Content warning: the following contains discussion of death threats and transphobic violence.
If you’re having bad self-esteem this week, just remind yourself that although things may be bad, at least you didn’t write a rambling, violent manifesto about graphically murdering transgender women. Unless you’re lesbian ex-porn star Lily Cade, in which case I cordially invite you to get the hell off this website, because what is actually wrong with you?
After being granted a platform to explain why “trans women are pressuring lesbians into sex” on the BBC last week, Cade published a series of screeds to her professional website (which has since been taken offline) decrying trans people as “satanic” members of a “pedophile cult,” and calling for specific trans women to be killed.
The bulk of the manifesto is contained in three lengthy posts, detailing a paranoid worldview in which trans people are the mentally ill byproducts of pornography and the internet’s “endless scroll;” trans women are men who have surrendered to their “shadow selves” and are sadistically preying on young, cis girls; and trans men are “ignorant dupes” who “desecrate” the womanly life they were granted at birth.
“Why haven’t you killed these people?” Cade demanded in her final post. “Why haven’t you killed the addiction that has made them your Lords and Masters?”
All of the preceding, of course, is merely justification for Cade’s violent rhetoric. One post calls specifically for like-minded people to “lynch” Caitlyn Jenner, the Wachowski sisters, MMA fighter Fallon Fox, and weightlifter Laurel Hubbard. And should nobody else step up to kill them, Cade writes, “I’d execute every last one of them personally.” (Also deserving of sexual assault and death by hanging, per Cade, is TLC reality star Jazz Jennings’ mother.)
Backlash online was swift, with many noting that Cade’s tone and content read much like that of a mass shooter’s manifesto. It’s important to directly condemn Cade’s screed, and to point out how ridiculous it is to be lectured about sexual assault by a woman who has herself been accused of sexual assault. (Responding to those allegations, Cade wrote on October 31, “If a rapist is someone who is accused in public of sexual assault, then I am a rapist,” as Gay Times reported.)
