When I first read that genderqueer activist Rain Dove was pepper sprayed by an anti-trans bigot for looking like a man in a public women’s restroom my first reaction was, no she wasn’t. Didn’t happen.
Rain Dove, I believe, made up a story, actually faked a hate crime, and succeeded in having her name placed in second rate news publications such as the Daily Mail. The story didn’t appear in more respectable outlets such as the New York Times, because those publications check sources and verify a story before it is published.
I’m sure the Times would like nothing more than to run such a juicy, click-baity blip, featuring a minor celebrity and the hot button issue of trans bathroom usage, but, as you will see, this story makes absolutely zero sense and was concocted by Rain Dove in a desperate, ill-conceived, sociopathic attempt at publicity.
A quick note: Dove prefers the pronoun they, as in this exert from Dove’s Wikipedia page: Born female, Dove lived their early years believing they were ugly. While not technically grammatically incorrect, this is also not grammatically ideal and I’m still not going to ever they when referring to an individual because it sounds forced and awkward. It has been formerly used only if the precise identity of the person is vague: such as If a child has a passport, they can fly on this airline.
When I hear a sentence start with Dove lived their early years I can’t tell if it’s more than one person or if it’s one person with multiple personality disorder. I keep picturing that scene from A Beautiful Mind where the crazy guy is walking down the street being trailed by a bunch of his demons. Two thousand years ago people started writing, and they needed a way to differentiate between an individual and a group of people, and pronouns were invented.
I’m not abandoning that longstanding tradition, encompassing all of world history, because of what Rain Dove, an annoying person who fakes hate crimes, prefers.
According to Rain Dove herself, and judging from my having looked at topless photos of Rain Dove in her underwear, Dove is a woman with a face that looks very manly. She looks very manly by nature, and Dove accentuates this manliness by cutting her hair short, not wearing makeup, wearing men’s clothes, and sticking her chin out like Quagmire whenever she poses for a photograph.
She’s an androgynous fashion model. It’s not a new thing, at all, and to state the obvious, nobody cares. 
Last week, Dove wrote an Instagram post detailing an assault she supposedly suffered while in a public bathroom. The story is beyond ludicrous and goes like this:
Dove was in the women’s bathroom when a woman, who was with her children, pepper sprayed her in the face, believing her to be a man. The woman then fetched a security guard to confront Dove, who was still in the bathroom washing the pepper spray out of her eyes. The woman then later somehow identified who Rain Dove is and messaged her on Instagram to berate her even more. (Dove released the exchanged between herself and the woman, but blurred out her name.) Dove responded to the woman calmly and rationally and explained the plight of non gender conformists and public bathrooms. Eventually Dove convinced the woman to change her ways, with the woman eventually conceding, “I feel dumb now.”
Right… Is this real life or the plot line of a Quebecian after school special?
Rain Dove is either brazenly empowered to a dangerous degree or really stupid. Or both. Here is her overview of the entire incident:
This person peppersprayed me in a “women’s restroom” a little bit ago,’ the caption explained. I didn’t get to converse with this being because this person just sprayed me and ran past with their kids in terror, asking the security guard to come in and confront me. I wasn’t even able to get the humans name because of the chaos and the washing. But it happens moderately often especially while traveling that people get scared or volatile when I go into the restroom so I just shrugged it off and continued life. Then suddenly out of the blue this person contacted me again. We had a conversation and here’s how it went.”
When Dove says “this person” she is referring to a screenshotted Instagram message thread between herself and an unnamed, unpictured woman.
All it would take to pull off this stunt is a burner Instagram account, which can be created in thirty seconds. It would take a subsequent ten minutes or so to impersonate the angry pepper sprayer, who I’ll hereby refer to as Pepper Bitch, and to then craft your responses to their messages. I’m not sure who wrote the messages from Pepper Bitch.
There’s a strong possibility it was Rain Dove herself, which is the scenario I like to believe, because there is something so quintessentially 2018 about a privileged white woman hoisting oppression upon themselves, sitting at a computer playing the character of oppressed and oppressor, and coming out the hero here to teach everyone a lesson, all over the platform of Instagram. A genderqueer person who is dating Rose McGowan. It’s perfect. Rain Dove and Pepper Bitch should be co-winnners of Time’s Person of the Year.
It could have been one of Rain Dove’s friends, the two of them lounging in an Airport Hilton, coked out of their minds, thinking this was a great idea. Who knows. The point is, as you will see, whoever wrote the part of Pepper Bitch is incredibly unskilled at writing dialogue.
Here is my breakdown of the preposterously fake exchange:
Pepper Bitch: Hola! I am the mother that maced you in the ladies room last week and I would do it again. I hope that pepper-spray burned the fuck out of you. I think it’s sick that you go into ladies rooms and you encourage others to do it on social media. Go to the 1 your ID says to! Keep you nastie dick away from us!
Hola? So they made Pepper Bitch latin? That’s kind of racist.
Now, let me get this straight, Pepper Bitch commits what amounts to a hate crime, yet gets away without being identified or subjected to a police report. (Even if Dove chose not to press charges, this assault could be pursued by whatever unnamed jurisdiction in which this took place, and a police report would likely be filed. By the way, if this actually happened, it would be irresponsible for Dove not to report this to the police, as this woman could be assaulting trans people like this on a regular basis.)
Having got away with it, Pepper Bitch, who is clearly not on the up and up as far as trans culture, somehow figures out who Rain Dove is, and locates her Instagram account.
How did that work exactly? Pepper Bitch sends out a mass text to her inner-circle: “Hey all, I just pepper sprayed some guy with tits in the bathroom and accused him of being a pervert who is after my children. Now that I’ve calmed down a bit, I have a sneaking suspicion it was actually just a manly looking woman. I’m going to reach out to them on Instagram and reveal my identity. Does anyone think it was possibly a genderqueer activist? Because from my perspective it was just a random stranger. Just in case, does anyone know of any genderqueer activists who it might have been? Maybe just send me a list of people who it would be really perfect for their Instagram brand if this happened to them. Thanks, Juanita.”
Rain Dove, sitting calmly at her desk, dignified, omnipotent, the bigger man, responds:
Rain Dove: Why hello there friend — I’m glad you reached out. I was so tied up washing out my eyes and talking to the security guard I didn’t get to say what I wanted to say before you left!’
Rain then sends a photo of her passport which identifies her as Female, or, as Dove prefers, Me Myself and I.
Pepper Bitch: Bt you dinnt look like one.
Rain Dove: Why would you say that?
Pepper Bitch: Idk. I was gunna say short hair but I guess you coulda been a person with cancer or meth addiction or just a dyke. I guess cuz your tall but I guess female basketball players are tall to. Your face though is really manly. That what did it for me the face.
Rain Dove: What I wanted to say to you before you left so quickly was that while you hurt me I still admire your bravery. You were protecting yourself against what you believed to be a tall cis man coming in to the restroom… With many warnings growing up about getting hurt or even raped in the bathroom by deviant men it’s easy to be brainwashed into thinking that anyone that is what society seems to be a penis-bearer will have negative or sexual intentions when in an intimate place. You did what you thought was right int he moment and that takes courage.
Okay. So, Rain Dove just referred to a public bathroom as an “intimate place.” Perhaps this is part of the problem with this whole trans bathroom issue. Certain people, on both sides, are making it way more of a thing than it is. Rain Dove, for example, appears to occasionally enjoy a nice glass of chardonnay by the hand dryers, which is likely what rubs strangers the wrong way.
Pepper Bitch: Dang. Does this happen often?’
Rain Dove: More than it should yes.
Yes, I am routinely pepper sprayed in public bathrooms. I’m beginning to think I might be the problem.
Suddenly, Pepper Bitch has an inexplicable change of heart, pivoting on a dime the way that only characters in poorly written fiction are apt to do. This is one of the bigger clues that this story is absolute bullshit. People who pepper spray trans people don’t change their minds. They have their minds made up, and, suffice to say, they feel very strongly about their opinion. Cue the string section:
Pepper Bitch: I’m sorry. It sounds like your the brave 1. Dang. I don’t get this trans stuff. What if next time it definitely is a men in the ladies room? How do I balance being fair and not judging with protecting myself and my kids?’
Yes, how do I do this? Does this woman write medical pamphlets as a profession? Nobody talks like that.
Rain Dove: Good question thanks for asking!’ That was my #2 point (pun not intended). First of all it’s great that you want to drop the judgement because there’s no way to “look like a girl” or a “boy”. Everyone just looks like themselves. So seeing them as an individual is really important and respectful. If you see them as an individual then you can assess them as an individual as well. Look at their actual actions as an individual, If a person is advancing on you, using inappropriate or threatening language, or brandishing their genitalia in a way that is not aimed at a toilet/urinal then act in a sensible way that’s self-protective. Otherwise, who cares if someone with the opposite genitals is in the room with you. It’s not like their splash back onto the toilet seat will impregnate you or give you an STD. And even if that were a concern no matter who’s been on the toilet I always recommend wiping it down before taking a squat.
This has been the social etiquette hour with Rain Dove. When you’re in a public bathroom, make sure and dress everyone down with your eyes. Maybe a brief questionnaire, or just shake hands and get to know them first. Also, if someone points their dick at you while masturbating in the Chili’s Ladies Room, make sure and exit the premises.
This is common sense, and could have been conveyed in two sentences, despite Dove’s professorial pedantry. Time for ACT III, in the dumbest movie of all time.
Pepper Bitch. I feel dumb now… I still don’t like trans people in the bathroom but I won’t mace anyone next time.
Well, I guess everyone learned… wait, what did we learn?
In a stunning display of ham-fisted bad writing, Dove further elaborates that herself and a “trans friend” have set up a Skype session with Pepper Bitch in order to further discuss these issues, and that “In exchange we are buying this person lunch via delivery.”
What in the ever loving fuck are you talking about, Rain Dove? Pepper Bitch is an unhinged lunatic who pepper sprayed you and is still adamantly anti-trans. She purports to have learned something from this discussion, but the only lesson I can see is that she will cease pepper spraying strangers in the bathroom. Based on her grammar skills and general backwoods ignorance regarding trans issues, this person isn’t interested in what you’re selling.
Why would she have any interest in continuing this discussion via Skype? Based on her general economic profile, does this even seem like the type of person who would have Skype, or have time for this shit? A likely single mother of multiple children, blocking off the day to discuss gender dysphoria? For a free lunch? What the fuck man!?!?
Dove ends the post on a few platitudes and that’s that.
You can either blindly choose to believe this story based on screenshots of an Instagram message exchange from a person of whom there is no concrete proof that they exist, or you can acknowledge the obvious, that Rain Dove needs material for her Instagram account, on which she posts advertisements of herself endorsing products by the way.
Rain Dove is dating Rose McGowan. She actually inserted herself into the Rose McGowan/Asia Argento saga, in which it became clear that Argento, a spokesperson for the #MeToo movement who claims to have been raped by Harvey Weinstein even though they had consensual sex several times after, had herself paid off an accuser of whom she was guilty of statutorily raping.
Dove was apparently the person who leaked Argento’s texts to McGowan, in which she admits to the rape and payoff.
This activist scene is a slimy culture comprised desperate individuals. What are the odds that this incident happened to Rain Dove, one of the people most closely associated with the issue? If you’re a huge fan of professional wrestling, you never just happen to meet Ric Flair in the bathroom, it’s just not the way the world works.
These people are trash. By inventing this narrative, Rain Dove is doing a disservice to any actual victims, because people are now suspicious that victims have an agenda.
Unfortunately, they’re right.
Either provide proof of this story or go away forever. If I am wrong, I will gladly accept a Skype session and a delivered lunch to talk about it.