A transgender motive?

The recent mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis has provoked a large number of responses, many focused on the hatred that the killer’s social media posts expressed against various groups. That the killer was also a man who (at least for some time) claimed to be a woman has made the situation more complicated for those who still cling to the pieties of the last decade.

There has been a hesitation in the media to refer to him with male pronouns, not to avoid hurting his feelings (obviously) but to avoid feeding any backlash that such would apparently encourage among those who are critical of trans dogma. The New York Times went further, with an opinion column that claimed the killer did not mention the trans issue in any of his screeds:

In seemingly stream-of-consciousness videos that she [sic] posted, she fixated on guns, violence and school shooters. She displayed her own cache of weapons, bullets and what appear to be explosive devices, scrawled with antisemitic and racist language and threats against President Donald Trump.

The videos also show pages from a diary, with long entries describing self-hatred, violence against children, and a desire to inflict harm on herself. The diary entries are almost entirely written in English, but using Cyrillic letters. A sticker in the diary displays L.G.B.T.Q. and transgender flags with a gun and the slogan “Defend Equality.”

All this is beside the point, as the Times column unwittingly indicates. It is certainly the case that to suffer from gender dysphoria does not make one proceed to indulge in the slaughter of innocents as exemplified in Minneapolis. But all such people share a few things in common. First, they make the assumption that there is a distinction between their bodies and who they really are. Hence, one born with a man’s body who feels that he is really a woman makes a distinction between his sexed physiology and the real person that he is. Such it would seem was the Minneapolis killer.

But there is also something else at play: The man who identifies as a woman, or the woman who identifies as a man, hates his or her body. It is seen as a source of oppression and inauthenticity. There is no way around that. Yes, there may be numerous causes of gender dysphoria, but all present as involving a hatred—often an intense hatred—of the givenness of the body.

The Times column indicates that the killer was driven by, among other things, self-hatred and a desire to inflict harm upon himself. Blinded by a commitment to trans dogma that holds transgender identity as fundamental to nature and not the result of other pathologies, the Times neatly separates the idea of self-harm from the kind of damage done by hormones, genital mutilation, and the like. It is as if self-harm prescribed by a doctor is not self-harm at all.

The Minneapolis atrocity will trigger the usual round of reflection on why such things happen in the United States, and there is likely no single answer as there is no simple solution. But it is dangerous to place a cordon around discussing the role of gender dysphoria in this specific case out of fear that it might feed bigotry or reprisals against people with gender dysphoria who desire to harm nobody but themselves. In the same way that we would examine a neo-Nazi shooter to see what had attracted him to neo-Nazism, so we need to ask why a male killer who identifies as female came to the point where his hatred of his body led him to wish violence against himself and whether this was connected to his desire to harm others. We cannot follow the science only as far as the science follows implausible and damaging fictions, however politically useful such fictions may be to some.

The Times might also want to think about the notion of hate speech. Perhaps using pronouns that confirm a man in his self-hatred might count?