A transgender activist from Florida is drawing national attention this week over a tweetstorm she initiated when she suggested that straight men “should try to work through” their “[exclusion] of trans women partners.”
Jones’s channel, which focuses on transgender issues and discusses her research on various transgender topics, first drew national attention when she appeared on CNN in 2013 to offer her views on “the importance of access to treatment for trans inmates like Chelsea Manning,” the former U.S. Army private whose court-martial conviction and subsequent imprisonment was commuted by President Barack Obama near the end of his last term in office.
Jones noted on social media that she turned down an invitation to appear on Carlson’s show. Jones claimed Carlson uses his show for trolling, and to specifically “trash random twitterers for talking about girld–k.”
She subsequently set up a donation page:
The series of tweets that caught the eye of conservative sites like TheBlaze and LifeSite were actually posted on July 1. At one point Jones opined that “nobody has to be with anyone they don’t want,” adding that it’s “O.K. to have a baseline social norm of treating trans women as the women they are,” but also claimed in a follow-up tweet that “these angry declarations that they have some absolute right to not want to be with trans women are just misplaced and inappropriate.”
Jones continued by claiming that straight men resort to “transphobia” to combat their suppressed attraction to transgender women, adding that male genitalia is a “part of her body,” and ultimately concluding that genitalia is “just flesh” and that men “can probably deal with it.”
(Editor’s note — post edited for content)
Father Mark Hodges, founder and pastor of the St. Stephen Orthodox Church in Lima, Ohio, critiqued Jones’s claims in a post that appeared on LifeSite.com.
Jones noticed the post and responded to Hodges via social media, with another user proceeding to body-shame Hodges:
(Editor’s note — post edited for content)
Hodges in his post refused to refer to Jones as a woman, and appeared to attempt to psychoanalyze Jones.
“Of course, I don’t know him personally, but he has made a name for himself by entering the public arena as an ‘expert,’ so I think it’s fair to critically evaluate what he purports to be universal truth,” he wrote about Jones. “I think this man, like so many, is simply desperate for love.
“He’s actually very self-revealing and admirably bold enough to become vulnerable. In a more honest mood, Jones admitted his ‘depersonalization’.”
Others on social media appear to have been inspired by Jones’s opinions:
