“This really lit a fire under my ass today.” So wrote Naugatuck, Conn. resident Aimée Toms in a post on Facebook that has gone viral.
What lit this uncomfortable-sounding fire was a purported run-in with a female customer in a Walmart bathroom who, Toms claims, told her “you are not supposed to be here, you need to leave.”
In a video posted by Toms that has also gone viral, she explains:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
I realized when I was washing my hands, ‘holy s**t she just thought I was somebody who was transgender.
This mistake, according to Toms, was in part a function of her pixie haircut (which, nota bene, she wears short because she donates her locks to cancer patients — what a gal!).
The story has appeared in every liberal publication you can shake a fist at. An article in New York’s Daily News begins, “Even cisgender people aren’t safe from the transphobic mania over bathrooms.” Mother Jones, to its credit, exercises more restraint in its lede, even going so far as to acknowledge that Toms’s assertion is only an allegation. None of the accounts, included Toms’s own, suggest there was anyone else in the bathroom who can verify her story.
Wherein lies the problem. Unless you’ve spent the last several years in hibernation, you can’t help but have noticed the many hoaxes perpetrated to advance one cause or another and almost entirely by liberals. That includes a recent bogus report of another bathroom humiliation, this one in Durham, N.C. (aka, Bathroom Central).
The problem with Toms’s story is that it is too perfect. Not only was she mistaken for transgender in a bathroom but a bathroom in a Walmart, the retail giant that recently declared its customer can use the facility of their choice. What a coincidence.
Then there is Toms’s passion for trans rights expressed in the aforementioned video. As you watch this, you almost find yourself wondering why she wasn’t proud to be mistaken.
So will Toms’s story turn out to be an invention? Probably. But even if it’s true, there is another takeaway worth emphasizing. That is that reactions like that of the woman who allegedly railed out at Tom are borne not necessarily of “transphobia” but apprehension over a policy that encourages an invasion of the right to privacy of non-transgendered Americans. If this was genuinely a false positive, it won’t be the last.
