A group of children at Lewis Park in the Courtenay-Comox area of British Columbia called a grown adult a man. The grown adult responded by hitting one of them.

Then went home and made a TikTok about it.

Leanne Lawson, a biological male who identifies as a transgender woman, posted a video recounting the incident with zero remorse: "They used words they weren't supposed to, and I smacked one of them upside the head." That's a direct quote.

The story didn't end with the assault. After striking the child, Lawson apparently gave a phone number to the kid's mother — then recorded a separate video taunting: "That's right, little man. I'm gonna f* your mom. That's right. I just gave your mom my phone number."

So the sequence is: an adult hits a child for using the wrong words, brags about it on social media, then sexually taunts the child on camera. And rather than delete the videos or issue an apology, Lawson posted follow-ups suggesting more of the same would happen if people continued to refer to Lawson as male.

The reflexive defense here is that children shouldn't use mean words. But the response to a child saying something rude is not assault followed by a TikTok victory lap and a crude sexual threat directed at the kid.

But this is what happens when an entire cultural apparatus spends a decade telling people that their identity is sacred and any challenge to it constitutes violence. Eventually someone decides that if words are violence, then actual violence is just self-defense. Lawson didn't snap in the heat of the moment and feel terrible about it later. Lawson planned a content strategy around it.

The videos are still circulating. The account that posted them gained followers. The algorithms rewarded the outrage. A person who openly admits to hitting a child and taunting that child with sexual language about the child's mother is, as of right now, facing no legal consequences and gaining a larger platform.