transphobia beyond Moore County

or, whose knowledge about violence do we value?

I had a lot of thoughts for this week’s newsletter—turns out the editor of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science is extremely racist, and people are freaking out about students cheating again for all the wrong reasons—but then someone(s) shot up power stations in Moore County, North Carolina at the same time a drag show was set to take place. This led to a predictable barrage of “don’t spread misinformation; we know nothing about why the attack took place” discourse, subconscious queer- and transphobia abounded among terrorism and extremism researchers, and I got very, very angry.

So, here we are: a rant about why you should believe queer and trans people, and why knowing something is not the same as knowing it.

I’m reminded of reactions to last year’s anti-Asian shooting at three spas and massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia. Experts immediately urged caution: we didn’t know the motive, it was insisted. Best not to speculate until we have more clarity. In some ways, this caution is welcome after years of assumptions that every act of violence must have been committed by a brown Muslim person. Remember how some news outlets originally speculated that Timothy McVeigh might have been a Muslim, before he was identified as a fixture of the white supremacist scene in the Midwest? Remember how two brown men were misidentified as the Boston Marathon bomber before the actual bombers were IDed? Yeah.

And yet, the lesson from this pattern—don’t be Islamophobic—somehow became “don’t make any assumptions and ignore all actual context clues.” And also, “law enforcement reports are the most authoritative source.” Let’s call this the doctrine of clarity. In response: I’m sorry, what. Did we not just have massive racial justice uprisings two years ago about police brutality and lies. (Worth noting that data sources such as the Global Terrorism Database use law enforcement reports as authoritative takes on who the perpetrators of attacks are, even if law enforcement are just doing what researchers are supposed to not be doing and speculating. This is just as problematic in the US as it is in places like Pakistan.)

Moore County, NC sheriff Ronnie Fields said yesterday that “we don’t have a clue why Moore County.” The doctrine of clarity demands we take this at face value. But, as it turns out, queer and trans people do have a clue. Trans activist Erin Reed has painstakingly catalogued how Libs of TikTok, the racist, antisemitic, queer- and transphobic Twitter account suspended and then reinstated under Elon Musk, directed her audience toward a drag show taking place in Southern Pines, North Carolina. It was called a grooming event. Followers posted pictures of bullets captioned “there is now a child molestation vaccine.”

This was on November 18. Tell me again we know nothing.

Back to Atlanta. Of course, it did eventually emerge that the Atlanta shooter was racist and misogynistic. But it was also obvious to any Asian person watching what had happened. In an environment of anti-Asian sentiment stoked by COVID anxieties and conspiracy theories, a shooting at Asian-run businesses, including one with “Asian” in the name (Young’s Asian Massage), in an industry stereotyped as Asian, was never going to be incidental. Even if it had come out that the shooter had not had specific racist beliefs and had chosen his targets seemingly at random, there is no randomness within broader societal discourses. A barrage of anti-Asian hate characterized the environment in which the shooter made this choice. That’s not random. That’s not incidental.

Whilst insistence that we wait for the facts about Moore County to emerge has been mostly that (“let’s wait,” presented in a calm tone), others have called those drawing links to between the attacks and clear anti-trans targeting of a drag show in North Carolina “irresponsible.” The sarcasm and dismissiveness oozes from tweets like this. I read them as both a queer person and a researcher of political violence in the United States, and I don’t lose my temper often, but if I were holding a glass right now, it’d be in pieces.

I don’t know what the hesitation is. Maybe it’s shock at the prospect that fascists would go as far as cutting off power for 70,000 people in the winter to stop a drag show. That is indeed horrific, and I can respect, to some degree, the sense of shock. Shock is healthy; shock means we don’t think this is normal. But shock is not the same as disbelief. Disbelief is a choice, and it’s a choice not to believe queer and trans people, who spend our entire lives facing varying levels of structural, everyday, and outright physical violence and so understand when we are being targeted because we have to in order to survive. It’s a choice to take analytical reactions, like Erin’s above, and invalidate them. It’s a choice to look at the onslaught of anti-queer and anti-trans violence within which the Moore County shooting happened, the frenzy of Libs of TikTok supporters targeting that area specifically, and go, “we have no idea why Moore County.”

I have a piece coming out for GNET later this week that will better explicate an actual systematic approach to not dismissing perspectives from targeted communities when analyzing political violence (hint: it boils down to “center the perspectives of targeted communities), but for now, I’ll just end with this: you may think dismissing queer and trans people’s interpretations of violence against us is necessary to uphold some standard of academic objectivity. You may also think your choice to do so is disconnected from the violence queer and trans people are facing. On both counts, you’d be wrong.