Transgender Teen’s Suicide in Lille Sparks Debate on School Inclusion

The tragedy has moved the web with a range of untruths. The reality is that the young girl, enrolled at the Fénelon high school in Lille, and who was assigned male at birth, took her own life in her foster home. In a video filmed by the transgender teenager in the office of a supervisor at the Fénelon high school on December 2, the supervisor could be heard reprimanding her for wearing a skirt at school. "I understand your desire to be yourself (...). And all of this is precisely to support you as best we can. That’s what you don’t understand," reports 20minutes, citing the supervisor.

Following her death, the video was shared on Twitter as the cause of her death. A Twitter thread, shared about 8,000 times, claimed that she had been excluded from a class and subsequently from the school, although it is "established that the author did not know Fouad personally." "The supervisor came to get her in the courtyard to take her to her office. But she was not excluded," said Annabelle and Safina, two of Fouad’s friends. In addition, she returned to the school three hours after the incident and not after days as posted on Twitter, the two friends pointed out. And to support her, her classmates had posted posters in the school and organized a "skirt day." "In the end, it was a victory for Fouad," her relatives stressed.

However, "we cannot say anything about the reasons for Fouad’s gesture," admits Annabelle, noting that she also had "family and personal problems. We may never know what the triggering factor was," she concluded.