This tweet is a deliberate distortion—a falsification—of what the appellate court found. This was not a “trans panic” case in any ordinary sense of the term. The classic “trans panic” defense involves someone claiming that discovering the presumptive woman they've taken home is actually male provoked the ensuing violence. Whatever you think about such a defense, that isn't what happened here, and this ruling has done nothing to give anyone “impunity” to kill trans-identified people. The killer in this case had been in a two-year relationship with the trans-identified male he killed and knew his sex. He claimed self-defense—the man he shot was armed—but the jury rejected his claim and convicted him of voluntary manslaughter. But the trial judge had barred the defense from referring to the victim's sex, forcing everyone to go through an elaborate charade that the man who presented himself as a woman was in fact a woman throughout the trial. This included redacting crime-scene and autopsy photographs to conceal his male genitalia, and redacting the autopsy report to remove information establishing his sex. One aspect of the defense thereby rendered inadmissible was that the victim was a 5'11", 262-pound biological male—a fact inescapably germane to the defendant's assessment of the danger he faced in a violent confrontation. The appellate court found that the falsification of the victim's sex misled the jury into believing “a male defendant killed a female victim.” It called Lee's biological sex “relevant and full of probative value” to Ward's self-defense claim and held that its exclusion prejudiced Ward and prevented him from fully presenting his defense. Truthout's framing is par for the course in treatments of trans issues—as was the trial judge's elaborate falsification of reality. This is not incidental to trans inclusion but intrinsic to its present form: once a falsehood is granted standing as fact in language and law, ordinary institutional practices must be altered to accommodate it. Here that meant altering photographs, an autopsy report, testimony, and the vocabulary permitted in a criminal trial—and, according to the appellate court, misleading the jury in the process. Here it meant using references to a "trans panic"' defense that do not apply in reporting on the decision. Transgender inclusion always means corrupting ordinary standards of evidence to collude in the falsification of reality. Kudos to the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals for doing its part to contain this ongoing mania.