I’m an optimist. Or at least I was. Current events over the past few years are making that extremely difficult. On March 27th 2023, there was yet another school shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. The story has become all too familiar: a resentful person gets ahold of some guns and decides they want to be immortalized by committing the most selfish cry for attention imaginable at the expense of other peoples’ lives. This case is especially heinous since it took the lives of three children. Anyone who could feel the tiniest bit of sympathy for the shooter should examine their morality. In the aftermath of the shooting, it was discovered that the murderer identified as transgender. I had been following the events through news apps as they were happening and when that detail came across my screen, my first thought was, “ok, so was the shooter a man or a woman?”. Then a glimmer of hope appeared. I want to stress that absolutely nothing good came from this horrible act. Absolutely nothing. The hope I was recognizing was separate. It was a hope for further discourse in the country from this point on. The media had unintentionally betrayed themselves. Even they acknowledged that there is a line to this madness.
The fact that journalists were talking about the gender identity of the person who killed six people in cold blood showcases how completely out of reality our news media is. When I read that, I wasn’t sure if the shooter was male or female. It was later reported that the female shooter identified as a male and for some reason this has bearing on the story.
I then noticed something else. Virtually every major media outlet was “misgendering” and “dead naming” the shooter. Misgendering is referring to a person by a gender contrary to the gender with which he or she identified and “dead naming” is referring to a person by their birth name as opposed to the new name they have picked for themselves after changing his or her gender expression. I was legitimately surprised, but also had a small sense of relief. “At least they acknowledge there is a line” I thought to myself. Major media outlets will not defend or collaborate with a murderer of children to play make believe that a girl can be a boy. It’s worth noting, however, that the Wikipedia entry for the Covenant Shooting identifies the perpetrator as male (formerly female) in name and pronouns.
It infuriates me to no end that instead of remembering the victims, our society is now arguing over what pronouns to use for the perpetrator. Even more shameless (along with no sense of tact) are many of the trans activists who are still calling for violence in the name of trans acceptance. Thankfully the organizers of the “Trans Day of Vengeance” had enough sense to cancel the event. Very few other than the radical (and arguably mentally unstable) activist class are talking about the media “misgendering” the shooter, and that’s a shame. I would like to see more than a few fringe players pointing out that people on the left finally drew a line in the sand.
