When the suspect in the Club Q mass shooting in Colorado Springs claimed, through his lawyers, that he was nonbinary, transphobes could barely contain their glee: No longer could those on the left accuse them of directly or indirectly inspiring the shooting with their hyperbolic transphobic rhetoric. The alleged shooter was trans — one of their own.
Now that the shooter has been charged with hate crimes for the shooting, his lawyers have quietly dropped the “nonbinary” claim, referring to their client as “he,” not “they,” at least according to a tweet by the podcast The Serfs.
But we shouldn’t forget the right-wing response to the original claim because it’s such a revealing example of the bad faith with which right-wingers approach virtually any discussion of trans issues. Just look at the headlines in right-wing media at the time.
“NBC Drops Colorado Shooting as Lefty Narrative CRUMBLES With Nonbinary Suspect,” declared Instapundit. “Non-Binary Murderer Ruins the Leftist Colorado Narrative,” Newsbusters proclaimed. Miranda Devine of the New York Post asserted that the “Colorado gay nightclub massacre shows Democrats’ hypocrisy.”
“For three days after the Colorado gay nightclub massacre, Democrats and their media allies smeared conservative opponents of drag queen groomer hour as ‘stochastic terrorists’ who are to blame for the tragedy,” she wrote.
Then, to their chagrin on Tuesday, the suspect’s lawyers filed court papers saying he identifies as nonbinary and uses the pronouns “they, them.”
Suddenly their right-wing homophobia narrative collapsed in a heap. … their haste to judge has left them with egg on their face.
Though it’s clear that none of the right-wingers crowing about the “nonbinary” claim believed it was true–Devine didn’t bother to change her pronoun for the shooter from “he”–they all professed to be shocked, shocked, when trans commenters called out the obvious bullshit of the “nonbinary” claim.
When a trans woman who was friends with one of the shooting victims said on CNN that she thought the nonbinary claim was “ludicrous,” the Gateway Pundit sniffed, “sounds like Natalee doesn’t agree with people being able to self-identify their genders or pronouns.” Meanwhile, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, professional transphobe and Daily Wire videoblogger Matt Walsh almost gleefully announced that those on the left weren’t “allowed to” challenge the shooting suspect’s apparent declaration “by the rules that you have set. And we’re going to hold you to them now.”
The reason trans and left people are “allowed” to do that, in this case, is that it makes absolutely no sense for someone who is nonbinary to shoot up an LGBTQ club. Whereas it is far more likely that the person who would do such a monstrous thing would lie about his gender identity to either try to wriggle out of hate crime charges or simply to troll. Because that’s how right-wingers — and right-wing shooters — do things these days. When we see bad-faith actors make bad-faith arguments every day, we expect it, whether they are transphobes like Matt Walsh or transphobes like the alleged shooter. We’re on to your utterly transparent bullshit.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
Not definitive, of course, but he seems more like the sort to troll by claiming to be trans.