30 | OutBoise Magazine | NEWS
OutBoise.com | Issue 6.2 | April 2015
Passing on your torch after passing on: Facebook’s Legacy Contactby Nicole Weaver
feature
In the modern world, being a member of the
LGBT community carries with it great fears and
very real dangers. We see those fears come to
life in the news sandwiched between images of
murdered LGBT children and the daily hate many
groups aim directly at us. It is even politically acceptable to propose laws to make discrimination
against us legal.
Every state has radically different ways of dealing with us. Some are positive (for instance,
California). Other states oppose our happiness
whenever and wherever they can (for instance,
Mississippi). This means it is often better to deal
with something that crosses state lines, than it is to
try for improvement inside any particular state.
Some of us are lucky. We have families who love
the person we are inside more than the superficial
shell we inhabit. These people are family in the
true sense of the word. They support and protect
us in life, and importantly, in death.
Many of us are not so lucky, and so we search
always for more ways to protect ourselves. There
are always those who purposely attack us and
defile our memory after we are gone. It seems like
they are not satisfied in their sick minds to simply
wound us deeply while we live, they must attempt
to tarnish our memory as well. Usually there is very
little we can do. That sense of being powerless
over our legacy can be deeply distressing.
All too often we hear stories of the hurtful people
we once loved. These people who reviled us,
beat us, and cast us out are rarely satisfied with
leaving us alone thereafter. They use even our
death as an opportunity to misgender us or minimize and attack our chosen partner. These people refuse to allow others who care about us to be
part of the mourning process. In twisted inspiration, some even use that process in an attempt to
take away the very identity bought so dearly with
our blood and our pain. In these cases it is those
who most wish to harm us, who suddenly have the
power to decide how we shall be remembered.
This brings us to a company normally considered
something of an evil empire in the privacy world
and the LGBT community. Facebook has quite
long rap sheet of mistakes involving both, but every once in a while they get something very right.
In this case, I think Facebook’s new feature neatly
solves a problem facing our community.
As of February of this year, we have access to a
small, but exciting new option to control our legacy. This new Facebook option has the potential to
give us a lot more power over what happens after
our death. Naturally it is no substitute for a legally
binding Will, but it is a useful tool nonetheless. It is
also unlikely Facebook had the LGBT community
in mind when they made this change, but it is a
perfect fit for our needs.
Before this feature was created, as in many
things in the United States, our biological family
had most of the control. They could make decisions in how our profile was dealt with after our
untimely departure simply because they are
legally related. As s