So far we only know bits and pieces about the strange and isolated life of Robert Lewis Dear, the alleged shooter who murdered three people and injured many others after holing up in a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic yesterday afternoon.
We know that he had numerous run-ins with the law and with his neighbors, that he was accused in the past of domestic violence, that he lived in a small shack in the woods.
While Dear didn’t leave behind a manifesto, the fact that he targeted Planned Parenthood seems to be a rather large clue as to his motivations. Indeed, the mayor of Colorado Springs told reporters that they could make “inferences” about Dear’s motivations “from where [the shootings] took place.” Meanwhile, NBC is reporting that Dear talked about abortion after he was arrested, making reference to “baby parts,” according to NBC’s law enforcement sources.
Apparently embarrassed by the actions of yet another white male terrorist, some right-wingers are trumpeting a bizarre claim: that Dear is a trans woman.
The claim seems to have originated with the blog Gateway Pundit, which posted voter registration information for Dear that labeled the alleged shooter as “female.”
To Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft, this isn’t just an innocent mistake on the part of some government clerk; it’s proof that Dear “Identifies as [a] Woman.”
Naturally, others picked up on the bizarre claim. Rich Hoffman, who blogs as Overmanwarrior, treated this “news” as a giant “gotcha.”
Guess what, Obama, MSNBC, CNN, Hillary Clinton and all the rest of the knuckle dragging losers of progressive politics? They thought they finally had a white middle-aged Republican man who committed a terrorist act—so that they could propose more gun control.
Never mind that most of America’s terrorists are in fact white men.
Sadly for them, the shooter—Robert Lewis Dear—the lunatic who shot up a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic on November 27th 2015 appears to be a cross-gender loving pervert who shared much more with Obama’s LBGT community than the NRA loving American traditionalists.
Never mind that the only political activism anyone says they’ve seen Dear ever engaging in was handing out anti-Obama leaflets.
According to early reports from The Gateway Pundit shown below indicate Robert Lewis Dear identified as a woman, not as the man that he is. Bet you won’t hear that on the news networks.
Probably because it’s not true.
Dear sounds like a cast member of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That would explain his appearance.
Apparently Hoffman has never actually seen Rocky Horror.
Hoffman continued on — and on:
This is just further proof that liberals make most of the problems in our society. They feed anger toward Planned Parenthood with immoral justifications then they create a loose society full of perverts, peeping Toms, and losers who are men who think they are women and women who want to be men. USA Today almost had an orgasm when they saw the pictures of the suspect, but quickly put on the brakes once the stories of this idiot became clear. They reported that the motive was unclear so the hard reporting will probably die now that Robert Lewis Dear has turned out to be a Bruce Jenner clone—a woman in a man’s body. Perhaps Dear was jealous that real woman were able to get abortions for casual sex while he was not able to commit such a vile crime—so he went on a shooting spree. That conclusion is just as valid as Obama’s early comments regarding the push to use gun control as a way to keep more idiots like this loser free to peek in our windows all in the name of a more “progressive” society of morally loose punks and general depraved nut cases. Gun control laws obviously didn’t work with this confused person. Robert Lewis Dear was a Obama kind of guy—a bewildered mess who didn’t know what he was.
Naturally, Hoffman isn’t the only one crying “gotcha.” On Twitter, right-wingers are spreading the “news” of Dear’s imaginary status as a trans woman; they sound positively giddy.
https://twitter.com/AuroraStargazer/status/670676592809545729
Democrat. Trans. BOOM!https://t.co/nVZkgqUwu4
— MelDoyle (@meldoyle9) November 28, 2015
https://twitter.com/ThomasWictor/status/670535763575087104
Official records show shooter identified as a female! A trans-terrorist?… https://t.co/yRs0AuKLnq
— Family Policy WV (@FamilyPolicyWV) November 28, 2015
https://twitter.com/GotharReichart/status/670722140723945472
https://twitter.com/US395/status/670651383301951488
https://twitter.com/Gregory__Adams/status/670640296963743744
Naturally, some couldn’t keep themselves from indulging in transphobic jokes:
The runner up for Caitlyn's Trans-ESPY award did not take the snub well. #PlannedParenthood https://t.co/E3kJPc3a47
— HaleStorm (@RealTJHale) November 28, 2015
@THEREBELTV According to his voter reg Robert Lewis Dear identifies as woman.
"She ain't perfect she's my brother"— Jones (@Sanerfpta) November 28, 2015
A man who thinks he's a she⏩ RT @exposeliberals: Who is Robert Lewis Dear? https://t.co/HoAz921RN0 #tcot #tlot #tgdn https://t.co/UNIXDNY2FL
— Patty 🌻🇺🇸🌵 (@littlebytesnews) November 28, 2015
#trans #PPShooter MO: Identifies as #FEMALE,So,HeWantedAbortion &PP WouldNot GiveHimOne? #LGBT #celebrities #TMZ https://t.co/SMP1YR828z
— sara hall (@sarahal15586515) November 28, 2015
Do any of these people actually believe that Dear is a trans woman, or are they deliberately spreading disinformation to amuse themselves and muddy the real issues?
I suspect that it is largely the latter. Either way, it is not a shining moment for them.
H/T — Thanks to yutolia, who tipped me off to this development in the comments here.
Argenti Aertheri
So cute! I wish I wasn’t allergic to cats. I can maybe get a sphinx.
It’s the same shooting debate, with an added layer of sexism and transphobia. At the end of the day, they’re still just trying to argue that it’s an isolated incident caused by mental illness, but with a disgusting argument that being transgendered is some kind of mental illness.
And of course, everyone will just give up until next week, when even more innocent people die in a totally preventable mass shooting committed by a white guy.
yutolia | November 28, 2015 at 10:25 pm
@kale:
“I’m not even surprised. Transphobic bullying often accompanies caricatures of us “violent” perverts.
This. So this. It reminds me of the people who attempt to disown the nazis by claiming that they were all LGBT.”
..say what?
@Fruitloopsie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pink_Swastika
@Argenti
Awwww. My boy cat has recently started to knead me all the time. He never did it before, and he’s 4 years old now.
@Fnoicby Trans Extermination Radical Feminists are part of the problem with transphobia and you’d have to be super naive to think otherwise. Stop making this about you being sad because trans people don’t feel safe around you when you identify with a subset of feminism with tons of members who label trans women as “predatory straight men trying to rape us lesbians”
Dhag,
Let’s not forget that feeemale cats are sluts who ride the cock carousel and a single litter can have more than one father. My aunt has two cats who are litter mates. Lilly is a chubby round short haired dilute tortoiseshell + white with blue eyes. George is a skinny angular long haired brown tabby with green eyes and not a speck of white fur. You’d never know from looking at them that they’re related. They almost certainly have different fathers.
Just one more reason to love cats. They’re such misandry!
@Fnoicby TERFS specifically stands for “Trans exclusionary radical feminist”. Not “all radfems” or even “most radfems”. Specifically a group of people who call themselves radical feminists yet ally with the patriarchy to throw a specific population of women under the bus. People like Kathy Brennan have organized campaigns to harass trans women and even spoke before governments to argue against trans people’s rights and deny them access to medical care.
So I can’t really tell if you just misinterpreted something here or you’re willfully being obtuse so you can argue with trans women and claim like all of feminism is being attacked by trans women.
I know there are lots of transpeople here, although I don’t know which ones of you are, and that I don’t know doesn’t matter, anyway.
BUT. Please know that lots of people think that you are just fine, don’t consider you to be “crazy”, or whatever else ignorant people may think about you.
These transphobic and transhatey people are not the majority. I think (hope) that they are the minority, they just happen to be really, annoyingly loud.
@erica, ascendant: I searched but nothing was found. I tried different combinations of his name but nothing. Strange.
Regarding that Colorado Voters Info website (www.coloradovoters.info): It appears that they have deleted his entry as I get a 404 error when going to link from the website where this whole story started. His name cannot be found manually either. Not sure what is going on here. Maybe they took it down to change the gender?
I know the difference between bold and blockquote, really I do.
@wwth
Possibly! But the other father would be an unknown in that case. Funny story though, the known father found a way to sneak into their 2nd floor balcony, made it inside, cleared out all the cat food, had sex with the cat lady of the house, and then he’s gone. But I’ve seen him have secret father/daughter get-togethers with Lisa in the backyard, so he’s not all bad. Maybe he’s just shy.
I’m not saying it had anything to do with feminists, @fnoicby. I think I’ve been pretty clear about this, especially since, hello, I’m one of those.
I feel like you’re trying to bait a trans woman into saying something that can be cut and pasted out of context, and I have no interest in providing quarter to anyone who holds up the banner of feminism and then uses it to punch down on women or tell us what to do with our bodies. Brennan does that to the same ends as an MRAsshole, but wraps it in the flag of ‘feminism’ when there’s nothing feminist about that. Oh and as a complete pariah in the “””””””transgender community””””””” and a low-grade person of note under my “wallet name” in the disabled queer community, your attempt to dismiss Brennan’s notoriety is suspect, since she sure spends lots of time chasing after Black lesbians, disabled lesbians, and lots of other people that it ain’t exactly feminist to pursue.
You’re arguing in bad faith, you’re putting words in my mouth, I’m done. It’s never “a bit much” to push back against people who do real harm to women like forced-birthers and people who basically act as enforcement for MRAsshole values like Brennan, Hungerford, Greer, etc etc ad nauseam.
If it’s a bit much for women to resist patriarchy in all its forms, then I guess I’m a bit much, and I’m damn proud to be.
Meanwhile, here in Victoria, our state government has finally got its shit together and passed legislation banning protesting within 150 metres of entrances to abortion clinics, GP offices and hospitals. It is possible to make progress. I feel a small sense of hope for humanity now.
http://m.dailylife.com.au/news-and-views/news-features/victorian-upper-house-passes-abortion-clinic-protest-buffer-zone-law-20151126-gl9bsi.html
TERFs are very similar to MRAs in terms of how they treat trans women. There is a TERF core that is very comparable to GamerGate. were talking outing trans women to their bosses in an attempt to get them fired for being trans, targeting of suicidal women, etc. & I say women because that is their primary target. Sooo feminist…. & when TERFs talk to trans people, they all do sound pretty close to right wingers and GGers, because they all use the same hate speech. :/
Dhag85
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pink_Swastika
I can’t even.
Sadly a lot of the MRAs see trans women as “men who hate themselves” and trans men “I can’t wait for those females to go through what men have to go through”
I’m a cis woman I have no problem of sharing a bathroom with a trans woman. And also it’s sexist as h*ll to think I need to be rescued I can take care of myself and plus trans men and cis women do bad things too so cut that patriarchy garbage out.
Sorry if I’m being a cis savior or “I’m not like those other transphobic d-bags” but to the trans and genderqueer people out there I’m on your side and always will be.
The first time i read about this idea, I couldn’t stop laughing every time I thought of it. The “Lolwut? What? WHAT?” type of laughter. Followed by a lot of “I can’t even” evens.
Taking the TERF position at face value, the argument is absurd:
Men claim to be trans, take hormones and cut their dicks off all to have a chance to rape women in bathrooms…which the can no longer do without penises(I doubt this TERF theory is sophisticated enough to include non-penile sexual violence) The version I read was REALLY worried out bathroom use.
Yes, I know not all male to female Trans get genital surgery, but TERF assumptions seem to take it as a given they do. So the logic is laughably not logical.
Then I found out about the despicable human being known as Cathy Brennan a lawyer who outs Trans teens.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cathy_Brennan
After reading her history, I have a very hard time believing Brennan actually believes this is a real “concern”. It seems pushing any scheme however irrational, is a wining tactic if the target is in a vulnerable population AND one can depend on loud hateful friends to echo the spin.
People like her and the GG lawyer should be disbarred.
Brennan is an intolerant and intolerable person, why does it matter how (in)famous she is? I’m seriously failing to see what TERfs have to do with anything.
Katz — yep, that sweetie was a stray only a week ago! Just over, but yeah, she’s mostly taken beautifully to our basement… just need to get “no you go in the box, not next to it” down! Switching from corn based litter (idfk, ask my mother) to clay probably Monday since stairs after trapeze equals ow. Upstairs cat still hates everything about this, but we’ll get there!
BVH: I know you didn’t intend it that way, but the “cut off their dicks” meme is both factually incorrect (not all trans women get bottom surgery, and bottom surgery doesn’t involve cutting things off), but also a favourite among both TERFs and regular transphobes, including MRAs.
TERFs, such as Br*nn*n and MRAs do hav a lot of overlap in both the company they choose to keep (partnering with right-wing organizations to push for anti-trans laws), and in their methods, including violent racism (seeing as most violence against trans people is against TWOC, and it’s unabashedly racist and white-supremacist to ignore that “only two genders” is not a cultural universal), focus on harassing women and minors, sexualized harassment, attempts to get vulnerable people fired, etc.
Raysa: While I do appreciate the sentiment, personal experience, and time spent with other trans people has shown amply that cis people in general are best safely assumed to be to some degree transphobic in a way that will hurt you at least a bit. Exceptions are lovely, but like sexism, racism, and all the other institutional -isms, it’s seeped into society. I hope things get better.
As far as the clerical error goes, our cat is technically classified as a puppy on his adoption papers, as they were out of “kitten” forms that day. He’s a very meow-y, purr-y tuxedo puppy, clearly.
[content warning: hypothetical sexual assault scenarios]
Even without assuming genital surgery, the logic is patently absurd. So you’re telling me that there are men turn their lives upside down, risk social stigma, risk losing their jobs, undergo hormone treatments, and voluntarily incur the wrath of wingnuts like Cathy Brennan for the privilege of…uhh…the magical key to the force field that keeps cis men out of women’s restrooms? I’m not sure what the TERFs imagine the upshot of this plan is. It’s not like a woman would get away away with sexually assaulting someone in a restroom any more than a man would. If you’re in the process of sexually assaulting somebody, whether or not you’re doing so in the right restroom is not what people are going to care about. What, you walk in on a woman molesting another woman and are like, “Oh, tally ho, don’t mind me, everything checks out, thought you were a man for a second!”
Also, even assuming the plan didn’t make less sense than selling snowcones to Santa Claus, I doubt many would-be rapists would opt for the rape plan they have to tell their mom about. It’s not like you can just be trans part-time or something…you kinda have to let your friends, family, and coworkers in on it too. (Unless you’re not planning as presenting as trans, of course, in which case the whole “presenting as a woman for admission to women’s restrooms” thing kinda goes out the window.)
As for the terrorist…while I wouldn’t deny any trans woman her right to groom however she pleases, when looking for cues that someone might identify as female I’d put GROWING A HUGE BUSHY BEARD pretty high on the “probably not” category.
“This. So this. It reminds me of the people who attempt to disown the nazis by claiming that they were all LGBT.”
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pink_Swastika”
That’s it. I need a bigger cat.
It is sort of amazing how quickly the commentariat here has moved to attacking transphobic women, none of whom actually were involved in spreading this particular rumour, as far as I can tell.
Like I’m not trying to criticise but it seems this happens a massive amount—men do something transphobic, someone brings up “TERFs” or whatever the latest acronym is, someone else objects, and within a short time the men and their actions are no longer even part of the discussion. So transphobia gets pinned on a small group of women—some of whom may not have even done very much—(I feel this happens all across the internet, worst of all is tumblr) and men are sort of let off the hook.
And let’s be real, men are the problem. Those guys in the screenshots above are the problem. The men murdering and assaulting trans women (and trans men!) are the problem—every assault on a trans person I’ve been able to find information about this year was committed by a man. The men writing transphobic jokes, lines and scenarios into their films, tv shows and novels are the problem—women don’t have that kind of cultural reach. The men who make and pass laws restricting trans people’s access to healthcare or whatever are the problem—again, basically all men. “TERFs”? There’s like… three of them, worldwide? And I can’t find any acts of transphobia from the majority except for calling trans women men?
I mean just speaking as a mtf-type trans person, when I hear transphobia from men it comes in the form of crude remarks, obscenities or death threats, and can cause me to fear for my safety. When I hear it from women it comes in the form of misgendering, and can cause me to fear… um… not much? Like I know what I am, a person calling me a man doesn’t change that. And I can confirm that what random male assholes yell at me out of car windows isn’t “man!”, so I’m kinda doubtful that they are being influenced in any way by the rather insular culture of radical feminists. (Maybe I should fear being outed, but I generally leave Dirt and her ilk alone, sort of like bears…)
Idk, just… focus on the guys. It was guys who invented the trope of trans women being serial killers and blood-crazed sociopaths and whatever (I mean there have been trans women serial killers, but afaik they all postdate the earliest depictions in novels and films), which these guys in turn are undoubtedly responding to because of semiconscious memories of men wearing women’s clothing whilst creepy music plays. And they think being trans is Bad because you’re deviating from your assigned gender role, same as with homosexuality and crossdressing and whatever. The way gender is set up, obviously, is for men’s benefit—though they view this as “equality” because of centuries of accumulated male entitlement—so any deviation from the norm is viewed as disprivileging men. Thus why they’re so eager to believe this is a trans woman instead of a man despite lack of proof, I suspect.
@invisible Mikey
“I won’t waste any more of your time trying to bridge this gap. I’m sorry we could not achieve a useful understanding of each other’s views. I still appreciate being made aware this bogus story is out there.”
If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think you were making a comment that “Women, and Trans men can’t be tall”, more making a, I dunno, off the cuff ‘Occam’s Razor’ observation about how unlikely it is for this person to be Trans because of his height. Which is a statement that can be read many ways.
The reason why you were attacked is because you made a statement about his mental health. This blog has a policy against making assumptions about a person’s mental health based on shitty behavior, because a).mental illness doesn’t cause misogyny and other prejudices, and b). the myth that mental illness causes violence results in mistreatment of the mentally ill. So, in conclusion, speculation about a person’s mental health are forbidden here.
This is written in the comment policy. Once you blatantly broke the rules, you were going to get much benefit of the doubt on anything else you wrote.
I’m also confused. Are these asshats claiming he’s a Trans man, or Trans woman?