The Right's Fixation on the Gender Identity of the Nashville Killer Is Disgusting—and Telling | Opinion

Mass shootings have become such a depressing fixture of American life that I don't know if anyone was shocked to hear the awful news that yet another school—a Christian school in Nashville—was targeted this week by a deranged killer. But this shooting was different from other previous high-profile ones in one way: The perpetrator was transgender.

Immediately, prominent right-wing commentators seized on this fact. Their commentary absolutely fixated on the killer's gender identity, and pundits and opinion personalities cast the shooting as proof of their theory that transgender people pose a major threat to the fabric of civilization.

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."

This 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. This makes no sense. After all, using similar reasoning, we could point to all the killers who aren't transgender and argue that people who aren't transgender are prone to violence. We don't see headlines like "Heterosexual Cisgender Male Commit Shooting" for the overwhelming majority of cases where that's true, so why is it more notable when the person is transgender?

You can't reach general conclusions about major social tendencies from small handfuls of incidents. You can't just present a string of anecdotes, or post mugshots of other trans people. You have to look at broad statistical trends.

If we really wanted to identify a group that seems disproportionately likely to commit atrocities, that group would be men, who comprise 98 percent of mass shooters. And just as it would be silly to attribute a pathology to men generally on the basis of the actions of a tiny subset of the group, it's unacceptable to use the actions of a lone trans person, or even four trans people, to reach broad conclusions about trans people.

Stereotyping a demographic group based on actions by a tiny, unrepresentative number of its members is pure bigotry.

In fact, it's pretty clear that the people highlighting the gender identity of the Nashville killer aren't interested in fairly trying to assess the facts. They just harbor an animus toward trans people. And that animus was there long before this horrible crime. They already hold the belief that trans people are a threat to children, so any case in which a trans person harms a child is going to seem to them like confirmation of their theory, no matter how much more often children are hurt by cisgender people.

When a mass shooting occurs, everyone tries to find lessons in it that fit their preexisting political narratives. When a gay nightclub in Colorado was attacked last year, for example, some commentators on the Right implied that the shooting was a predictable response to "grooming" by LGBT people. The Left, of course, isn't immune from this kind of confirmation bias. When Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011, some Democrats attributed responsibility to Sarah Palin, who had published a map showing Giffords in crosshairs.

People are all too quick to attribute political motives to mentally ill killers, and to try to draw broad conclusions from those killers' actions. When an individual Trump supporter or Bernie Sanders supporter has carried out a crime, those who dislike Trump or Sanders will use the crime as proof that everything they thought about the politician is true.

The rational response after a shooting is to have a clear-eyed conversation about what can be done to stop this from carrying on indefinitely. We know, despite the Right's constant denial, that a heavily armed society is a society where a lot of people will get shot, both accidentally and on purpose. We know that if someone can't access a gun, they can't shoot anyone.

But rather than seriously discuss the gun problem, parts of the Right would prefer to stoke their moral panic about trans people, presenting one of the most heavily stigmatized and bullied groups of people as a threat to society.

This won't protect children; it wouldn't have saved any of the kids in Uvalde, for instance, although preventing a deranged teenager from buying an assault rifle would have.

All it will lead to is the entirely irrational and unfair demonization of trans people, who are facing extreme persecution already.

Nathan J. Robinson is the editor in chief of Current Affairs magazine and the author of Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.