Beyond Selidor

YES THIS. In this case, they only think they did wrong because it turned out to have been written by a trans woman. If it was written by anyone else, they would believe their actions to be totally justified. There's absolutely a tendency to believe that people can "deserve" any kind of ugliness at all so long as they're the wrong kind of person.

k, because so many people in this community rely on contextual clues about the author (demographics, who their friends are on Twitter, who's promoting their story) to actually interpret the author's work, rather than the work itself

This is fascinating. I hadn't thought of it in those terms, but that's so clearly true.