17-Year-Old's Locker Room Freakout Became Anti-Trans Crusade
On Jan. 11, 17-year-old Rebecca Phillips approached the lectern at a sparsely attended city council meeting in Santee, a suburb of San Diego, California. No item on the agenda brought her to city hall that night. Instead, she tearfully recounted how a local YMCA had followed state law and company policy by allowing a transgender woman to use the same locker room that she did. She had no contact with the woman and claimed only to have seen her, but the experience left her “terrified,” she said.
From there, a symbiotic network of local and national right-wing media began passing the story upwards, catapulting Phillips to the airwaves of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight in just six days. But while Phillips earned the adulation of a constellation of conservative and far-right actors—including a former politician himself accused of sexual misconduct in public bathrooms—the subject of her outburst became a national target.
Christynne Lili Wrene Wood, a 66-year-old Navy veteran and retired civil servant, had just returned home from a trip to Palm Springs when a friend from her beloved aqua aerobics class sent her a video on Instagram of Phillips speaking at the city council.
“I just started crying and crying and shaking,” she told The Daily Beast. “I’m neither Sigmund Freud nor Carl Jung; I don’t know what evil pathology drives that. But there’s always got to be that convenient boogeyman. There’s always gonna be that ‘other’ that threatens ‘us.’”
If drag shows have been one focus of recent extremist rage at the LGBTQ community, it appears as if YMCAs may be emerging as a new proving ground for right-wing culture warriors. If so, the story of Rebecca Phillips points to just how swiftly that process can take off.
Phillips’ comments galvanized an existing network of right wing and far-right groups in greater San Diego, according to local disinformation researcher and journalist Brooke Binkowski. “There’s a very strong streak of far-right ideology here that has been here for generations,” she told The Daily Beast.
Santee specifically has an established reputation of extremism, earning it the moniker “Klantee.” The city has tried multiple times over the years to rehabilitate its image, most recently after news coverage of a man shopping at a local Vons wearing a Klan-style hood followed by a separate incident of a Santee Food 4 Less customer wearing a swastika face mask.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-a-santee-california-ymca-locker-room-freakout-became-an-anti-trans-crusade?ref=home
Story is even crazier and more horrifying if you read it all the way through.
= new reply since forum marked as read
