News

Guilt is powerful

This is a tragedy that should never have happened.

I'm in rural Georgia. If you want to hold any political office at all, you have to be Republican. That's just the way it is. There's a Democratic party, and they run candidates in most elections, but they're doing pretty good when they get more votes than the Libertarian candidates do. So if you want to change shit or do any good at all, you run as a Republican, and you vote in Republican primaries. At a local level, there are definitely people that are trying to do good things that are Republicans, even though they agree with most or all points of the Democratic party.

I haven't seen any indication that this person--and I don't know how they privately self-identified--was anti-LGBTQ+, aside from their association with the Republican party.

When you're in a small town in the south, esp. when you're involved in small town politics in the south, this kind of thing is a social death sentence. It would likely mean the loss of both of their jobs, and possibly their family.

They didn't deserve this.

No one deserves this.

The people celebrating their suicide, because they were religious and in local politics as a Republican, should be ashamed of themselves. Trans lives matter, but only as long as they fit in the molds we've made for 'em, huh?

My heart goes out to their family.

Man I love it when Republicans eat their own.

Conservative paper outs conservative hypocrite and instead of admitting the truth he shoots himself.

Conservatives are all cowards at their core from what I've seen.

Also this pile of bs fta is rich AF:

even though it does not appear he had taken any public positions against LGBTQ issues that could be construed as hypocritical.

He's a Republican. Their entire party attacks LGBTQ people but this guy is supposed to get a pass?

Fuck him. Fuck conservatives who think this is ok for them to do but they can demonize anyone else who wants to dress up.

How weird to see where I went to school on the news in this way and yet rather unsurprising given the culture in the area.

and evil wins again

It's a really weird situation. .. Here we have a conservative who is writing the kind crime novel that conservatives tend to write about trans people that utilizes a bunch of fairly stereotypical transphobic narratives that internally within the trans community would elicit disgust and ridicule and then appearing to act it out.

While it's possible they could have been trans themselves this feels a lot more like someone treating the conservative stereotype of trans people as a kink and acting on it. JK Rowling writes this kind of shlock the key difference being she, at least as far as we know, didn't write it as part of some sort of LARP. This person was in a complicated situation, even if they weren't trans they were caught doing things the right would look at as definitive evidence as trans and they likely had trans or trans ally commenters telling them that what they were doing was not okay. So you either have a trans hypocrite willing to set their own community on fire because of their subscription to conservative values and tropes or you have a rather stupid conservative secretly treating a trans psychokiller trope as their personal fetish or trying to use it to add realism to fuel their hobby of writing transphobic fiction and got caught by a community that is both extremely transphobic and equally not empathetic to it just being a kink.

For those who are claiming cognitive dissonance in the audience there are a few things at play.

• Suicide is a tragedy. Many of us know what the impacts of that are on communities and loved ones. This person did some bad shit but not the sort of thing we would execute someone for doing. This is still a tragedy.

• In a conservative run world being closeted and driven to suicide is a thing that has happened to generations of trans people who were not this person. It is okay to register that is not something we want to keep or return to. Feeling some empathy for trans people caught in this situation is normal.

• We don't really know what this person's actual situation is but in absence of context they effectively died becoming the sort of bogeyman the right loves to spread. They effectively died making the trope seem more real which isn't great for the trans community particularly regardless of this person's potential transness.

• Stalking isn't fucking cool. Neither is writing this kind of shit.

However you want to feel about this on the spectrum of "fuck this person in particular" to "that poor person, this shouldn't have happened" this all is valid. But it isn't hypocrisy, it's nuance and the right does not fucking understand nuance.

Hmmm I'm disappointed. If you say he's Bubba from Alabama, that's not the picture I'm expecting