Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

So my whole thread today has been people talking about how monstrously transphobic Linehan and Singal are, and I would kind of appreciate it if people stopped that.

When you name someone's prejudice in that way, you're making the central issue one of motivation. Did this jerk do

this thing for a bigoted reason, or for some other reason? And it's generally implied with the framing that if they did not do the thing for bigoted reasons, it is OK that they did the thing.

So you know, when someone fires someone for coming out as trans? Yeah, it's important

there to prove that they were motivated by bigotry, because that's a pretty horrific reason to take someone's job away, and there generally isn't a consequence to firing someone normally because the rest of the standard reasons are like, they were bad at their job and such.

And we have a lot of conversations about racist murdering cops, because the fiction we've all bought into is that if a cop isn't a racist and fatally shoots someone, they were taking the only possible action to stop a dangerous criminal.

But you'll notice when there's a general

agreement that someone just straight up committed an unprovoked act of murder, even when it was for clearly bigoted reasons, you don't generally see people prosecute it as a hate crime, because again, then we're suddenly talking about the why not the whether and the murder gets

set aside. And this isn't just some weird legal thing, people really do think that way. Suddenly we're judging someone's character, and in a court of opinion, hey, there's always this huge popupation never believing the straight white cis guy is some sort of bigot no matter how

strong the case.

And in particular, when it comes to transphobia, there has been a massively successful effort to paint all trans people as sensitive little crybabies who throw a fit when you use the wrong pronoun or whatever, and that is definitely in people's heads when they

hear the word "transphobic" causing plenty of people to assume whatever you're talking about must be trivial. And frankly, the best examples you can give are Linehan and Singal here. If people didn't just roll their eyes because of all their targets being trans, I'm pretty damn

sure both of these creeps would be in prison by now.

Let's please start talking about the actual things they do and not why they do them.

We've got some weird stalker creep poking around nazi websites looking for old family photos of the women he's stalking, going on talk shows

to body shame the hell out of his targets and speculate out loud about their masturbation habits, and he's also out there gathering petitions to get children's charities shut down because he believes bonkers Pizzagate style conspiracy theories he picked up on far right message

boards and thinks they're corrupting children somehow, and shouting "pedophile" at random college professors, not because he has any meaningful accusations along those lines, but because he wants to give nazis cover stories for trying to kill them.

And then in this other corner,

we've got this weird freak who seems to be convinced he's dating every woman he ever talks to, and the minute he's upset with one of us he starts acting like the villain from some bad '90s thriller, throwing around blackmail, threatening employers with frivolous lawsuits if they

don't fire his targets, and literally organizing conspiracies to keep anyone who might speak up against this blackballed out of the media. And that's not even getting into the fact that he's a violent far-right thug who gleefully sics hoards of nazis on people he doesn't like on

the regular, nor his long history of securing himself "science writer" gigs which he uses to write defense pieces for someone in hot water for sexually abusing children, and insisting to his critics that the science is on his side by linking to what is literally a pro-pedophile

blog. And that's not even getting into him being the author of far-right propaganda that gets cited in court cases to enable discriminatory laws.

Please focus on all that when you're talking about these two. And talk about it much more loudly, until someone actually listens.