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.
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Matt Walsh’s head is so far up his butt his hairline is practically touching his spinal cord.
called it (among many others). He just wanted the kid glove treatment, either to drop the hate crime charges, or to get mollycoddled like a lot of these fools think trans people have the world handed to us. And when it didn’t get him what he wanted, he dropped the charade.
It should stated sexual minorities can be on the far right and do terrible things because of their ideology.
Ex. Blaire white. Dave Rubin. Formerly Milo. Fuentes.
There are make Christian hate-preachers who railed against the existence of gay people and found giving a blow job in men’s bathrooms.
The right should know this since they recognize white liberals can hate white people.
The only people I know of who said he was “nonbinary” are his P.D.s. I’m not aware of any record of him saying it publicly himself. So I have had my doubts.
Just an ahead, not all enbies identify as trans. Please don’t assume we all are. That said, the bullshit was so obvious that nobody should be shocked to learn it’s bullshit. Still, even gay people can commit hate crimes against other gay people, and religious shits definitely commit hate crimes against other religious people (which everyone I know on the left knows full well), so the only hypocricy lies, once again, with the right here.
They are so driven by their insecurity and hate, that they will make up any narrative that gets them out of the consequences of their actions.
I expect these hateful wankers will probably keep referring to him as ‘they/them’ and claim he was pressured to change his pronouns or some shit when they are corrected. Truth never mattered to them.
And yes, minorities can be guilty of horrendous shit. Just like everybody else. I don’t think anyone is denying that, except in the fevered imagination of these jackasses.
I don’t know that anyone has argued you should always take everyone’s word for it, no matter what. We know there are bad-faith actors. It’s more that you should trust by default and not give people unnecessary trouble as long as they’re not causing any. I’d say opening fire in a crowded bar more than exhausts any expectation of a presumption of good faith.
Similarly, the hypothetical that a boy could abruptly identify as a girl during gym class to get in the girls’ locker room uncontested has never been anything more than bad-faith nonsense that only happens in people’s fevered imaginations. That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works!
Same thing with #MeToo, come to think of it. It was never “always believe all accusations all the time regardless of evidence”, but more that you should never begin from the assumption that it never happened, and should give people the support they most likely need when they most need it.
Either way, expressing skepticism of claims that can’t hold up to any scrutiny is neither hypocritical nor a gotcha moment.
Even if this person actually is non-binary, it doesn’t prove what these assholes want it to prove. They want to believe that transphobia and homophobia and biphobia and enbyphobia don’t exist and it’s all us creating our own problems. However, their black-and-white worldview doesn’t allow for the fact that even if you are LGBTQI+ you can still hate your own groups. It also doesn’t take away all the other crimes that have been committed against us. Even if this person is non-binary, it doesn’t take away the fact that LGBTQI+ people face a very high rate of violence and discrimination from society.
It’s like they think crimes committed by members of our group take away all the crimes committed against us by cis-hetero LGBTQI+phobes. They seem to think that along with this being a ‘gotcha’ (it’s not), it’s some kind of ‘get out of jail free’ card for them (which it’s also not).
I wonder if someone finally explained the definition, and consequences, of perjury to him.
I mean I would have been totally cool using they/them pronouns, as in “they are a scumbag, and I hope they get a very long prison sentence.”
@Mediocrites: I wouldn’t be surprised.
Everyone but the GQP knew he was lying when he said that — glad now it’s known.
He’s a mass murderer; why should we believe anything he says?
@Chris: I think possibly his beard might be touching his spinal cord.
@kWhatsit: “a boy could abruptly identify as a girl during gym class to get in the girls’ locker room uncontested has never been anything more than” a fevered projection of the fantasy of gross Republican men.
If a nonbinary person is already full of self-loathing and is then further infused with it by transphobes, it makes sense for them to lash out at other lgbtq people. People externalize their own self-hate and take it out on others all the time.
It takes a special kind of gall to whine about being called stochastic terrorists while engaging in stochastic terrorism all in one sentence.
And in today’s WTF weird nonsense from overgrown children bitter that they aren’t awarded a fuck slave by default for becoming an adult male and convinced that it’s because of some gibberish biological imperative instead of their staunch refusal to work on their shitty personalities: https://www.reddit.com/r/NotHowGirlsWork/comments/zfi3aa/women_only_feel_platonic_or_sonmother_vibes_with/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
@Trying
Why would the nonbinary person be full of self-loathing particularly? And as KMB mentioned not all enbies are trans and thus may not be especially targeted by transphobia. Given the full context of this discussion, are you implying that you do believe that the Colorado shooter is non-binary?
non binary isn’t real until you can use it to distract people from the facts, and the fact is that the right likes what happened and wants more of it to happen.
next step is to double down and claim it was a false flag and the right is being demonized with it
(to clarify, _i_ know that non binary people are real and their existence is a fact, the people using this lie as a distraction generally reject this fact)
@ Yutolia the Laissez-Fairy Pronoun Boner
“It’s like they think crimes committed by members of our group take away all the crimes committed against us by cis-hetero LGBTQI+phobes. They seem to think that along with this being a ‘gotcha’ (it’s not), it’s some kind of ‘get out of jail free’ card for them (which it’s also not).”
That’s EXACTLY what they seem to think. Just like they play the”what about black on black crime?” argument whenever a police officer encounters a person of color going about their day and “fears for his life”, as though that excuses lethal force at a traffic stop when they handle a horrifying number of mass shooters with friggin kid gloves.
@Mediocrites:
I don’t suppose it occurred to them that even if short women actually do have a strong preference for dating tall men, the reason might be wholly pragmatic? After all, if they end up cohabiting, someone will need to be able to reach the higher kitchen shelves …
@Surplus to Requirements:
I don’t suppose it occurred to them that even if short women actually do have a strong preference for dating tall men, the reason might be wholly pragmatic? After all, if they end up cohabiting, someone will need to be able to reach the higher kitchen shelves …
I’m reminded of a long tall drink of Kenyan (about seven feet) who used to work the floor at a local Walmart; customers would notice him, stop in their tracks, and straightaway make a beeline in his direction, and he knew full well why.
@Big Titty Demon,
I am nonbinary and I don’t call myself trans. Call it enbyphobia then.
Why might an enby be full of self loathing? Because their society/church/family instilled it in them.
I don’t know if the shooter is nonbinary. I’d rather hear it from them and not their lawyer. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were just a transphobic cis person on a murder spree; I’m just wary of misgendering them.
@ Surplus
I think you, and I, and pretty much anyone else in this comment section who even glanced at that tirade have probably already put more thought into it than the guy who wrote it did.
@Surplus: The Mr. is a few inches taller than me and has very long arms. It’s useful. But the guy I went steady with in high school was half an inch taller, and that was fine too. (He was nice and a great kisser)
Our next-door neighbors at one point were a hulking 6’2″ Slavic former football player, and his maybe 5 foot former cheerleader wife. He did a lot of reaching. She had a lot of stepladders.
Given what we know of this shooter’s family and upbringing, I really don’t think he’d ever get to a point where he could understand what “nonbinary” is, or ever admit it to himself or anyone else in his life. So it’s really not at all relevant whether he now claims to be nonbinary — the fact remains that he was raised in a dreadfully messed-up family/church/social environment steeped in bigotry and hate, and was told that violence solves problems. THAT’S what caused him to go out of his way to shoot up a gay bar, and his (half-assedly alleged but probably never provable) enby status doesn’t make our prevailing right-wing culture of hate and scapegoating any less responsible for outcomes like this.