When New York magazine published an investigative report that found Republican Representative Nancy Mace had engaged in abusive, alcoholic, and inappropriate behavior with her staff, it came as no surprise to me. She had gone down a very familiar path with a completely foreseeable ending familiar to most transgender observers who have followed the arc of numerous transphobes over the years. It also wasn’t surprising that New York magazine made no mention of her obsession with transgender people as a sign of her downward spiral.
The pattern goes like this: Someone famous who thinks they’re untouchable says a bunch of nasty, aggressively anti-transgender things. Back in the early-to-mid 2010s it might get you fired, but since then it has been normalized to the point where there are zero consequences, and even quite a few benefits. Riley Gaines, a swimmer famous for inveighing against trans athletes, is making almost half a million dollars per year off of tying for fifth place, and Dave Chappelle was handsomely rewarded by Netflix and Saudi Arabia after his transphobic stand-up routine.
Most of the public shrugs off these episodes and moves on: The Overton window on transgender people has shifted to the point where people openly discuss whether they should have their guns taken away, be forcibly institutionalized, or eradicated from public life. But later, people who decided to angrily obsess over transgender people inevitably find new targets. They either say horribly racist things, fall apart mentally, expose themselves as a nasty piece of work in other ways, or some combination of all three.
When Mace did a sudden turn on transgender people in 2024, I could clearly see what was coming. It wasn’t performative: No one posts nasty things on X about transgender people 326 times in 72 hours without being more than a little obsessive in an unhealthy way. Mace led the charge to ban transgender people from bathrooms on federal property, singling out Democratic Representative Sarah McBride of Delaware, even though McBride has her own private bathroom in her office (as do all members of Congress). Over time, Mace’s frequent tirades about transgender people became increasingly vituperative and unhinged.
This was a well-trodden path from celebrity to nasty crank. Roseanne Barr said anti-trans things in her 2011 book and didn’t back down from them when confronted. When ABC was considering whether to reboot Barr’s TV show in 2018, GLAAD reportedly presented the network with 27 pages of anti-trans quotes by Barr. The network went ahead and did it anyway and then had to cancel the show after she went on to tweet racist things. In the years that followed, she became a full-blown conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter.
Former Major League Baseball player Kurt Schilling was fired from ESPN for making anti-transgender comments in 2016. At the time there was some criticism about “cancel culture.” However, Schilling went on to make comments so racist that even Breitbart fired him. Schilling had previously compared Muslims to Nazis. Later, he went on to make statements that appeared to endorse lynching journalists and expressed support for the insurrectionists of January 6. Then, in September 2023, Schilling reposted an antisemitic tweet that referenced the “Jewish Question” and “Jews in leading roles.”
Elon Musk has gone down a similar path of quirky-but-admired techno-bro weirdo to the world’s richest person, who is obsessed with eradicating people who have zero effect on his day-to-day life. His obsession with trans people started around 2020, when he tweeted, “Pronouns suck.” Following backlash, he addressed the issue, claiming to support trans people while calling pronouns an “aesthetic nightmare.”
After his daughter, who is transgender, legally changed her name and severed ties with him in 2022, Musk increased his anti-trans rhetoric. This included declaring cisgender a slur in June 2023. By 2024, he was openly declaring that “the woke mind virus killed my son” and “the woke mind virus must die” and blamed his child’s transition for his push into conservative politics. During the 2024 presidential election, he was the funding source behind much of the $220 million worth of attack ads aimed at transgender people.
Thus it came as no surprise to me when Musk started promoting “great replacement” nonsense and antisemitic conspiracy theories. His obsession with transgender people, and hatred thereof, was seemingly the path to the dark side.
Chappelle has spent a decade mocking trans people and claiming to be the victim, when he suffers absolutely no repercussions whatsoever. But the truth that he’s just an awful person manifested itself when he accepted a boatload of money from the royal family of Saudi Arabia to perform there, and whined, “It’s easier to talk here than it is in America.” Which exposes either his ignorance or his inflated sense of grievance. For the record, both homosexuality and criticizing the royal family are punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.
Chapelle didn’t mention Jamal Khashoggi during his routine, either. In 2021, a declassified U.S. intelligence report concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the operation to capture or kill Khashoggi. Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a team of agents, some of whom were linked to the Rapid Intervention Force that answers directly to MBS. Reports indicate his body was dismembered with a bone saw and disposed of in a drum of acid. Khashoggi’s “crime” was writing an article for The Washington Post that was critical of the regime. Apparently, according to Chappelle, what trans people do in the United States is more egregious that having your critics murdered, chopped into little bits, and dissolved.
The list goes on and on, but the story is the same. Important person says horrible things about trans people, society shrugs or doesn’t notice, and important person suffers no real consequences but gets free publicity and the adulation of others who similarly hate transgender people. The media takes no notice because this sort of nastiness has become mainstream. Then, obsessed, the unhealthy famous person does other things that are just as bad but don’t involve transgender people, and the media notices.
So, if you want to know which famous person is likely to step over another line that society takes more seriously, look for people who are already viciously obsessed with transgender people and are getting away with it. I’m looking at you, J.K.
