I understand that change is hard and that for many people transgender issues are confusing. (I’m not sure why, exactly, it’s not like it’s new. I knew transgender people back in the 70s…) The apparently desire among the right wing to cause harm to transgender people, ostracize them, discriminate against them — especially those who have turned it into a culture war crusade for cynical political purposes — is making me sick. And the fact that they feel the need to lie about constantly tells you everything you need to know:
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 thecity 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 greaterSan Diego, according to local disinformation researcherand 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.
“The QAnon-friendly crowd and their adjacent groups have been demonizing trans people and throwing around the ‘pedo’ and ‘groomer’ labels for years now,” Binkowski said.
Little is known about Phillipsand her own politics, and neither she nor her parents could be reached for comment. Her father works as a retirement consultant while her mother, Susanna Hodge, is a Christian blogger and homeschools her six children. Her LinkedIn lists her as a director for a Christian homeschooling company.
Whatever the details of the teen’s own ideology, it took virtually no time at all for extremists to latch onto her.
The day after Phillips spoke at city hall, a screen recording of her comments appeared on the Instagram page for SanteeParents4Choice, a group that emerged in the thick of the pandemic in opposition to masking requirements in Santee schools. Tracie Thill, the group’s founder and a former special education aide in the Santee School District who says she was fired for refusing to adhere to the district’s COVID testing policy, ran a failed campaign for school board in 2022.
SanteeParents4Choice held a rally in front of the YMCA on Jan. 18 that was reportedly attended by a range of actors outside the group, including right-wing and far-right locals. The YMCA closed early as a safety precaution after receiving threats—threats that have rippled to locations across the country, according to Shelly McTighe-Rippengale, the group’s executive vice president for San Diego County.
“Our YMCA and our staff continue to be the target of credible threats, negative attention, and electronic attacks simply for serving our mission and obeying state law,” she said in an email to The Daily Beast.
Thill could not be reached for comment.
A local news stationthat has been linked to the right, KUSI, picked up the story a day after SanteeParents4Choice, running it online with the headline “Santee YMCA allows naked man to use women’s locker room with underage girls.” In a television segment, KUSI brought on Carrie Prejean-Boller, a former Miss California USA who first obtained political notoriety when she came out against gay marriage in the televised finals of the 2009 Miss USA competition. In 2021, she received attention for appearing at a local school board meeting to decry mask mandates, declare the pandemic over, and threaten to run for school board (she did not).
Prejean-Boller praised Phillips as a “hero” for sharing her story.
Phillips herself also appeared on KUSI, this time expanding the scope of her attack against the YMCA to its gender-inclusive policies for sleepaway camps. (According to the San Diego YMCA policy, sleeping arrangements and group assignments should “reflect each child’s identified gender” and staff will “not disclose information regarding a camper’s identity without their express consent.”)
In quick succession, the story traveled from KUSI to the New York Post and Daily Mail. A game of telephone played out in the process, with Mail, OAN, and The Daily Wire reporting that Phillips had seen a penis in the locker room. But Phillips herself had said in her city council comments only that she had seen a “naked male.” On local TV, she got a bit more specific, saying that she “did not see the man’s front side.”
Get ready for the kicker:
In fact, it would have been impossible for the teenager to see a penis, because Wood underwent gender-affirming surgery in 2016.
What terrified this teenager so much about seeing the backside of this woman in a locker room is something she’ll have to take up with a therapist, but the idea that everyone assumed she’d been flashed with a penis tells you all you need to know. They are looking for excuses to act like cruel bigots, which they clearly are by nature, and trans people are easy targets. It breaks my heart to see it.
There’s more on this story at the link if you can bear to read it.