Cis Men Are Afraid Trans People Might Exist

A quick little note from the pages of Terrorism Today!

In the aftermath of the Apalachee High School shooting yesterday, shooter Colt Gray was arrested for multiple murders. His father Colin Gray, too, was arrested for providing the rifle used. (This of course follows the example set in the Oxford Township, Michigan case in which parents of murderer Ethan Robert Crumbley were themselves charged for their negligent contributions to the horror.)

CNN has a story up depicting what we know about Colt and his father so far, and it describes exactly what we should expect: Colin Gray was abusive, Colt experienced abusive bullying at school, and as a result Colt fantasized about being the powerful abuser instead of the powerless victim. Despite these fantasies, Colt remained quiet about his violent thoughts … except online, where he presumably thought they would be more acceptable.

The state investigated and even prosecuted the family and Colt’s parents (including mom Marcee) at several points. A civil investigation of the parents’ fitness led to Colin’s sole custody of Colt despite Colin’s explosive outbursts described by grandparents as constituting a long-lasting harmful environment:

According to Polhamus, Marcee Gray’s father, she lost custody of her children after failing a drug test, moved back in with her parents in south Georgia and is going through rehab.

Polhamus said he had never thought his grandson would be capable of such a deadly attack.

“I understand that Colt chose to do what he did, and I understand he has to pay for it,” he said. “But I’m telling you, the environment that he lived in… you put somebody in a situation like that for 10 or 11 years, guess what’s gonna happen? Nothing good.”

Colt was also investigated 15 months ago for what is presumed to be his writing on Discord. CNN quotes a Discord spokesperson an account on the social media app as “believed to be associated with” the boy who yesterday shot 13 people. The source of the account was traced and Colt questioned because of clear statements that the author intended to kill students at a school.

“im committing a mass shooting and im waiting a good 2-3 years,” stated the account user, according to screenshots included in an FBI incident report from May 2023 obtained by CNN. “I cant kill myself yet, cause I’m not contributing anything to culture I need to go out knowing I did.”

Later the author posted a picture of guns with the statement, “I’m ready.”

When questioned by the FBI Colt denied the account was his, an assertion that seems laughable now but at the time was all that was needed for the local sheriff’s office to close the case as “the user behind the Discord account that made the threat cannot be substantiated.”

What has all this to do with trans people? It’s not immediately clear, though trans communities are almost literally humming with fear this morning over a single vague paragraph in CNN’s story:

The account referenced Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter, and in separate posts shared a desire to target an elementary school and expressed frustration with the acceptance of transgender people.

Pervert Justice has explained before that cis people have a history of wanting to erase us entirely from the face of the earth. While there’s no information out as yet that any of the victims of Colt’s violence were themselves trans, it wouldn’t be unusual for media and authorities to treat transness as a shameful secret that one dare not release publicly unless triple checked and fully confirmed. At times, even when confirmed media stories will refuse to acknowledge trans lives and the violence against trans persons if a murdered or uncommunicative trans victim has family that hate trans people and transness. This is the state of “respect for the family” reporting, and as a result we can never fully trust reports that fail to mention a victim is trans.

Brooke Binkowski at Wonkette recently recently wrote “Misogyny Makes You Stupid.” (Her argument is worth the read, so go read it if you haven’t.) I have a thesis and it is this: Cissexism Even Moreso. Cissexism is in many ways a result of common sexism, but it is also the gateway to and enabler of the more extreme forms of sexism about which Binkowski wrote. As a result, cissexism is necessary because for even mildly sexist ideas to exist as coherent thoughts, there must be a clear distinction between men and women.

The entire premise of sexism is that men and women are different and separate — emphasis for the moment on “separate” — categories. (The “argument” of sexism, if you wish to credit it that far, is that one of these categories is better than the other.) For many people their sexism is moderated by knowing human women, who demonstrate what must seem to the sexist mind a remarkable competence at humaning, and human men, who at times demonstrate remarkable incompetence at the same. Cissexism is not moderated similarly.

Trans people and others who are gender non-conforming or even just perceived as trans are comparatively rare. This is, in part, because the sexist eye wants to believe that the categories man and women are distinct but together all-encompassing. From media reporting that doesn’t wish to cause more harm to grieving cissexists by telling true facts to more everyday elisions in which tall and short-haired must equal “man” — thoughtful analysis, phallus size and shape and even chromosomes be damned. And so whether a person knows no trans people or simply falsely believes that they know no trans people, a budding cissexist rarely needs to confront counter examples that would dispel stereotypes.

Take JK Rowling for example. (Please!) For her cissexist public statements, she received quite a bit of online hatred. But I have never tweeted at all, and even the majority of trans people who do tweet aren’t tweeting at Rowling, and even the ones tweeting at Rowling aren’t all read by Rowling. Instead there are some statements that Rowling likely has reasonable need to interact with — threats, for instance, might need her signature for a complaint to Scots law enforcement — while the vast, vast majority of trans people going about our lives are neither noticed nor noticeable, even if they do tweet about Rowling’s cissexism. Spaced so widely and living lives so frequently ordinary, our everyday experience need not be accounted in cissexist conceptions of trans existence.

While sexists must confront the women that they stereotype, it is much easier for cissexists never to encounter the realities of trans and gender non-conforming people. This creates more room for wild cissexist fantasies to breed. If you don’t know any trans children, then the idea — as stupid as it is — that those few who do exist somewhere outside your experience, exist as trans because of kidnappings conducted by school officials and surgeries performed without parental consent (much less notification) can remain an uncontested idea.

Trump can say such things and his followers can believe them because they don’t all have one or two trans people in their families telling them it’s bullshit. They don’t have the experience of chatting with their family members day after day about the barriers, the wait times, the disbelieving officials. They don’t personally witness the years-long process. As thoroughly demented as the idea of kidnapped-and-transified school children might be, if you don’t have any evidence in your own life of how transness happens, then you don’t have any way of actually refuting even demented ideas without, you know, doing work.

Cissexist gatherings, then, are a dog park for the hyperactive labs and greyhounds of conspiracies theories and laughable stereotypes. But gender is as gender barks, so they say. Once one’s conceptions of cissexist gender are unleashed, it isn’t long before that same person is licking up the most revolting of sexist vomit.

For reasons which should be obvious if you’ve read this far, meeting and knowing trans people interrupts this dynamic. But if you’re attached to your sexism, if being a man is part of what makes your life worth living, then destabilizing the category of man threatens to make life not worth living. For those people, the mere existence of trans people is something to be feared.

If the categories bleed into one another, there can be no clear superior group. Trans people cause just this bleeding into; in turn, cissexists are determined to cause trans people to bleed out.

We’ve long known that domestic violence and sexism are highly correlated with school shootings. With trans people more visible, trans existence is necessarily incorporated into school shooters’ justifications. Cissexists are afraid that, despite all their yelling about XY! and PENIS! and TESTOSTERONE!, trans people might actually exist. And with school shootings already focussed on making some people not exist, targeting trans kids makes cissexist sense.

It’s not surprising that the bigoted are more violent and that the violent are more bigoted. And it’s not surprising that if the focus of their bigotry is gender being cissexist is not enough. What good is being superior to trans people if you don’t know any trans people? The power fantasies of school shooters need others to be inferior. They invite sexist school shooters to create gendered tiers; while trans people might be at the bottom, in order to feel the thrill of power they need to set others below them as well, thus the categories women, men, and the elite “real men.”

Trans lives frustrate categorization and even existing categories. So no, Colt Gray’s anti-trans hatred, assuming that the account Discord says was associated with him was actually written by him, is not surprising.

It’s just terrifying.

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