I can’t believe this has to be said, but not all trans people are mass murderers

It’s no secret that I’m not any kind of investigative journalist. As I’m fond of saying, I’m just a guy with a website and an opinion. Some may even say I’m merely a barking dog on the internet. I’m not out pounding the pavement to get the scoop. The only scoops I’m getting are the ones of vanilla ice cream from my freezer.

Instead, I have the news come to me, and by that, I mean I signed up for Google News Alerts for certain keywords. And if I’m being honest, Google News Alerts has been going downhill for years. Just by talking about it, I’m afraid it’s already on its way to the Google Graveyard. (RIP Google+)

As you may have guessed, I get a ton of news in my inbox about school shootings. A couple of weeks ago, my inbox blew up about a woman who made vague threats online in the wake of The Covenant School shooting in Nashville. While the threats may have been vague, they were disturbing to say the least.

“A person in Tennessee walked into one of your schools and shot up a bunch of your Christian daughters. That’s not the last of them if you don’t shut your f***** mouth.”

“We’re coming for your children.”

“While you’re sitting out here talking your s***, we’re not gonna come for you, we’re gonna come for your f****** children. Do you understand me?”

Unfortunately, I can’t post about every threat that’s ever been posted online about a school shooting. However, this is nothing new to me. Edgelords take to the internet and post crap like this all the time. Most of the time, it’s followed up with “I was only joking” as they’re being led away in handcuffs. I even have my own personal rule that if the suspect wasn’t in possession of a gun, I just don’t have the time for it. This time, the story was a little bit different.

The suspect in this story is 47-years-old. Ok, unusual, but not unheard of. The suspect is also a woman. Again, a little bit out of the ordinary, but nothing I haven’t seen before. The suspect is also trans. Ah shit, here we go again.

Before we go further into the story, I want it to be known that I am a firm believer in trans rights. I lost a lot of supporters and colleagues due to my public support of trans rights. Hell, it wasn’t even really about trans rights. I didn’t want to deadname a suspect, and a bunch of TERFs got their granny panties in a wad. But, that’s a story for another time.

I know this sounds a lot like “I’m not a transphobe, but…”, but the suspect in this story is not a very nice person to say the least.

Alexia Willie of Nashville, Illinois, went even further in her threats…

“Well, I guarantee I’ll be in the bathroom raping your Christian daughters, and there ain’t nothing you f****** can do about it.”

And to top it all off…

“I don’t care I’m openly a pedo. I’m openly a pedophile. I literally feel on your girls’ p******. You guys can’t do nothing about us. You can cry. Cry. Put me on national television, I don’t care. I’m transgender, I’m in the bathroom raping your fucking daughters.”

If this story had gotten more national attention than it did, it would have set trans rights back to stone age. Which leads me to my point.

The reason my inbox was blowing up over this story is because most of the right-wing got a hold of this story and held up Alexia Willie as the example of the trans community. This what conservative media and its readers have always done. They’ll take the worst person in any community and use them to represent the whole community. I was guilty of this myself when I considered myself a conservative commentator. While I’m not comparing apples to oranges, so to speak, back in the early 2000s, I had it out for vegans. I read a story, probably on Fox News, about a vegan couple who fed their infant child some weird vegan diet they had come up with. The child was taken away from the parents due to severe malnutrition. To me, at the time, that represented all vegans. So, to many conservatives, Alexia Willie is now all trans people.

Getting back to my Google News Alerts, only one news story I got about Willie was from what I would consider a legitimate news source, and that was Newsweek. Everything else was from the usual suspects, such as the Daily Caller, the Daily Wire, the Daily Signal, and Hot Air. Jesus, what’s with all the Dailies? This is the internet, not your grampa’s newspaper.

Of course, either the headlines were hateful or the body of the article was. I’m going to throw fair use out the fucking window and show you some of the vile things these right-wing rags say and not cite them at all.

Headline #1: Trans-identifying Man Arrested for Threatening to Repeat Nashville Mass Shooting

In the first sentence of the article, the word transgender is surrounded by what I like to call sarcastic quote marks. Then the article kept referring to the suspect as a man.

Headline #2: Illinois man in drag makes repeated (horrific) threats of child rape and school shootings, likely to walk away with a fine

I’m not even going any further with this article, since the website looks like it’s straight out of Geocities. 1997 called and it wants its website back.

Headline #3: Transgender-Identifying Man Charged After Threatening To Copy Nashville Shooting

Again, it’s hard to take this article seriously since it greeted me with a giant pop-up asking me to subscribe to their ‘culture war’ newsletter. Shouldn’t they be bitching about the war on Christmas, this time of year?

Anyway, the first sentence of this article starts off with “A biological male who identifies as a transgender woman.” They got to throw that dig in right at the beginning, don’t they?

Headline #4: Feds Charge Trans-Identifying Man After He Pledged To Copycat Nashville Shooting: ‘I’m Coming For Them In The Bathrooms’

I’m surprised the bathroom thing didn’t come up sooner. The Right has this obsession with kids in bathrooms when it comes to the trans community. A metric ass-ton of Conservatives are convinced that trans women are just men in drag who want to assault women and children in women’s restrooms, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Willie did the trans community no favors by leaning into this trope.

Headline #5: Transgender Activist Threatened to Target Christian Girls in Bathrooms and Rape Them to Death

Again with the bathrooms. As the saying goes, it’s not about bathrooms, just like it wasn’t about water fountains. Moving on.

Headline #6: Another Rock Solid Trans Citizen Charged With 14 Counts of WHUT?

Is that even a headline? That headline wouldn’t even be good enough to be a headline on my crappy website.

These headlines are designed to portray all trans people as dangerous mass murderers. As someone who has been documenting school shootings since 2000, there have only been two openly trans school shooters, and both shootings happened within the past four years. What the right-wing media hacks want to distract you from is that there have been scores of school shooters with right-wing beliefs going back for close to two decades.

Look, if you’re a transphobe, you’re pretty much a moron. If you think trans women are invading restrooms or kids are having gender reassignment surgery in kindergarten, you’re mentally deficient. No one is trying to turn your kids trans. If you believe in any of these things, you probably believe that Pepsi and Pop Rocks can kill you, or flashing your headlights will get you killed in a gang initiation.

Every community has that one person that the rest of the community distances themselves from. Alexia Willie does not speak for the trans community as a whole. You wouldn’t let the leader of the Klan speak for all conservatives, would you? Ok, that’s a bad example, but hopefully, you get my point.

(Source)

• Who is Alexia Willie? Transgender Woman Threatened School Shooting—Police

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