I think John is banking on his followers' assumptions that everywhere in Mississippi is a backwater one-horse town where the sudden reappearance of a gangling brickhon suddenly gets the whole town talking. (I mean, that part might be true to an extent, just not how he's framing it.)
For reference, Hattiesburg is Mississippi's fifth-largest city, with nearly fifty thousand residents. One random troon passing through is not going to attract that much attention, especially because it's also a college town which adds in a few thousand more students, and probably some genderspecials in the mix. It's even less likely that anyone would even recognize him after trooning out and having his face butchered, to say nothing of how nobody would know who he was supposed to be previously since he'd left Hattiesburg years before he started faking being a woman. At best, people might wonder why this freak is gurning all over the place, but nobody would've reached out to him on Facebook because, again, they wouldn't know who he was.