Mick Hartley

The latest from Reduxx. It's a tragic tale of a poor trans woman hounded to death by cruel right-wing jibes. Well, that's the story that won a Pulitzer Prize for Esquire magazine.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

Announcing the reception of the prestigious award on May 5, Esquire described their article, written by Mark Warren, as an “extraordinary, deeply moving account” of the “beloved” cross-dressing Alabama mayor Copeland, who “took his own life after a right-wing news website exposed private online activities he’d engaged in that involved transgender role play.”

“With great sensitivity, Warren, an author and a former longtime editor at Esquire, interviewed scores of Copeland’s friends, family, townspeople, and fellow congregants in order to render a heartbreaking account of the man’s final days, and to portray the full scope of the visceral, grief-stricken, perhaps counterintuitive response of a small southern town in all its rich complexity,” said the Esquire editorial team in their statement.

“In so doing, he illuminates how very much was lost when Copeland was driven to despair. The story explores themes of immediate, even urgent relevance: our evolving norms of gender and sexual difference, the brutal culture wars that have us tearing at one another often without thought or regard, the profound effect of social media on our lives, and the astonishing power of the Internet.”

But that's not quite the whole story. The guy was into "bimbofication" – expressing arousal and enjoyment at the thought of being reduced to a feminine sexual object for male use.  He promoted the use of feminising hormones for men to become "whores". He stole women's identities, even writing a story about killing a (named) local woman and taking her place. Read the whole piece – and the earlier Reduxx article – for more of the sordid details.

But hey, trans. Hero, right? Got to be.