Once again the Republicans have stolen the thunder of a stunning and brave trans womxn. By thrusting the story of a stabbing in Charlotte into the spotlight when some of us were still contextualizing the shooting in Minneapolis, they have denied Robin Westmxn her humanity—just for being who she was.
So let’s take a look at what happened in Charlotte in order to get it out of the way and thereby return to holding space for Robin. The attention that’s been given to the unaliving of a Ukrainian “refugee” on a commuter train proves once more how systemic racism dictates the news coverage. As if a white person can be a refugee. The correct-thinking media had the integrity not to mention this story until the fascists decided it somehow reflected a societal crisis based on statistics. It just feels like national attention is always on the deaths of white people. Think about it. Can anyone honestly, off the top of their head, name a single black person who died, say, during a confrontation with the police? All we get instead is Nicole Brown Simpson, Lakin Riley, and now Iryna Zarutska, who let’s be honest was blonder than Sydney Sweeney.
For DeCarlos DeJuan Brown Jr., travelling on light-rail must have been triggering. This is often the case when you are a justice-impacted individual with fourteen arrests for domestic violence, breaking and entering, and robbery with a dangerous weapon. He was also living with schizophrenia, so being enclosed by a compartment of public transport probably reminded him of the threat of institutionalization. Whether or not he said, “I got that white girl,” as he walked away is irrelevant. If he did, what he meant was, “I hated her for her whiteness,” which let me remind you is not racist.
The whole misunderstanding reminds me of the time I heard a black trans womxn tell the crowd that had assembled in Washington Square Park to celebrate her and her sisters, “To all of our allies, we say ‘fuck you’. We don’t want allies, we want co-conspirators.” I could sense that some of the whiteys were confused so I explained to them how when a trans person says “fuck you” they don’t mean it the way others do. It’s more like an invitation to embrace joy and recognise sex workers as healers. When we listen to trans people we learn as much from their strategies of inclusion as we do from their mystical superiority to cis people.
In the spirit of educating you, it seems useful to mention another queer wonder before re-centering Robin. I’m talking of course of Emma Corrin. I was at Charles de Gaulle recently where there were Miu Miu fragrance ads of them throughout Terminal B. I have always been amazed at Corrin’s ability as a nonbinary performer to play the roles of cis women. I don’t know how they do it. But what impressed me about the campaign was how they spritzed themself and then, via an overlaid clip, smelled their neck and leaned in to kiss themself. The whole thing was so true to the trans and nonbinary experience, whether you are a Gothic nonbinary black womxn or an intersectional crusader who broke through the temporal boundaries of the Trans Day of Vengeance and brought it into the rest of the year. Like Miutine, the trans mystique is irreverent, youthful, rebellious, and focused exclusively on itself.
Robin naturally had these qualities in spades. Through her use of a unique and youthful quasi-Cyrillic script in her journal and manifesto, she shared irreverently how she wanted to kill Trump and be the “big scary horrible monster standing over those kids” at Annunciation Catholic School. She playfully planned what she would wear to shatter the stained glass of the chapel and chose a series of rebellious words to inscribe on her ammo. These include “Suck on this”, “Extra thick Jew gas”, “Israel must fall”, and “Fuck everything that you stand for”.
Unsurprisingly everything Robin stood for has been misconstrued. She’s been accused of having mental health issues and of wanting to detransition. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mental health issues are to be applauded not derided. They are themselves a superpower, a way of resisting and dismantling ableism. So if she did have them, blesséd be the fruit. And if she didn’t, fuck you in both the trans and the non-trans senses of the phrase.
Another response to Robin’s vengeance spree has been to point out that not all trans people have mental health issues, and not all trans people are violent. When it helps garner sympathy, we like to amplify the rates of suicidal ideation and cite common comorbidities, but that does not give gender-critical Nazis the right to suggest causality or that “underlying issues” might influence someone having a defiantly gendered soul. When you are born in the wrong body you may think, feel, and plan any number of things that may or may not be related to other endarkened feminist phenomenological modalities of self.
So indeed, not all trans people have mental health issues but my more sophisticated point is that not all trans shooters do. Sometimes a trans shooter is just expressing her inner monster. Sometimes a kinky antizionist girl needs to take a stand against the violence of Christian prayer. And sometimes the interlocking systems of oppression are as likely to cause a trans womxn to enact her resistance against the compartments of institutionalism as they are to cause a DeCarlos DeJuan to free public transport from systemic whiteness.
In both the Minneapolis and the Charlotte case, the motive remains a mystery. One thing I’m sure of is that crime is a human right. Only some people are enlightened and compassionate enough to know this.
Wow, I am so used to talking to idiotic liberals and progressives that it took a while to even realize you were being sarcastic.
This is beyond dark sarcasm; it's Swiftian.