trans people. Alcorn ends her letter by writing: The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say “that’s fucked up” and fix it. Fix society. Please.
Similarly, Knight indicates her dream for a more accepting world where trans individuals and communities can live authentically without fear or impediment to their flourishing, stating, “I hope that the world gets better for us. I hope our people get old. I hope we get to see our kids grow up to fight for us. I hope for trans rights worldwide.” In both extracts, both author’s use of the subjunctive voice creates a pause of possibility for readers to contemplate the worlds Alcorn and Knight could only conjure up in their imaginations but never access during their lifetimes. In the contingency of the “about to die” moment of the suicide letter, readers must come to terms with powerful calls to action that set the tone for a networked ritual of commemoration constructed around the aspiration for a future laden with life rather than death. By sharing the letters, user audiences construct a rich social environment from which to indefinitely experience the subjunctive voices of their authors, inducing liminal conditions productive of ritual performances of remembering and mourning.
Enshrining Selfies
The next ritual stage involves the enshrinement of selfies previously taken and shared by the deceased. Selfies are self-captured photographs that have become widely recognized forms of communication in digital social media culture (Jurgenson, 2019). Since the popularization of the selfie during the first half of the 2010s, queer and trans people have engaged platform mediators to perform their identities on their terms and, in the process, diversify norms of visibility within digital social media networks (Duguay, 2016). Because trans selfies symbolize a certain degree of autonomy over one’s image and identity, it is likely uncoincidental that as news of Alcorn’s and Knight’s suicides traveled within and beyond Tumblr and Twitter, so, too, did their digital self-portraits. Like a photograph placed in memoriam at a tomb or at a place where death once occurred, circulated selfies of the deceased operate as “spontaneous shrines” that “insert and insist upon the presence of absent people” and “display death in the heart of social life” (Santino, 2006, p. 13). To be sure, the selfie is an essential aspect of the ritual process.
Digital variations of the spontaneous shrine emerge from a longer lineage of trans worldmaking rooted in ritualized memorial practices that blur boundaries among mourning, witnessing, and political activism. For instance, Cram (2012) recounts how, in the wake of the murder of a Latina trans woman named Angie Zapata, mourners wore t-shirts bearing the victim’s self-portrait as they gathered in public vigils that not only commemorated her life but made possible a visual protest rooted in the witnessing of trans people as citizens deserving of dignity and justice. A similar dynamic persists within popular social media platforms in response to trans suicide. While Alcorn’s and Knight’s family members insisted on misgendering them in their official memorials, their virally circulated selfies defiantly reinstated their agency by depicting their bodies as the trans women they imagined themselves to be during their lifespans. Selfies provide evidence of the deceased’s gender identity against forces of oppression that would instead distort or completely erase proof of a trans past. In this way, one can interpret the selfie as a historical record and its viral circulation as a concerted move toward its preservation within the memorial environment provided by the platform.
Alcorn’s selfies depict a young trans woman who has yet to undergo any physical gender confirmation treatments. Two of the most frequently circulated selfies show Alcorn capturing an image of herself in a dressing room mirror while trying on a skirt and dress (See Figure 3). These images “make plain the ongoing process of identity construction” that Jurgenson (2019) ascribes as a characteristic feature of selfies in general (p. 54). Sadly, Alcorn’s selfies betoken an in-progress process of identity construction cut senselessly short.
The most circulated selfie of Alcorn.
Knight’s selfies portray a young trans woman who seems to have made substantial progress in her journey toward self-realization. Knight appears in one frequently circulated image wearing purple hair, with her eyes gazing directly into the camera (See Figure 4). She shoots the image of herself standing outside while the sunlight illuminates her face and surroundings. Unlike Alcorn, who only ever publicly declared her transness through her Tumblr profile, Knight’s images communicate a confident comfortability with her trans identity spanning both digital and non-digital public settings. As pictures taken after gender-confirmation procedures, Knight’s selfies render visible the bursts of freedom Alcorn longed for throughout her suicide letter, providing a chance for audiences to witness and share documentary evidence of the joy that comes with living a trans life.
The most circulated selfie of Knight.
In a similar way as the suicide letter, selfies like those of Alcorn and Knight pause the body in a space and time before death and thus register rhetorically in the subjunctive voice. Because self-captured images before the event of suicide catalog an “about to die” moment, they provide those who circulate them an outlet upon which to project their emotions while they witness, remember, and mourn. The enshrined selfies are key parts of the ritual process because they “sustain and/or mobilize collective sentiments and solidarities on the basis of symbolization and a subjunctive orientation to what should or ought to be” (Cottle, 2006, p. 415, emphasis in original). In the next section, I turn to how these enshrined selfies serve as inspiration for imaginative enactments of visual commemoration that encourage further participation in the memorial network.
Modulating Memories
The commemorative ritual proceeds as users creatively transform images of the dead into memorial displays. Amid this portion of the ritual process, the participatory nature of the network comes into focus. Users save, organize, and store existing content for future retrieval and actively contribute to the growing pool of material produced in tribute to lives lost. Acting simultaneously as data curators and generators, users perform in ways reflecting what Papailias (2016) identifies as “database modularity,” a term designating the shifting character of the archive in digital social media culture. Papailias observes, “While the archive is defined by its exclusivity as a repository of unique objects and structured by alphabetism and name-based hierarchical organization, the database enables users’ access to easily-reproducible digital content by way of search queries and fast retrieval” (p. 448). In turn, “remixes, mashups, memes, and curations that typify contemporary modes of digital production reflect the modularity of database” because these forms showcase just how easily users can utilize database systems for storage and retrieval, such as those embedded in popular social media platforms, to alter existing content and forge networked communities around the circulation of said transmuted content (emphasis in original). In situations of ritual mourning, Papailias avers, database modularity solidifies the convergence of networked user communities who come together through the rapid spread of affect while building viral memorials. After Alcorn’s and Knight’s suicides, the affordances of Tumblr and Twitter offered users the capacity to modulate data to inspire modes of remembrance oriented toward the imagining of future possibilities for justice beyond the sorrows of the present.
User-generated memorials to Alcorn materialized as visual reinterpretations of her image. These commemorative graphics are classifiable into four broad categories, including (1) selfie-inspired memorials, (2) trans-affirmative memorials, (3) memorials to Alcorn and other trans youth who died by suicide, and (4) photographs of offline memorials.
First, selfie-inspired memorials encompass commemorative visualizations that clearly reference Alcorn’s selfies and thereby replicate her image as a technique of memorialization (See Figure 5). By duplicating her selfie, these memorial types enhance Alcorn’s familiarity and fortify her iconicity in the broader social movement against oppressive transphobic social conditions that compel a decision between life and suicide. Second, trans-affirmative memorials include commemorative visualizations that take artistic liberties with Alcorn’s image by feminizing her appearance in ways that cohere with the image of herself she articulated throughout her suicide letter (See Figure 6). These memorial types affirm Alcorn’s gender identity and ask spectators to imagine the possibilities of an unrealized future. Third, memorials to Alcorn and other trans youth who died by suicide refer to commemorative visualizations that are inclusive of the numerous other trans youth who died by suicide during the first half of 2015, such as Zander Mahaffey and Blake Brockington (See Figure 7). These memorial types help diversify Alcorn’s memory by shifting attention toward transmasculine and trans youth of color who also die by suicide at disproportionate rates. Finally, photographs of offline memorials are commemorative visualizations that show how Alcorn’s memory has traveled beyond digital contexts and into other parts of the world (See Figure 8). These memorial types demonstrate how the virality of the memorialization effort may gain a great deal of traction on the platform it originates but certainly does not end there.
An example of a selfie-inspired memorial circulated via Tumblr.
An example of a trans-affirmative memorial circulated via Tumblr.
An example of a memorial to Alcorn and other trans youth who died by suicide circulated via Tumblr. The image references Zander Mahaffey, a trans boy whose suicide occurred shortly after Alcorn’s on 15 February 2015.
An example of a photograph of an offline memorial circulated via Tumblr. The image features a roadside plaque erected near the highway where Alcorn took her life.
Two of the four memorial types circulated after Alcorn’s suicide also re-appeared after Knight’s. Because Knight had already begun her physical gender transition, no trans-affirmative memorials depicting a newly feminized Knight emerged. Nor did users produce memorials to any other trans people who died by suicide during the same period as Knight. Users did, however, produce selfie-inspired memorials (See Figure 9). They also shared photographs of offline memorials (See Figure 10).
An example of a selfie-inspired memorial circulated via Twitter.
An example of a photograph of an offline memorial circulated via Twitter.
Furthermore, users produced short-form videos that explained the complex circumstances surrounding Knight’s suicide. These videos doubled as memorials and grassroots investigative journalism. For example, one video consists of a slideshow of Knight’s suicide letter cut into sections. A narrator, who never enters the frame, reads the letter. This video ends with a slide of a saturated image of a body of water captioned, “Rest in peace Eden Knight.” (See Figure 11) Another video, posted by trans public intellectual and activist Eli Erlick (2023), described the series of events that led to Knight’s suicide in 60 s. This video prominently features Erlick who speaks while in a side-by-side shot with images of Knight and those involved in her trafficking across the United States and Saudi Arabia, which gives the clip the appearance of a short-form news clip like those commonly circulated on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok (See Figure 12). The inclusion of videos within the network constellated after Knight’s suicide reflects the rise of filmographic capabilities embedded into popular social media venues since the death of Alcorn. Moving images not only augment the dynamism of the memorial network but also offer narrative frames for effectively navigating the meaning of its contents.
A screenshot of the final clip from a video slideshow explaining the circumstances surrounding Knight’s suicide circulated via Twitter.
A screenshot of Eli Erlick’s video about Knight circulated via Twitter.
The creative transformation of data is an integral part of the ritual of commemoration following the event of trans suicide. Within digital social media culture, the modulation of memory facilitates networked processes of witnessing and mourning, allowing individual users to work through and make sense of a collectively experienced trauma. As users leave their distinct impressions on the performance of commemoration, they prepare themselves for the next and final stage of the ritual, which entails adjudicating justice based on the evidence assembled through the circulation of the viral memorial movement.
Casting Blame
The ritual concludes with participants redirecting their mourning into a collective administration of justice on behalf of the dead. Absent formal channels for apprehending a singular culprit and subjecting the suspect to the rule of law, users draw from the content generated through the ritual of commemoration to place blame on figures they perceive to be most responsible for maintaining the transphobic social conditions that give rise to trans suicide. In both Alcorn’s and Knight’s cases, users took seriously the ways both authors allotted blame to the actions of their parents as factors in their decisions to end their lives. They placed Alcorn’s and Knight’s parents on trial within the platform contexts where their suicide letters circulated as if to create a virtual courtroom through which the criminality of transphobic aggression may finally be exposed. Therein, trans suicide becomes a targeted hate crime caused by prejudicially violent transgressions against a marginalized community.
After Alcorn’s suicide, the ritual of commemoration honoring her memory quickly transformed into a referendum against her parents, Doug and Carla. 6 As public reports swirled that Alcorn’s parents would eulogize her under her deadname—a term used within trans communities to refer to a no longer accepted birthname—users captured screenshots of her mother’s public Facebook account and re-posted them to Tumblr to confirm suspicions of the erasure of Alcorn’s trans identity at the site of her burial. In one status update, Carla refers to Alcorn by her deadname and masculine pronouns. She also writes that Alcorn “was hit by a truck” during a morning walk (See Figure 13). The passive voice in this statement rhetorically obscures that Alcorn died by suicide, which forecloses any inquiries about the circumstances that could have led to her death.
A screenshot of Alcorn’s mother’s Facebook status update circulated via Tumblr.
Users supplied corrections to the post and screenshots of messages they sent to Alcorn’s mother directly before she adjusted her privacy settings to no longer accept messages from non-connections (See Figures 14-15).
An amended version of Alcorn’s mother’s Facebook status update circulated via Tumblr.
A screenshot of a private Facebook message delivered to Alcorn’s mother by a Tumblr user.
Because there is no way to access Carla’s Facebook account now, it is impossible to determine whether she really posted the status update that supposedly so casually misgenders her child. Regardless, the circulation of this screenshot and its numerous responses demonstrates the deep desire for some users to attribute culpability to a perpetrator and initiate the process of punishment for a crime that would otherwise go unnoticed.
The ritual of commemoration following Knight’s suicide similarly involved a group of users projecting blame toward parental figures for their trans child’s death. They re-circulated a post in Arabic released by Knight’s family to their public Twitter account. They also translated the post to English, corrected all instances of misgendering, and replaced her deadname (See Figure 16).
An amended version of Knight’s family’s Twitter post.
Some directly responded to the post. One user replied that “your daughter” only died by suicide because her family kidnapped her and forced her to detransition. Others condemned the indignity of the post’s inclusion of Knight’s deadname. Other users were more explicit, charging Knight’s family with her death. Some posted similar refrains in Arabic, using the #JusticeforEden equivalent “#إيدن_حق.” Hundreds of Arabic posts seeking justice on behalf of Knight highlight the large-scale scope of #JusticeforEden. The hashtag brings together a transnational coalition of participants who mourn by holding accountable those who they feel are most responsible for Knight’s death, despite there being little to no options for pursuing legal recourse.
During this concluding stage of the ritual, the casting of blame toward parental figures personalizes otherwise abstract and/or concealed structures of transphobic oppression emanating from within the domestic sphere of familial relations. In other words, the memorial transforms once private matters into issues of public concern. As the private goes public, users draw clear moral lines between right and wrong, putting parents who mistreat their trans children on the latter side of the demarcated boundary. The wedge they carve brings into focus how the ritual ends much the same way as the “social drama” form described by Turner (1980), which always finalizes in either the social reintegration of contesting parties or the recognition that such coming together will no longer be possible (p. 151). Certainly, part of what drives the user network’s need to mourn and remember is its shared understanding of the violent social conditions underlying trans suicide, and, for this reason, it is no wonder that they understand the perpetuation of these conditions as constitutive of an irrevocable breach. By condemning the parents of Alcorn and Knight, both networks sutured in the aftermath of their suicides offer a reminder of the specific forms of violence they endured prior to their deaths, while also underscoring the haunting absence of accountability for these injustices.
Conclusion
While completing this article, I was saddened to learn that Nex Benedict (they/them), a non-binary teenager from northeastern Oklahoma, died by suicide. In early February 2024, Benedict was involved in a physical altercation with a group of girls in a restroom at the high school they attended. Benedict reported the incident to police but did not press charges. The next day, Benedict died suddenly in front of their adoptive mother.
Details of these events, including filmed footage of Benedict at the police station, circulated across social media networks before officials confirmed Benedict’s cause of death weeks later. During this period, users speculated that Benedict’s death was a murder. They created memorial hashtags, including #NexBenedict and #JusticeForNex, and shared images of the teenager. They placed blame on the girls who assailed Benedict, as well as those responsible for the continued entrenchment of transphobic ideology within the Oklahoma education system, for their death. Although users did not have access to a suicide letter, they did heavily share some of Nex’s last recorded words captured in the video with police. In many ways, these activities mirrored the phases of the rituals of commemoration set into motion after Knight’s and Alcorn’s suicides, demonstrating the relevance of this study for understanding how people continue to use the connective affordances of popular social media platforms to publicly share memory to collectively affirm the value of trans lives.
In conclusion, even given all the problems that loom over digital social media culture presently, popular platforms continue to offer trans people and their allies a set of reliable options for appropriately commemorating those within their communities whose lives have ended due to the cruelty of transphobic ideology and violence. Because the tragic effects of systemic transphobia will likely persist for the foreseeable future, one can reasonably expect more hashtag movements, such as those commemorating people like Alcorn, Knight, Benedict, and others. So long as trans people use social media platforms to memorialize and pursue justice on behalf of the dead, future scholarship should focus on these efforts and deliver adequate concepts, methods, and analytical frameworks for advancing this area of study. With this article, I have insisted on the merit of a ritual perspective for conceptualizing how social media users assemble and perform the collective labor of public memorialization and value-driven social justice activism. Accordingly, I identified four distinct phases of the rituals of commemoration made possible by creative, strategic appropriations of popular social media platforms. In sum, I hope to have provided a starting point for a thoughtful dialogue on urgent matters requiring our immediate and sustained attention.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
