Alabama Mayor Kills Self After Right-Wing Blog Outs His Cross-Dressing

Haus@kbin.social to News@lemmy.world – 1217 points –
Alabama Mayor Kills Self After Right-Wing Blog Outs His Cross-Dressing
thedailybeast.com

Bubba Copeland shot himself in front of police on Friday, days after he begged 1819 News not to expose his private life.

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That's horrible, poor dude should just have lived his truth. Damn same he felt that this was the only way forward/out.

The missing part of the story involves him stocking a local woman, and writing erotic fiction about how he was going to murder her and taking over her life.

Also posting of pictures of children to porn sites.

https://1819news.com/news/item/to-say-i-was-a-stalker-would-be-a-bit-of-an-understatement-curvy-transgender-smiths-station-mayor-copeland-wrote-fiction-about-murdering-real-life-local-businesswoman-assuming-her-identity

It's a really weird situation. .. Here we have a conservative who is writing the kind crime novel that conservatives tend to write about trans people that utilizes a bunch of fairly stereotypical transphobic narratives that internally within the trans community would elicit disgust and ridicule and then appearing to act it out.

While it's possible they could have been trans themselves this feels a lot more like someone treating the conservative stereotype of trans people as a kink and acting on it. JK Rowling writes this kind of shlock the key difference being she, at least as far as we know, didn't write it as part of some sort of LARP. This person was in a complicated situation, even if they weren't trans they were caught doing things the right would look at as definitive evidence as trans and they likely had trans or trans ally commenters telling them that what they were doing was not okay. So you either have a trans hypocrite willing to set their own community on fire because of their subscription to conservative values and tropes or you have a rather stupid conservative secretly treating a trans psychokiller trope as their personal fetish or trying to use it to add realism to fuel their hobby of writing transphobic fiction and got caught by a community that is both extremely transphobic and equally not empathetic to it just being a kink.

For those who are claiming cognitive dissonance in the audience there are a few things at play.

  • Suicide is a tragedy. Many of us know what the impacts of that are on communities and loved ones. This person did some bad shit but not the sort of thing we would execute someone for doing. This is still a tragedy.

  • In a conservative run world being closeted and driven to suicide is a thing that has happened to generations of trans people who were not this person. It is okay to register that is not something we want to keep or return to. Feeling some empathy for trans people caught in this situation is normal.

  • We don't really know what this person's actual situation is but in absence of context they effectively died becoming the sort of bogeyman the right loves to spread. They effectively died making the trope seem more real.

  • Stalking isn't fucking cool. Neither is writing this kind of shit.

However you want to feel about this on the spectrum of "fuck this person in particular" to "that poor person, this shouldn't have happened" this all is valid. But it isn't hypocrisy, it's nuance and the right does not fucking understand nuance.