Member-only story

Transphobes Are Extra Mad About Online Aggression

Because they’ve never talked to real trans people

Tucker Lieberman
5 min readJun 2, 2023
Detail of lion fangs
Lion by Ian Lindsay from Pixabay

Online transphobes make inflammatory statements. Trans people often reply. Many platforms implicitly reward such interactions, and many people feel encouraged to engage in them, especially when they can be anonymous.

Occasionally, some people reply to bigotry and discrimination with violent imagery. Generally speaking, this is unfortunate. The whole situation is unfortunate.

On the internet, you can find an example of anything. Sometimes it’s a real threat, but more likely it’s not, especially if a marginalized person wants a larger bully to leave them alone. The person who replies aggressively may be a teenager, or they may be deceptively false-flagging, or they may be a keyboard warrior who would never have lit such a match on the actual soil under the actual sky.

In Reply to a Transphobe, May I Post a Lion? A Kitten?

In this section, I’m addressing myself to teenagers who might be reading, or to the teenagers the rest of us once were: our inner teenagers.

One trope of the transphobes is: Look how violent the trans people are! All I did to this one trans person was tell them in 10 different ways that they shouldn’t

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Tucker Lieberman
Tucker Lieberman

Written by Tucker Lieberman

Cult classic. Author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time." Editor for Prism & Pen and Identity Current. tuckerlieberman.com

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