The Right's Fixation on the Gender Identity of the Nashville Killer Is Disgusting—and Telling | Opinion
The New York Post ran the front-page headline, "TRANSGENDER KILLER TARGETS CHRISTIAN SCHOOL." Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire said it confirmed his conviction that "the trans movement is the greatest evil our country faces." (Really?
In a country with child labor and medical bankruptcy?) Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) said that the fact that the shooter was trans should lead to "a lot of soul searching on the extreme left" and showed that "giving into these ideas isn't compassion, it's dangerous." Benny Johnson of Turning Point USA said it showed that trans people were "committing genocide against children," and are an "evil from the pit of Hell," citing several other examples of shooters identified in press accounts as transgender to prove that the trans rights movement is producing "terrorists."Today's cover: Nashville school shooter Audrey Hale identified as transgender and had detailed manifesto to attack Christian academy https://t.co/IULlPS7xBI pic.twitter.com/cGgKGkAuvJThis fixation on the killer's gender identity is strange, to say the least.
After all, this is only the most recent in a long string of these horrors, a substantial number of which have been perpetrated by white supremacists.
Johnson found some other incidents in which transgender people committed violence, but as Newsweek reported, the percentage of shootings with transgender perpetrators is minuscule.In other words, if this shooting is evidence that transgender people are violent, why aren't all the other shootings evidence that cis-gender people are violent?It seems that for these right-wing critics, when a killer is trans, their crime occurs because of their being trans, but when a killer isn't trans, their gender identity becomes irrelevant.
