“Not today motherf**ker!”: Kelly Herron's Battle Cry Against Anti-Transgender Hate Bill

Earlier this month, Kelly Herron went out for a run near Seattle and, well, in her own words, this happened:

“My biggest running nightmare became reality- 4 miles into my long run Sunday afternoon, I stopped to use the restroom and was assaulted by a man hiding in a stall ... I fought for my life screaming ("Not today, M**F**er!"), clawing his face, punching back, and desperately trying to escape his grip- never giving up. I was able to lock him in the bathroom until police arrived. Thankfully I just took a self-defense class offered at my work and utilized all of it. My face is stitched, my body is bruised, but my spirit is intact.”

“Not today motherf**ker!” Kelly calls it her “battle cry” now and she’s using it again, to slap back at an anti-transgender group called Just Want Privacy who began using her story—of a woman being assaulted by a man—to campaign for a bathroom bill—Bill I-1552—even though what happened to Kelly Herron has nothing to do with transgender persons. It has to do with men raping women.

So Kelly is speaking out:

“To the people behind I-1552, I say ‘not today, motherf**kers.’ I refuse to allow anyone to use me and my horrific sexual assault to cause harm and discrimination to others.”

Kelly first learned that this group of haters was using her picture and story on their Just Want Privacy Facebook; it seemed to suggest that, had there been a law barring transgender people from using the bathroom that matches their gender identity page, Kelly never would have been attacked.

This is a lie; again, this was a man, dressed as a man, who slithered into a women’s bathroom for the purposes of raping a woman; it has absolutely nothing to do with transgender people.

Although Kelly Herron had already gotten her story out to the news media—as a warning to other women to be careful of rapists hiding in bathrooms—she felt the need to speak out again to stop Just Want Privacy from using her assault to promote a Hate Bill.

“I just about lost my mind. I was more upset than I’d been all week to learn that this political campaign was using my name, image, and story to raise funds and further their agenda towards a cause I do not support.”

The sickening folks at Just Want Privacy used Kelly’s story twice: on March 9, four days after the was assault, the group sent an email to subscribers with a post-attack picture of Kelly’s face and the caption:

“Each week yields new stories of deviant men who found ways to access female’s vulnerable spaces in order to exploit them.”

Just Want Privacy then posted those same pictures to Facebook with a caption urging support for I-1552, a bill that would overturn the state’s non-discrimination protections for transgender people, override certain sections of local non-discrimination ordinances, and require schools to regulate restroom use by birth-assigned gender.

Just Want Privacy—founded by Joseph Backholm, president of the Family Policy Institute of Washington—failed to get enough signatures for a similar ballot initiative last year, but failed to do so. This year they’re trying to use lies to push their hate agenda.

After Kelly Herron took her story of Just Want Privacy to the media, her pictures were quietly removed from the group’s Facebook page. The group then issued a statement saying that they “would welcome the opportunity to apologize to her in person if she would like to reach out to us or provide a way for us to reach her.”

Um, Just Want Privacy? May I call you that or will Hateful Bigots be okay? Kelly Herron wants nothing to do with you; you took an assault by a man who snuck into a ladies room as a man in order to rape a woman and tried to turn it into some kind of transgender persons are deviants cause.

And it isn’t; it’s a man raping a woman; try working against that cause and let transgender persons use the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity because, and it bears repeating, they just want to pee.

Rapists use the bathrooms rape; trans people use the bathroom to pee.

Get it queer.

The Daily Beast