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.
But that hasn’t stopped the chorus of speculation from the likes of Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump Jr. among many others.
“How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking,” tweeted Greene, unburdened as usual by any obligation to established facts (or grammatical competence). “Everyone can stop blaming guns now.” Then how about blaming politicians who, like Greene, have thwarted the passage of red flag laws that might have prevented Hale — who was in fact a mental patient — from legally obtaining seven guns?
Trump Jr., meanwhile, tweeted about an “incredible rise of trans/non-binary mass shooters in the last few years … by far the largest group committing as a percentage of population.” Where the former president’s son dredged up that bit of fanciful disinformation is anyone’s guess, but it’s the opposite of true. As The Washington Post concluded in an analysis this week, Americans who identify as transgender make up about 0.6% of the national population, and so would be statistically expected to have committed 16 of the 2,697 U.S. mass shootings of the past five years. Instead, just three of those tragedies, including this one, were committed by transgender assailants.
Implicating an entire segment of the population based on a heinous crime committed by one member of that population is the very definition of bigotry. And it’s especially offensive when the statistical facts point in the opposite direction.
