Thanks for this! It's illuminating. The the other day on Mastodon, one of my posts promoting the Prism & Pen weekly digest attracted an inordinate amount of attention from a right-wing person decrying supposed "transgenderism" in Olympic boxing. They were not, to put it mildly, amenable to my links to news stories to the contrary. They were so angry at trans people for existing that they just dripped with contempt.

This doesn't surprise me. I see that every day.

Then somebody kicked in to "defend" the Algerian boxer by claiming she's intersex. They even named a medical syndrome. When I asked, however, they had no credible source for their claim.

Fortunately, the server administrator deleted the subthread by the next morning, I suppose because of all the really hateful transphobia, but I was simply astonished by the whole episode, by the willingness of people to believe things merely because they want them to be true.