Military pilot Jo Ellis said she had to hire private armed security for her family because of the false claims, which went viral on social media.

Military pilot Jo Ellis said she had to hire private armed security for her family because of the false claims, which went viral on social media.

A transgender military pilot filed a defamation lawsuit Wednesday against a conservative influencer who falsely claimed on social media that she was flying the helicopter that collided with a commercial jet near Reagan National Airport in January, killing 67 people.

“I want to hold this person accountable for what they did to me,” Jo Ellis, a pilot who has served more than 15 years in the Virginia Army National Guard, said in a statement to NBC News. “It’s become too common that people can say horrible things about someone, profit at their expense, and get away with it.”

On Jan. 30, less than 24 hours after the crash, conservative influencer Matt Wallace, who has 2.2 million followers on the social media platform X, shared a post from another account he operates stating that the helicopter pilot was transgender, according to the lawsuit. Wallace included a photo of Ellis, and the post went viral, the lawsuit states.

  • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
    8·
    2 days ago

    For the better part of 30 years I have used a non-gendered language when possible. I was elated to find that “they” was originally, 13th century, a single pronoun instead of plural. I have probably used “one” way more times than is healthy.

    ~30 years ago I was living in/near Hillcrest, San Diego. Gay, trans, drag and everything else. I was online and people’s genders were frequently unknown. In 1993 we already had the issues that On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.. Now we have AI which has no gender pronoun, I’m voting for “hal”.

    Point is that avoiding gendering text has been and will continue to be the safer option for general purpose writing. Some people will get bent out of shape that you didn’t use gender specific language because the Narcissism of Small Differences means they must see you as the enemy even if you agree with them on 99% of things. Trying to have a generally non-discriminatory pronoun policy? That’s a paddling. Your good intentions must be stopped because they aren’t pure enough.

    It sucks. Instead of focusing on the slander used by hate speech and the remediation sought by the one who was wronged we are totally lost in the weeds and focused on if we used the right three letters because avoiding the wrong three wasn’t enough. It’s thought police with the best of intentions but it’s still thought police.

    • Diva (she/her)@lemmy.ml
      65·
      2 days ago

      Point is that avoiding gendering text has been and will continue to be the safer option for general purpose writing.

      I do the same, but if someone’s gender is known it’s really not hard to use one of their preferred pronouns.

      I don’t think that’s being the ‘thought police’ and it’s certainly not something to focus on instead of hate speech, we can do both.

      • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
        61·
        2 days ago

        And figuring out their preferred pronouns isn’t always easy. Can you trust the news source to have gotten it right? You end up getting stalkerish and seeing if they have made a public statement on their pronouns and you have to make sure it’s current because gender can be fluid and maybe it changed since the story broke. And do you need to go revise your previous posts and comments to update the current status? Or do you go with evergreen and neutral because you definitely don’t want someone digging through your history and seeing something different from whatever is current and then jumping on the cancel wagon without checking the calendar to see if it was appropriate at the time.

        This isn’t as simple as a lot of people want it to be. Going neutral isn’t a slight. It’s not misgendering. It’s a way to avoid accidentally making an error even with the best of intentions.

        My old roommate was trans. They went through multiple gender identities before settling on that. And every post I made mentioning them is still clean because I went with the gender neutral before they had ever made their first change.