It was entirely predictable, but still despicable, that right-wing demagogues like Sen. Josh Hawley are trying to spin Monday’s Nashville school shooting into an indictment of transgender Americans generally because the assailant happened to identify as trans. That was the obvious thrust of a Fox News discussion between the Missouri Republican and host Laura Ingraham that was initially about the shooting but morphed seamlessly into the utter non sequitur of transgender medicine. “We’ve got to tell the truth about what happened in Nashville,” intoned Hawley, with his usual bigot-dog-whistle subtlety.
Yes, by all means, let’s tell the truth: Transgender Americans are a statistically microscopic percentage of mass shooters, the overwhelming majority of which are cisgender white males. Yet we’ve been unable to find a single quote from Hawley after previous shootings suggesting there’s something dangerously wrong with straight white men as a population. This is yet another calculated distraction from the fact that Hawley and his fellow conservatives have paralyzed America from taking any substantive action to impose reasonable restrictions on firearms.
The shooter who killed three children and three adults at the Covenant Christian school Monday, identified by police as Audrey Hale, 28, reportedly was born female but had taken to using male pronouns on social media in recent years. There has been no reporting to indicate Hale had undergone gender-related surgery or was on gender-affirming drugs.
