Thank You For The Follow-upAfter the reports of her death there was no further reporting about it.  No report about the autopsy, the family, NOTHING.  I wrote the LA Times last week and have received no reply.  I’m hoping someone will publish something so all of us can have some closure.

BRAVA, Autumn!
Ms. LaCoe, et al., are DISrespectfully making the memorial about THEMSELVES not Mike Penner [fka Christine Daniels] and, therefore, simultaneously disrespecting the prime directive behind trans liberation: that regardless of what doctors, parents, friends, government, society tell us, each of us has the right to identify OURSELVES as we wish.
That HE changed his mind about embracing his Christine identity was HIS right and should be respected in death as well as life, and those who refuse to might ponder how much rejection of that decision by some like them played into HIS suicidal thoughts.
RIP.

I Don’t Go For ThatI am not disrespecting Christine.  It appears her family shamed her in detransitioning.  They apparently told her if you want our love go back to being Mike.  She did and they still shunned her.  As far as I’m concerned they KILLED her.
You sound clueless about the realities of transition.
She is, and always shall be, FEMALE in my mind.
Please respect my opinion, don’t try to bully me into accepting what you believe.

What HE was in YOUR mind [such as it is]…
is irrelevant.
What I believe is, again, that the individual has the right to name his or her identity.
You don’t.

Under duressWhat I believe is, again, that the individual has the right to name his or her identity.
If that was the case, then why did Christine kill herself after becoming “Mike Penner” again?  If it was really a choice, then she would not have committed suicide.
How many times have gay or bi men, then suddenly call themselves straight, and then committed suicide shortly thereafter?  Too many to count.

Autumn, can you clarify something for me?I did not know Mike or Christine (I read somewhere else on the LGBT POV forum that he preferred to be known as at the end).   There’s also one unanswered question: Did Mike commit suicide due to a loss of “heterosexual privilege”, or did he commit suicide due to being shamed into detransitioning?  
Regardless of the reasons, his suicide is a travesty, it’s just that these questions are making it very difficult to figure out which gender pronoun to use in this circumstance.

I don’t careI don’t care about the name.
I lost a friend. Someone rather like me in many ways, who’d shared the same travails.
Someone who could have made it. This didn’t have to happen.
I still haven’t shed all the tears, some more are coming now.
Names don’t matter. People do.

It’s not public knowledge.We have no idea why Mike completed suicide, although many of us suspect it had to do with his gender identity. It’s why I wrote about detransitioning, and reposted the piece twice — the internal pressure that caused Mike to transition to Christine likely didn’t go away with detransition.
But what I do know is that Mike made the choice to reidentify publicly as male, and live life again under the name of Mike — who am I to call him a her; who am I to call him by the name Christine?
I don’t call Mike by the name Christine, but I certainly understand why some others who loved him and mourn his passing want to remember him as Chistine.
Personally, I just want to go mourn my friend with others that also cared about him; I’m going to this service because the first service for Mike was closed — it was attendance by invitation only.  

That’s the issue hereThere’s certainly have been many examples, both anecdotal and not, of gay or bisexual men forced to “go straight” publicly due to familial pressure to not be gay.  They break up with someone who cared for them, they “live straight”, and suddenly a few months or years later, you find out that he committed suicide, perhaps with no notation or reason why.
Though certainly gender transition issues are much more complicated than merely wrestling with gender affection issues of orientation, this I cannot doubt.   No situation is one in the same with each other, but the idea of “someone being forced by familial shaming to pretend to be hetero” and then them committing suicide months or years after the fact is a fact which has occurred in actuality to me.  Someone claiming to be straight in those circumstances, I can never take them at their word, despite their insistence, and things like what happened to Mike/Christine is a very painful reminder of attempts at forced re-orientation.