By Chuck Campbell of the Knoxville News Sentinel

Trae Crowder zigged when you thought he would zag.

The self-proclaimed "liberal redneck" from Knoxville entered the fray of debate about public-restroom use by transgender people this week, and in the process he turned the image of the bigoted redneck upside-down and became an improbable ally to the LGBT community.

See his video (WARNING: Profanity and language some may find objectable)

Crowder, 30, posted a video to his Facebook account Wednesday afternoon, and 48 hours later the video had passed 13.8 million views and climbing by the minute. In the video, the shirtless, baseball-cap-wearing West Knoxvillian is temperamental, employing his deep, rural Tennessee accent to say he's "fired-up, son." Yet just when viewers might have expected a stereotypical transgender-bashing, Crowder goes in the opposite direction.

"What do you think is going to happen?" by letting transgender people use their restrooms of choice, he asks in an incredulous tone. "You do know that transgender people have existed forever, right? What bathrooms you think they've been using?" He dismisses the notion of sexual predators using the guise of transgenderism to prey on children in restrooms, especially "not with their mouth-breathin' troglodyte daddy 12 feet outside the door just dyin' to punch somethin' different. It don't make no sense."

Crowder continues: "You're freaked out, the thought of a man wantin' to be a woman disgusts you … because you lack the capacity to understand it." He goes on to say the next generation is growing up "to be more open-minded, and that's happenin' whether you like it or not."

The not-safe-for-work video is replete with expletives as Crowder makes his point.

Crowder, a part-time comedian for the last five years who has two preschool boys with his wife, Katie, says the video only took about five minutes to record and 20 minutes to edit, though he had put in quite a bit of forethought to decide what he was going to say.

"I wanted to let people know that they have friends in places they might not expect," Crowder said Friday afternoon, "and to also show my more stereotypical fellow Southerners that if (other) people acted the way they act but said things they didn't like, they probably wouldn't take too kindly to that. … I wanted to give them a taste of their own medicine."

Crowder moved to Knoxville in 2010, having grown up in rural Clay County near the Kentucky border. He said that of all the responses he gets, the ones that anger him most are "the ones accusing me of faking the whole thing or faking the accent. … I grew up rough as hell in the backwoods of this state, so anybody that wants to question my 'red cred' is barking up the wrong damn tree."

He admits that he generally isn't as aggressive with his opinions in his day-to-day life, but what he expresses in his videos "are my beliefs."

"I voted for Obama twice," he says, adding he's been "a lifelong advocate for LGBT rights and am not religious at all. So the 'liberal' part (of 'liberal redneck') is fully accurate too," Crowder said.

He said some of his favorite responses to the video have come from, "actual trans people and other members of the LGBT community saying how much it means to them to hear someone like me taking up for them after all they've been through," and also, "other born-and-bred liberal Southerners telling me how much they appreciate me showing other people we're not just a bunch of inbred hicks down here."

The latest video wasn't his first. In another recent Crowder video post, he blasts a that would have designated the Bible as the state book of Tennessee.

In that video he warns that those who try to proselytize to his children are "gonna have trouble out of me, you can believe that. And if this offends anybody, I don't give really a damn because I'm tired of not being able to stand up for what I believe down here in the South." He concludes by blasting rednecks for wanting an official book anyway: "Don't act like y'uns read. Y'uns don't read."

Although the Tennessee legislature passed the Bible bill earlier this month, Gov. Bill Haslam vetoed it, and the state House of Representatives refused to override his veto on Wednesday.

The viral response to the transgender video has been "surreal. Utterly. My head is spinning for sure," Crowder said, adding that 95 percent of the reactions "have been extremely supportive."

What will he do next?

"Buddy ask me next week," Crowder said. "I'm still reeling at the moment."

Then he promised, "there will definitely be more videos, though. That much is for sure."