A few things from Monday’s horrific school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, are very clear: Six people, including three 9-year-old children, are dead. The shooter deliberately targeted Covenant School, a Christian elementary school, and had been a former student there. And the shooter was a woman, 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who went to Covenant with the intention of killing and being killed.

This last fact (Hale’s identity) has been the point of unnecessary confusion for nearly 24 hours. It seems Hale identified as a man and went by the name of “Aiden.” At least one of Hale’s social media profiles included “he/him” pronouns next to her name. Yet for hours, even before Hale’s name was released, the media had been reporting (accurately) that Hale was female. But what kind of woman was she? Was she a man identifying as a woman, as the Nashville police chief seemed to suggest? Or was she an actual woman identifying as a man?

It turns out that Hale was the latter (a woman claiming to be a man), much to the chagrin of left-leaning outlets, which have since twisted themselves in knots trying to justify their egregious misgendering of a deranged sociopath who just killed three children. "There was confusion later on Monday about the gender identity of the assailant in the Nashville shooting. Officials had used ‘she’ and ‘her’ to refer to the suspect, who, according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, appeared to identify as a man in recent months," the New York Times said in a statement on Monday evening.

This is a great example of how gender ideology obstructs much-needed moral clarity. It matters a great deal whether Hale was a man or a woman, because the latter demographic is much less likely to be involved in acts of violence than the former. It also matters because Hale’s sex, specifically her confusion about it, seems to have been part of her motivation, according to police.

Yet gender ideology prevents us from being able to talk about any of this honestly. The New York Times’s clarification, for example, is insufficient. It is not enough for the outlet to say that Hale identified as a man. They must affirm without equivocation that Hale was a man — simply because she said she was one. Gender ideology will accept nothing less.

This, of course, is impossible to square with law enforcement’s definitive statement that Hale was a woman. So which side will the activists running our newsrooms take? That of reality or ideology?

It’s absurd that this has to be a debate at all, and it does a great disservice to the victims, their families, and the public at large. Audrey Hale was an unstable, maniacal woman who wanted to kill people. We have to be able to name her evil clearly, or we run the risk of diminishing it.

The fact that gender ideology tries to stop us from doing so speaks to evils of its own.