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https://burns-notice.ghost.io/what-am-i-supposed-to-tell-my-terrified-friends/>
“Every time there's a mass shooting in the US, my trans friends and I hold our
collective breath. If the shooter turns out to be trans, it could signal the
final days of our human rights in a country that is supposed to be a shining
beacon on the hill for freedom. Trans people are rarely responsible for these
mass shootings, but it does sometimes happen. There are disturbed people in
every demographic, of course, but conservative white men are responsible for
the overwhelming majority of mass shootings.
But there have been trans shooters before, and there will be another one again
in the future. And conservatives have long been salivating for a trans shooter
they can use as a casus belli to full on institutionalize or incarcerate every
day trans people.
Every time there's a mass shooting in the US, my trans friends and I hold our
breath.
I used to do daily reporting for a variety of outlets in the late 2010s and
early 2020s. I was a part time political reporter for
Vox in 2020 and was a
weekend news writer for them from 2019 to 2021. I covered the initial aftermath
of over a dozen mass shootings in that time.
There is always an information vacuum in the first several days of a mass
shooting, particularly if the shooter isn't detained or killed on site. As a
reporter, you need to leave open the possibility that your initial reporting
will end up wrong. Details are scattered, rumors run rampant online,
assumptions are made before anything is known.
For the last 3 or so years, every time there's been a mass shooting,
conservative influencers, who are already soaked in daily trans hate, rush to
fill that information vacuum with made up garbage about the shooter being
trans. The first time I saw this in action was in 2018, when a 38 year old
woman broke onto the campus of YouTube HQ and started shooting people. She had
been an Iranian refugee as a teenager and had struggled to build a YouTube
following on the site before her shooting spree.
But conservative provocateurs argued, inaccurately, that it was biologically
unlikely that a cis woman would commit a shooting (infamously, a major mass
school shooting was committed by a cis girl in 1979). So they took videos of
the shooter and her unique ethnic features, and deep voice and concluded that
she was a trans woman.
I was a breaking trans news reporter at
Conde Nast's "them." at the time, and
so I dove into reporting out whether this shooter was trans or not. I called
the Bakersfield, CA police department hotline and spoke with a very nice
detective who was utterly baffled why I would be asking these questions. "No,"
he told me. "Of course she isn't trans."
He had seen the shooter's body himself.
But my article did nothing to quell the right wing rumors. So I pushed for even
more confirmation, eventually sending a FOIA request to US immigration
officials, and years later I got an answer. She was classified as female as a
young tween when she first entered the US. Online TERFs later responded to this
by suggesting that she got bottom surgery in Iran as a pre-teen back in Iran.
Little did I know that this would eventually become the standard conservative
response to all mass shootings a few years later.”
Via Janet Logan.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
