People Not Actually Being Stabbed Most Affected
And in always-respect-the-media news, we turn to the Crime pages of the Chicago Tribune:
Isa Noyola, transgender activist and Director of the Border Butterfly Project, pointed to the wider political climate and lack of violence prevention resources as an overarching reason the situation happened in the first place.
The situation, since you ask, was one in which Mr Kelly Day, a cross-dressing man, aged 32, stabbed to death a fifty-year-old stranger named Larry Young. Such was the vigour of the attack, Mr Young was stabbed no fewer than thirteen times – in the head, neck and shoulder – with the tip of the knife breaking off and remaining embedded in his skull.
Mr Young, the party being stabbed to death, was, one might conclude, rather more directly affected by the incident than some notional trans community.
Mr Young had apparently made some needless and unflattering comment about Mr Day’s non-female status, following which Mr Day became “extremely angry” and a quarrel ensued. Mr Young then pushed Mr Day “before walking away toward a nearby gas station across the street.”
Just to be sure, one assumes.
A suboptimal interaction, certainly, with no parties emerging as entirely fragrant. However, to frame the altercation as an illustration of “how quickly violence can affect the trans community” does seem rather bold. One might say misleading.
Following his fit of indignant stabbiness, Mr Day discarded the knife and fled the scene, before being arrested at Jackson Park Hospital, where he was requesting treatment for a cut on his finger, sustained during his attack of Mr Young, and which he claimed was the result of a cooking mishap.
Predictably, the Chicago Tribune refers to Mr Day, a man, as a woman, using the terms she and her, thereby adding to the confusion.
Via Wesley Yang.
Regarding said publication and its values, I’m just going to leave these here:
Think of them as data points in a psychological profile.
It bears repeating that the editors of the Atlantic were actively promoting the first linked article as a “must-read,” a measure of the magazine’s importance to the progressive lifestyle. As if it might leave the reader feeling sympathetic towards the author. As if she were someone with whom they would obviously identify.
A choice that seems rather more telling than intended. Given the colossal hypocrisy that unfolds, and the fact that the article, supposedly so inspiring and exemplary, so morally improving, is basically an ode to antisocial selfishness. To a degree one might regard as pathological.
Again, psychological profile.
I’d add that reading the Atlantic, or pretty much any ostentatiously progressive publication, isn’t just a matter of registering differing priorities or shades of emphasis one doesn’t entirely share. It isn’t just a case of, “Oh, we don’t quite agree on how much weight should be given to X as opposed to some other variable.”
There’s often a sense of perversity, of contrivance. Or, as in the “must read” article by Ms Gonzalez, of total moral inversion.