User:Slywriter/sandbox2

>Ash Haffner was a North Carolina student who died by suicide in 2015 at age 16, after being bullied for years because they identified as LGBTQ.

Ash Haffner was born April 28, 1998. Ash was gender-questioning. Various sources labeled Ash lesbian or trans male(?), though in earlier writings, they identified as neither male nor female.

Bullying increased and finally culminated in suicide.

Media coverage after the death of Ash was heightened because recently three American transgender teenagers died of suicide: Leelah Alcorn, Zander Mahaffey, Melonie Rose; and because youth suicides in North Carolina reached a peak.

The earliest media coverage of Ash's death in Gay Star News, and in Planet Transgender, suggested that Ash was fully transgender and, moreover, suggested that Ash's mother did not accept them as transgender. A blog reported two different statements about Ash's gender identity by people who claimed to have known Ash personally. A later article in the Charlotte Observer provided more background detail and pictured an open and honest mother. Gay Star News added a section to the original article indicating that it had been premature to depict Ash as fully transgender.

There were also commemoration videos about Ash on YouTube by various people, among them a video by the transgender teenager Kovu Kingsrod, which Ash's mother added to the playlist on the Ash Haffner YouTube channel.

A note that Ash once wrote about that topic reads: [