May 23rd, 2014. Elliot Rodger emails his 137-page autobiographical manifesto, My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger, to his parents, a few friends, and his therapist.
It begins as follows:
Humanity...All of my suffering in this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women. It has made me realize just how brutal and twisted humanity is as a species. All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life amongst humanity, but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.
Rodger had already stabbed his two roommates and their friend to death by the time he sent the email. So he drove to a sorority house on the University of California, Santa Barbara campus, and began killing the women who had been “incapable of seeing the value in him.” All told, Rodger killed six people and wounded fourteen others before turning his gun on himself.
The manifesto continued:
For the last eight years of my life, ever since I hit puberty, I've been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires all because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave their affection, and sex, and love to other men but never to me [...]
I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It's an injustice, a crime, because...I don't know what you don't see in me.
Rodger didn't hate these women because they'd slept with other men. He didn't hate them because they were beautiful. He hated them because they committed the greatest sin a woman can commit against a certain type of man.
They told him no.
If I were to ask you whether men like Elliot Rodger should be allowed into women's spaces, you'd probably say no.
You'd recognise the narcissism and misogyny that contaminates his thinking, the envy and entitlement that pervades his view of women, you'd sense that men capable of rhetoric like this shouldn't be trusted around anybody, let alone women locked in prisons or undressing in changing rooms.
But for a bewildering number of people, that would all change if he put on a dress and asked for new pronouns. After all, then he'd become a benign, feminine soul like “Hayley”, who posted the following on Reddit's MtF (male-to-female) board:
I'm so jealous whenever I see a beautiful woman flaunting her beauty and femininity I just want to hurt her I especially hate seeing little girls because they get to grow up as female while I had to grow up as a fucking boy this is why humanity is doomed people don't think about how growing up being told one thing but wanting the opposite will fuck up the child. They don't think, "What if they have a shit life?”
Or the charmingly named @pornbrokenchloe, who wrote this on Twitter:
I love seeing more trans girls embrace their misogyny. It's perfectly normal! Why should she get to be born a girl and not you? Her perfectly feminine body comes naturally to her, you have to work so hard to get anywhere close. She doesn't deserve it. Envy her. Hate her.
Every cute cis girl who has been nice to me since I transitioned? I've fantasised about smashing her head into a wall.
And last but not least, this nightmarish fantasy that I'm genuinely uncomfortable inflicting on you (if you're of a sensitive disposition, please, please skip this quote. I'm only including it because failing to highlight these people allows their enablers to pretend they don't exist):
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