Christopher Cantwell, AKA The Crying Nazi, is back in the news with a video game he created. Because it wasn’t enough for him to be a white supremacist, he also designed a game that has players kill LGBTQ people in a nightclub. The armed players break into the “LGBTQ+ Agenda HQ” and shoot gay and transgender people. The club is decorated with CHILDREN WELCOME signage because the myth of pedophilia and homosexuality is one that just won’t die as easily as queer people do.
In a promotional ad for his game, which is called Angry Goy II, he wrote, “All White men should hunt down and mercilessly kill as many trannies, f—-ts, n—–s, k—s, and cucks as they possibly can, in the new hit game Angry Goy 2!”
He wrote this on the same site where the Tree of Life gunman posted anti-Semitic hatred before shooting up a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Cantwell does mention that killing people on the computer is a better alternative than “taking out your frustrations on actual human beings.” Sorry, you are still a homophobic and transphobic asshole, Chris.
The problem is that there are a lot of Christopher Cantwells out there who are ready to verbally and physically abuse, even kill members of the LGBTQ community, specifically those of us who identify as transgender and queer. It is painfully obvious how much work needs to be done.
We are currently in the middle of Transgender Awareness Week. Each year, the second week of November is used to educate people on the issues that transgender and nonbinary (when you don’t identify as male or female or you identify as both) people face on a daily basis. It’s a time to share stories of personal triumph and offer words of hope. But it’s also a week to share statistics and the dark reality for transgender folks. A recent study in Pediatrics reported that 50% of transgender boys, 41% of nonbinary youth, and 30% of transgender girls have also attempted suicide. And if these kids aren’t dying by suicide, they are dying by murder. One victim was 17 year-old Ally Steinfeld, a transgender teenager found dead in Texas County, Missouri.
I considered sparing you the graphic details of her death, but as we lead up to Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20th, I would be doing a disservice to the truth. Because the truth is that many people hate transgender people. They hate gender-nonconforming and nonbinary people like me. They hate us so much that they want to kill us. They want to put all of their anger, frustration, ignorance, and fear into justified murder. And in Ally’s case, her murderers gouged out her eyes and stabbed her body and her genitals repeatedly. That’s a lot of hate. Yet, the authorities wouldn’t call this a hate crime. They insisted the motive was NOT because of her gender identity. Sorry, fuckers, you are wrong and part of the problem. I am so, so sorry, Ally. You deserve to be remembered with so much more respect than this.
Yet, we are living in a country where the current administration wants to erase transgender and nonbinary lives by defining gender by our sexual anatomy. Science doesn’t work that way. Our gender identity is not determined by our genitals. When the two match, you are cisgender. When they don’t match, you may be intersex, transgender, or nonbinary. For those of us with brains and hearts that don’t line up with our parts, we can’t live in the gender assigned at birth based on what was between our legs. Many people don’t think we should be living at all.
Raising awareness is key, but we also need to be sure that transgender awareness is met with acceptance. We won’t accept the high numbers of death by suicide or murder, but we will keep telling those stories, too. There is a very ugly and dangerous side to living our truth, and the world needs to see it all.