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Prelude: The Nashville school shooting is definitely peak toxoplasma, a day later: people cheering everyone who entered that school with a gun, both the shooter and the police. Aidan/Audrey’s acts are a near-perfect scissor statement.
The statement on the shooting by the Trans Resistance Network is particularly toxically tribal. It hearkens back to the days of trying to sympathize with the Columbine shooters, where the narrative is shaped solely by early reporting and people were asking “What made them do it?”
Tangent: drag shows. But the use of the word “genocide” in the TRN’s statement made me stop and ponder: the modern term “genocide” includes not only the actual killing of group X, but also the halting of cultural practices as a lead-in to the eventual rounding up and killing.
Here’s an odd little dynamic: halting drag activities in children's spaces is trans genocide for both sides, but in different ways!
For pro-trans activists, halting them is halting a ritual cultural activity, and hints at a wider cultural desire for eventual trans elimination through murders of the outed and the suicides of the closeted. It also removes an avenue for trans youths to discover their true gender and thus leaves them in a spiral of depression heading toward suicide.
For social-contagion theorists, halting the drag activities in children’s spaces is useful for preventing cis children from being memetically contaminated, and thus memetically sterilizing the trans community. Reasoning: since full transition includes sterilization (thus committing traditional genocide upon themselves rather effectively), trans people don’t breed genetically, but memetically.
Kavanaugh was peak scissors/toxoplasma because there was an object level dispute about what happened. This is the 'everyone agrees shooting kids is bad but the cause is the thing that supports our desired policy and definitely not the thing that supports your desired policy' that happens every mass shooting. Throw in a dash of 'your militant rhetoric led to this' that we got with the Buffalo shooter and immigration, Gabbie Giffords and posters with crosshairs, and the Republican caucus shooter. The structure is identical the content is novel because trans people seem to commit mass shootings in rough proportion to their very small share of the population so there aren't many of them.
Trans Resistance Network has 500 twitter followers and no links to any external organizations in their profile, do they speak for anyone significant? It's kind of frustrating that the decline of mass-membership organizations means that we don't have a trans NOW or NAACP to present some sort of 'official stance of the trans community' on a variety of issues.
This is definitely a big issue. People calling themselves pro-trans are in the habit of claiming to speak for all trans people despite having no actual evidence of significant backing by the "trans community," and the rest of us are demanded to just take their word for it. Given that, even some apparently tiny "organization" like this Trans Resistance Network can claim to speak for the "trans community," and the rest of us are conditioned to just take their word for it. If there were some sort of meaningful gatekeeping by such activists to authenticate who can actually speak for the "trans community" by numbers or whatever, we wouldn't be here, but, well, here we are.
I don’t think big, gatekeeping orgs like the ADL or NAACP have a great reputation among outsiders.
Hell, the NRA has tried its hardest to position as the authoritative signal of gun advocates, and it’s not gone so well.
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