On Monday, a woman who identified as a man killed three children and three staff members at a Christian elementary school in Tennessee. She was killed at the scene by a pair of Nashville police officers. A community is in mourning.
There is a temptation to think of violence like this in exclusively political terms. We consider which side “benefits” from a particular combination of attacker and victim and try to shoehorn the facts into our partisan frame. That is a mistake. Seven real people have died. Real parents are burying real children. Dozens of real child survivors are left to live with memories of carnage.
There are, of course, political implications of this shooting, however. The shooter may have been motivated by Tennessee’s recent bans on transgender surgeries for minors and drag performances. She chose to attack a Christian school, specifically, that likely disagrees with her transgender identity. There are reports that the shooter’s parents rejected her male identity amid the Biden administration’s war on “non-affirming” parents.
There was a sense among some reporters that the shooter had a point. ABC News anchor Terry Moran linked the shooting with Tennessee’s transgender legislation. NBC’s Benjamin Ryan mentioned the shooter’s transgender identity alongside the fact that Daily Wire, which he called “a hub of anti-trans activity,” is located in Nashville. The implication seemed to be that Tennessee had provoked the attacker and left her no choice but to shoot up a Christian elementary school.
They never quite said that out loud. Still, the media’s behavior suggests they agree with transgender activists that “hate has consequences.”
Even after the shooting, reporters dutifully respected the killer’s transgender identity. The New York Times wouldn’t refer to her with female pronouns in one of their reports, and several outlets amended their coverage after reports broke that the shooter identified as a man. They issued corrections for having identified Audrey Hale, the shooter, as a woman.
That is one of the real questions here: Was Audrey Hale a man, or not? If she was, maybe she had real grievances expressed in an obviously unacceptable way. If she wasn’t—if there is more to being a man than wanting to be called “Aiden,” donning a boyish bowl cut, camouflage fatigues and a backwards ball cap, and assuming male pronouns—then her grievances were rooted in delusion.
It’s clear which side the media falls on. To them, Audrey Hale was a man, persecuted by family and state, whose rampage could be explained, if not excused, by the actions of Tennessee lawmakers. She was poked and prodded by the powerful, and responded accordingly.
The truth about Hale’s identity, however, was made clear in contrast with the actions of first responders. Hale had donned a paramilitary outfit and terrorized schoolchildren in a pathetic and warped performance of masculine aggression. Police officers confronted and killed the shooter in a display of actual masculine virtue. Body camera footage shows Officers Rex Englebert, Michael Collazo, and the rest of the Nashville Police Department running gallantly toward the sound of gunfire, braving lethal danger to protect the vulnerable from the predations of the wicked. From the moment Officer Englebert wrestled his weapon from his vehicle to the time he shot the perpetrator, he and his fellow officers resolved to risk their lives for those who could not protect themselves.
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It is one thing to display such courage in Edwardian England or Constantinian Rome, where heroism is exalted and masculinity venerated. It is another to do so when every major institution in your society holds masculinity in contempt and considers a two-bit imitator like Audrey Hale to be just as much a man as the men of the Nashville Police Department.
The feminist Vivian Gornick said to achieve equality between the sexes, society would need to reform “the emotional habits of thousands of years” in the course of “a single generation.” That involved a whole-of-society effort to reform the beliefs and behaviors of every American, to get them to reject what biology makes obvious. The fruits of that effort were manifest in the carnage of Nashville, where a confused young woman was led to murderous rage by the intrusion of reality on her delusions. But it is equally manifest in the countless young minds warped and captured by gender ideology, whose bodies have been mutilated and identities fractured in service of a generational effort to deny the differences between men and women.
None of that, of course, is any consolation to the victims. To them and their families, and a community forever broken, we offer our prayers and we share in their mourning.
