As the face of militant trans activism, I feel more than qualified to speak on right-wing zealotry. Since my first doxxing in 2017, I have been consistently subject to an unquantifiable amount of online harassment, from faceless accounts making racist edits of my selfies, to being physically threatened in the comments of an Instagram post for being “homophobic” because “women like you” shouldn’t be “using a gay slur that doesn’t belong to you.” Excuse me? I’m a socialist first, and a transsexual faggot second, so remember that next time you plop down in front of your computer to make a funny little comment. It better hurt!

Unfortunately, the internet has a stranglehold over the politics of most people, exemplified in the recent hoax regarding litter boxes being placed in school bathrooms. Charming, how we use mass media to provide amplification of this horseshit. It doesn’t take much looking to realize the crux of the issue: it’s another case of gullible people reading misinformation on the internet, taking it at face value, and spewing it into the real world without much forethought. It’s a pattern that has been rampant in the last six years, especially within the realm of bathroom politics. 

As touched upon in Evan Robins’ “Trans Day of Not Having a Place To Piss,” bathroom politics revolve around the political gatekeeping of transgender people from using bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding to their gender identity. Within the United States, there has been a long saga of litigious efforts to police trans people and gender nonconformity through a variety of means, mostly through legislative channels at various levels of government. With a vicious culture war at its centre, this effort is seen as an attempt to restrict the ability of trans people to enter and use public spaces in a safe manner, and the result has not only affected us, but people who don’t visually conform to gender norms, with stories of even cisgendered people being harassed in public restrooms circulating the web.

With our shared media hegemony, cultural osmosis between the U.S. and Canada is inevitable, with pieces of this issue floating through the psyche of our best and brightest. This hoax is no exception: first peddled by American Republicans and their pundits, we now see even the Peterborough Examiner covering this, with letters being sent to Renfrew newspapers about the hoax, urging the Renfrew County District School Board and the Renfrew County Catholic District School Board to release a joint statement online.

It’s not a reach to say that this type of misinformation is another cog in the machine to facilitate right-wing “anti-wokeness.” Most receive a majority of their news from historically unreliable sources, like Facebook and Twitter, where very little is done on those companies’ end to assuage campaigns of misinformation. An Ottawa Citizen article cites a Facebook comment claiming that “we have (litter boxes) in schools in Peterborough,” and “if (students) want to act like this, they should learn to clean their own kitty box.” Within this framework, when schools allow trans people to use washrooms in schools, they must allow furries to use litter boxes, because furries and transgenders are one and the same! To someone with a piecemeal perspective on this issue, this would make sense, because “liberalized” schools are fronts for brainwashing students into transgenderism and identifying as animals, since there is no other outside influence shaping young minds. 

The level of misinformation surrounding the nature of trans people’s lives hurts the effort to normalize gender variance. There have been numerous hoaxes in the past decade that have grabbed hold of the public conscience that explicitly make trans people look deranged or unreasonable in their standard state. It’s important for us as consumers to critically interrogate these scandals for what they are: lies that intentionally smear a marginalized group, and manufacture consent to legislate them into oblivion.