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A Trans Pilot Was Falsely Blamed for a Plane Crash. Now She’s Fighting the Right-Wing Disinfo Machine
National Guard pilot Jo Ellis is suing a right-wing influencer for falsely blaming her for a DC crash that killed 67 people. A WIRED review reveals 12 similar incidents of scapegoating trans people.
“A transgender Blackhawk helicopter pilot for the military wrote a long letter about ‘Gender Dysphoria’ and depression 1 day before the fatal crash!” read a since-deleted post on X by right-wing influencer Matt Wallace, who has 2.3 million followers. “Whenever there’s a school shooting or a mass tragedy, if I search for that along with the city name and the word trans, I will get pretty immediate hits on that,” said Grace Abels, an LGBTQ fact-checker with PolitiFact, who has been tracking transgender-related mis- and disinformation and debunking it for two years. One of the early instances our review found of a trans person being falsely blamed for a tragedy happened after the May 2022 Uvalde school shooting, during which a male gunman killed 19 children and two adults.
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