Has a sentence ever felt like a knife at your throat?
Have you ever read a piece of news and dropped into freefall, the world blurring around you and your phone while your stomach sinks because what you’re seeing can’t be real?
Has someone written something so wrong that it makes your bile rise and your hands shake? That you didn’t know a person could contain enough malice and ignorance to even think those words, let alone type them out and hit “Send”?
If you’re on Twitter, you’ve felt this countless times. There’s a reason we call it the hell site!
But it’s human nature: When someone espouses beliefs we don’t just disagree with but cannot abide, it feels like a transgression. When cold, hard reality pierces our warm, cozy information bubble, it feels like a violation. We want nothing more than to push them away, shut them up—and that tends to be true no matter what kind of bubble you’re in.
But as real war rages on the other side of the world, tensions are escalating in our culture war—and there are already real casualties.
At the bottom of that stack is a man named Jeffrey Younger.
How did we get here? Well, anti-trans activists have been learning from their British counterparts. They’re leveraging lies about gender-affirming medical care (no, kids are not getting genital surgeries), lies about sports (no, trans girls are not ‘putting on dresses and winning gold medals’), and just plain lies to get their way.
Younger even told Goodman in his own words: