Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

So I'm still a bit stuck on the whole thing where some far right fraudster made up a story about seeing "a man pretending to be a woman" in a famously trans exclusive spa in order to spark off nazi violence in the area. Both because it's horrible and still an active danger, but

also because it so perfectly illustrates how the sort of people who freak the hell out about trans people are always doing so as some sort of weird abstract thought exercise, when in reality they've never even seen one of us in the wild, at least knowingly.

Let's break this down

I'm assuming if you're reading this, you're up to speed on this incident. If you're not, go educate yourself on your own and come back.

The whole thing we can say, I'd hope, at this point, beyond a reasonable doubt, was completely staged. The woman freaking out was freaking out

over the presence of a person who did not actually exist, and was explicitly filming the whole lack of an incident in hopes of circulating it through far right channels and encouraging the violence we're currently seeing. Listening to her it's downright scripted and, again, she

went through with the whole thing without having a person to actually point her camera at, which is the whole thing that gave the game away (beyond the whole premise being a scenario that has never happened in reality, but boy will that crowd never shut up about imagining it).

Another thing that breaks down with the whole thing, if you're a normal person, is that the spa this little stunt was pulled in is one with a known advertised stance of being queer friendly in general and explicitly having some trans regulars.

As people keep pointing out, there

would be no problem if there were an actual trans woman there for her to film (other than her being there filming, of course). If you're just going to invent an imaginary person to object to the presence of, it'd be smarter to pull your stunt at a location that, as a policy, does

not cater to trans women, so your fictional example would be breaking rules of some sort.

The theory I'd like to put forth here though is that shouting about the presence of some totally imaginary person was not, in fact, plan A. Plan A was to find some actual trans woman at the

spa that day, baselessly accuse her of being some kind of weird sex pervert, and work towards getting her lynched over it. And this is pretty well supported by the resulting fascist crowd simultaneously trying to find any given person who was in her video to try and kill and also

claiming the first trans woman the found talking about the stunt was the phantom, doxxing her, sending her death threats, etc.

And the original plan falls apart, because despite presumably doing a fair bit of research to try and find a location where there was a chance of maybe

seeing a trans naked woman, she couldn't find one. And let's be real, if you're looking to find a trans woman without any clothes on, and your first instinct is to look into fancy spas, you are terminally out of touch with how we tend to live our lives and are clearly getting all

of your information about us from sources who just make up wild gibberish.

Which is generally true of all transphobes.

Like, the really active ones have probably run across a few of us NOW, as this has been an all-consuming fanatical witch hunt for them for years, and they can

no longer hold a single thought in their heads that isn't about hating us in some way, so they do things like crash pride marches and protests and such whenever they can. And there's at least like 1 or 2 in the mix who became hateful obsessives in response to their own children

coming out to them as trans and really picking the wrong online resources for advice on how to react to that, but otherwise I really doubt even one of these people could point to one single trans woman they knew in their day to day life before they joined a raving cult and seeing

who's suddenly avoiding them.

Like, I personally have a bunch of obsessed weirdos stalking me, specifically, who I'm not sure have even once set foot in the western hemisphere. I can tell you for a fact that Graham Linehan saw something of mine making the rounds while bored on

twitter one day, started stalking me on the assumption I was some hot little 20-something or whatever, and then had a violent reaction when some 4chan troll showed him a picture of "Sailor Bubba" or whoever else it is nazis keep in that thread these days and said it was me. It's

an anecdote he relates on far right podcasts when asked how he ended up on their side.

And if you're paying attention to some of their other BS, editorials in newspapers, letters to heads of state, etc. a huge present concern they all have is that "sissy hypno porn" is real, and

otherwise cis heterosexual men keep accidentally stumbling across it on youtube, with the swirling pink spirals actually taking over their minds and turning them into trans women. That's an absolutely hilarious case of not being able to tell the difference between reality and

fantasy, but the reason they got it into their heads as a real thing is, again, none of them know one single actual true fact about trans women, and they just end up doing a bunch of porn searches looking for new things to be terrified of. I'd list a bunch of other examples off,

but I'm not really inclined to register for a pornhub account or whatever to do the research.

Hell, the whole scenario this woman here was hoping to capture, based on how she puts things, is a recreation of the sort of editorial cartoon bigots pass around where there's some big

burly man wearing a ridiculous dress and peeing in the urinals that the cartoonist believes are installed in women's rest rooms.

And I dunno, it's just totally wild to me that these people are pumped up enough to be doing stuff like stabbing strangers in the streets, lobbying

lawmakers, and boycotting businesses because they're just completely scared shitless by the very existence of a minority whose members they're so collectively unfamiliar with they couldn't even provide a crude sketch of what any of us actually even look like.

And again, this is

not at all unique to transphobia. There have been studies showing how racism is most prevalent in all-white areas. The standard issue misogynist shut-in nerd is always genuinely shocked to learn women actually play videogames and watch Star Wars movies and such, never having had

the chance or inclination to look into how we actually spend our time.

Universally, scratch a raving bigot and some weird damn shutin who gets all their information on what human beings are actually like from second-hand sources bleeds.