There are those who seek to live an unobtrusive life in the identity of their choice, and those whose gender dysphoria is accompanied by clinical paranoia.
‘T here does not seem to be a coherent ideological motive behind this attack,” Amy Cooter, the deputy director at the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, told NPR in the immediate aftermath of the August shootings at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minnesota. “It really seems to be much more about the violence for the sake of violence.”
Sure, the FBI said the attacker was motivated by a “hate-filled ideology.” But which ideology, we may never know. “I think the most important thing is what the shooter wrote on the slide of that handgun: ‘There is no message,’” the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s Cody Zoschak agreed. “There’s an inherently nonideological indication.”
There were factors complicating the hunt for a motive in the shooting that targeted dozens of children at prayer, killing two and wounding 18 more. The 23-year-old shooter left behind a lot of incoherent writing and, despite adopting a trans identity, described regretting the choice to transition. But the messages on the bullet casings tell a tale: “Kill Donald Trump,” “Jew Gas,” “6 Million Wasn’t Enough,” and, creepily enough, “For the Children,” among others.
Two weeks later, the person who murdered Charlie Kirk followed a similar pattern, albeit absent the evidence of a clinically addled mind. The messages he etched into his bullet casings — “Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Bella ciao ciao ciao,” “Notices Bulges OwO what’s this?” and “Hey fascist! Catch!” — tell, if not the same tale, a familiar one. They are evidence not just of saturation in left-of-center online discourse, but also the subcultural touchstones that are familiar to those who frequent “furry and trans circles.” It’s not unreasonable to conclude that the shooter encountered those circles, given his romantic relationship with a transitioning biological male. After all, as the shooter confessed, “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
Once again, the motives that inspired Kirk’s killer were said by the experts to be wholly inscrutable. As CBS News reported, the assassination could be chalked up to “nihilistic violent extremism” — a phenomenon in which the “motive remains elusive” and the killing is “not driven by an obvious political ideology.”
It took nearly two years before the FBI released the scribbled ramblings that 28-year-old Audrey Hale left behind after she murdered six people and took her own life in the 2023 attack on Nashville’s Covenant School. It is a contemptable document composed by a disordered thinker. It revealed her desire to “kill all the white kids” and to “destroy all the white people who are teachers,” her hatred of America and Americans, and the agonizing struggle with her own gender identity. She sought out notoriety, and apparently bore little resentment toward the school where she recalled spending some of the happiest years of her life. But she was also deeply resentful of the authorities who deprived her of puberty blockers until she was “too old” and it was “too late to become a man.”
These killers are outliers. Their chaotic missives are not representative of any coherent political philosophy. In addition, while three events constitute a trend, they do not make for an epidemic. And yet, there are common threads in their thinking that harken back to the ideological affinities evinced by the gratuitously provocative and anti-social subcultures to which a particular sort is attracted. Not transgender people, per se, but those who subscribe to what the right has taken to calling “trans ideology.”
It’s not clear if those who use the phrase “trans ideology” are aware of the distinction they’re making, but it is a helpful one. There are those who seek to lead a productive life in their chosen identity who are scrupulous in their effort to avoid infringing on the liberties of others. They are not invisible, nor should they be. But they do not make a habit of transgressing against social norms.
Those who make a talisman of their transgenderism take a different approach. Perhaps the foremost supposition shared by “trans ideology” adherents is a non-controversial one — at least, it is if you’re unquestioningly accepting of it. As the American Medical Association declared in 2019, transgender individuals are facing an “epidemic” of targeted violence (which isn’t true either, even if attacks on transgender individuals strictly for being transgender should be too common for anyone’s comfort). The community’s more florid members describe themselves as an “endangered species,” and it’s the whole of American society that is endangering them.
And if you consume the media tailored toward that audience, it is festooned with the trappings of a persecution complex. America itself is committed to an “anti-trans war.” Culture war activists warn of the degree to which American institutions are committed to the physical eradication of transgender individuals. Entrepreneurial anti-capitalist zealots transmute “attacks on trans people” into a feature of their “class war.” It is no wonder that there’s a genre of commentary that presupposes “America wants me dead.”
As the right has begun to make a healthy distinction between transgenderism and an ideational affinity toward transgender activism, a strain of which is most certainly radical, the expert class has set out to stigmatize the effort.
“There is no trans ideology,” said Jacey Thornton, executive director of an LGBT nonprofit. She called the phrase “deeply troubling,” and equated the effort to investigate what Charlie Kirk’s murderer believed with scapegoating the entire population of transgender individuals in America. A GLAAD spokesperson castigated, for example, the New York Post merely for relating the information provided by investigators in Utah. The Wall Street Journal was also singled out for opprobrium for using the phrase, which was coined “for expressed purpose of delegitimizing the humanity of trans people,” Trans Journalists Association executive director Tre’vell Anderson insisted.
This is precisely the sort of high dudgeon that keeps those who are already in a heightened state of anxiety on edge. It is hardly inconceivable that someone who truly believes that American society is out to get them would conclude, irrationally enough, that acting preemptively against existential threats to themselves and their loved ones is justified.
It is useful to establish a distinction between those who seek to live an unobtrusive life in the identity of their choice and those whose gender dysphoria is accompanied by clinical paranoia. That is not a distinction the activist class wants you to make, and that tells you something.