Hours after the tragic Uvalde Shooting, dangerous rumors began to circulate online that the shooter, Salvador Ramos, was transgender. These falsehoods led to online harassment of trans people and to an assault on a trans teen in Texas. But these acts of virtual and physical hate violence don’t happen in a vacuum. There is an active and vibrant ecosystem on the Internet that is designed to weaponize beliefs about our community, and exploit actual tragedies, in order to create support for pushing trans people out of public life entirely. We wanted to understand this underreported part of the Anti-Trans Hate-Machine, its dark, unseen underbelly. Imara Jones sits down with Sydney Bauer to unpack it all.

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