Are Transgender People Stealing Hashtags From Minorities? (And Other Really Stupid Questions.)

In my last article, I briefly touched on a controversy regarding transgender people using the hashtag “SayHerName” in response to the murder of transgender woman Brianna Ghey. Naturally, I did nothing but make fun of this controversy — primarily because it’s extremely stupid. However, the nature of the article caused me to not really be able to fully express my issues with this scandal, which is quite a shame given it really deserves more attention as it is the perfect microcosm for a specific breed of Twitter warriors.

I already mentioned in the aforementioned piece that Jessie Earl was the person who got the ball rolling on this discussion. After Jessie said that transgender people should limit their mourning as to not be too similar to the mourning of others, many people got angry. As such, on 2/17/2023 Jessie tweeted the following:

The idea that I don’t care about the murder of a transgender teenager because I made a single tweet is not only disingenuous, it’s fucking gross. Do you know how much it hurts to see the face of a young kid who died. It guts me. It destroys me. So how dare you say I don’t care.

First off, Jessie didn’t make “a single tweet,” she wrote a thread of seven tweets. (By the way, this fiction that it was “a single tweet” is something Jessie has repeated several times during this controversy.) Second off, I can’t help but notice that she does the one thing that every person who’s being criticized for doing something which they, on some level, understand was shitty does — she leaves out exactly what this “single tweet” said. If Jessie had wrote about “The idea that I don’t care about the murder of a transgender teenager because I said transgender people need to be careful not to use certain hashtags while expressing outrage” then that would have been far more honest — and it would have made her look far worse. I firmly believe Jessie knows this, otherwise she would have stated that was the reason people were criticizing her in the tweet in question!

For that matter, I also want to point out that Jessie keeps saying she only started this fight on behalf of some black people who expressed this issue to her. I’ll ignore the fact that this does not inherently make the concern any more valid or logic — black people can be wrong on things too, remember — and instead ask a simple question: Okay, where are they? If Jessie is really trying to…