Reactions to the Nashville Shooting

An Augur of Coming Darkness

This piece is wandering and poorly-structured. I began writing it the day of the Nashville shooting as a way to organize my own thoughts. I don’t think I’ll revisit the topic for awhile (for a number of reasons). I hope it interests you.

A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country, and in his own house. - Book of Matthew, 13:57

"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later the debt is paid." - Valery Legasov, Chernobyl

Mass shootings are now as American as fast food and every one creates its own echo chamber of political urgency. Gun control is obviously always on the table. When Elliott Rogers and Alek Minassian killed groups of random citizens (although Minassian used a van, in Canada) it created a narrative of secluded right-wing incels, warped by sexual and romantic frustration to a murderous loathing of women. Social science data indicates that ‘incels’ are actually more progressive than average (although their social media ecosystems display plenty of anti-social racist and sexist filth) but that’s irrelevant for those creating the narrative. The narrative is clear: young, white, disaffected rightwing men are a danger to women and to larger society and the new progressive values of racial equity and gender ideology are comfortingly placed on the virtuous side. These values will ALWAYS be placed on the virtuous side by the midwits responsible for creating our cultural narratives because the values are the starting point and everything else follows from them. There is no information or event that could upend the new progressive worldview in the minds of modern believers because it’s claims are axiomatic and, like religious dogma, cannot be questioned.

Similarly, when Dylann Roof killed 9 (black) people in a Charleston church or Payton Gendron killed 10 people (also black) in a Buffalo supermarket, the narrative was clear and intuitive for the narrative-makers. Black people (already at risk from racist police violence, according to the myth) were being hunted by white supremacists. The Civil Rights era was the last time progressives had solid contact with moral reality and so their programs and ideals constantly refer to that time and these events fit nicely into the scope of that history: racist whites as brutal killers, peaceful blacks as victims. The fact that more than 85% of interracial killings in the US are committed by black people (mostly against white people, but also against Asians, disproportionately) is not advertised or discussed and even mentioning it is distasteful. Its truth is irrelevant. It doesn’t fit into the narrative and many of the narrative-makers would undoubtedly say that racism MUST be the ultimate cause of even those murders. #StopAsianHate was never designed to be an exploration of why so many Asian Americans are killed by young black men because to ask that question veers dangerously close to uncomfortable questions about the basic axioms of social justice.

All of this is written to establish a few basic points: ‘politicizing’ mass shootings is only a charge when the political values and aims of the speaker are different from your own. National crises don’t magically erase different perspectives on gun control or the racial balance of power, and even those tragedies are viewed through that lens. Ideally people will be fair to the data and acknowledge the counterarguments of their opponents but, as we’ve seen with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement that is no longer a media standard and powerful narratives can grow organically without any data or policy sense to support them. Everyone in the political space ‘uses’ mass shootings because they believe that their political goals would help resolve the problem. The dynamics are familiar by now: a shooting brings calls for gun control, followed by calls for mental healthcare from the right (which never actually follows through by devoting more resources to mental healthcare). If the shooting fit into a virtuous narrative that narrative is explored endlessly. If not, the shooting disappears from the media space fairly quickly. The Colorado Springs shooting against a gay bar was initially assumed to be an ‘anti-LGBTQ’ hate incident. When the shooter was arrested and identified himself as non-binary that claim was widely dismissed by the media, although according to gender ideology NO claim of NB or trans can ever be dismissed since the claim is literally the only available metric. Witness a trans commentator on CNN saying that the shooter was obviously and identifiably male (as a counterpoint to their claimed NB status) to illustrate the fact that: 1.) even trans media personalities don’t seem to know what ‘non-binary’ means and 2.) concepts like non-binary are secondary to the axioms of the media narrative. If necessary they will be discarded in order to strengthen the narrative.

I want to say a few things about mass shootings before I proceed. First: the goal of disarming America is a fantasy, almost as disconnected from reality as the goal of abolishing private property or the police. It won’t happen. It can’t happen. Anyone stating this as a policy goal isn’t living in the real world. Guns are ubiquitous and background checks and assault weapons bans wouldn’t address most of the incidents. Most of the shooters had no criminal record or mental health ‘red flags’ and most shootings don’t involve assault weapons. The Nashville shooter used an automatic handgun with an extended magazine which has been wrongly identified by dozens of media outlets as an ‘assault weapon’ (not even a real category), which only displays their ignorance of gun culture. The idea that guns are the problem, therefore more guns make the problem worse is a narrative that is close to universal on the left. This is just silly, though. CNN, MSNNC, the New York Times: all have armed security guarding their properties. On those properties journalists and media pundits confidently assert that armed security in schools would only make the problem worse. It’s certainly not making THEM less safe, though, or the companies would dispense with the armed security. Arming and training certain teachers and putting armed guards in schools might very well be a short-term ameliorative measure but when even dozens of uniformed police fail to close the distance and kill an active shooter, can we really expect armed security officers to do so? When confronting killers who are determined to die even trained soldiers struggle to minimize risk; armed security officers couldn’t do better. There are certainly enough veterans in this country to guard many schools and I believe that people who served in the military tend to have the kind of training that makes risking their own lives for the sake of children more likely. I know that were I near a school with an active shooter I would run towards the gunfire, and not away, and many other young men would and have done the same. Witness the male passengers of Flight 93 or the two young American servicemen on leave on a Paris-bound train years ago who ran towards and overpowered a terrorist with an AK-47. Sacrificing our lives to protect the community is a powerful biological urge in men (as protecting one’s children is a natural urge in women) and even in our weakened modern state I believe the urge remains.

None of those suppositions addresses the CAUSE of shootings, though, and so none really speaks to prevention. The cause that I identify is speculative but I still believe it’s true: we are a lonely and unhappy society. Our communities have been ravaged by international capital outflows and drug addiction and the catastrophic disintegration of the family. After the Uvalde and Nashville shooting I observed that there is NO psychological explanation for a person to annihilate themselves to kill unfamiliar children. There are known motivations for mothers to kill their own children. Postpartum depression and psychosis are hypothesized to be evolved natural mechanisms to create distance between mothers and children to allow the mothers to kill their children in conditions where scarcity argues against the addition of another dependent. There is no birth control in nature and adding children to a family can be a very costly proposition. Most cultures throughout history have allowed infanticide in certain circumstances and the practice of not naming a child until it had reached a certain age (28 days in Kerala, for instance, up to one year in certain indigenous cultures) can be viewed as an institutionalized ‘probationary period’ for a birth to be ‘undone’. An anthropologist working in the favelas of Brazil 80 years ago remarked on the common funeral processions for tiny infants who had been ‘taken back to heaven’ by saints. In reality their mothers had smothered the babies after calculating that adding another mouth to the family endangered all of its older members. There are also plenty of psychological urges for disaffected members of society (particularly young men without any purpose or romantic prospects) to kill strangers but these are historically peers or adults. The fairly recent development of young men (and now a woman) walking into buildings full of elementary schoolers and trying to murder as many of them as possible is new in human history. It can be added to mass adolescent gender confusion and juvenile suicides as developments that exist in our culture without any historical precedent, symptoms of a great civilizational neurosis caused by our comfort and our social atomization and our aimless lives. The development of strangers trying to kill a maximum number of children is an unprecedented devolution that should force us to confront the very roots of our society. It’s a bleak and condemnatory commentary on the place we’re all in.

That neurosis is not the darkness that my title refers to, though. It is certainly a massive problem but the recent school shooting in Nashville points to a different problem: a problem with narratives and communication. This is a shooting of the type that afflicts our narrative-makers with intense discomfort. It’s a discomfort even more acute than that caused by a black man ambushing police or parade goers (both of which happened, both top news for 1-2 days) or a non-binary shooter attacking a gay club. The shooter in this case was a member of the most totemic groups in our society: she was trans. This essay isn’t really about the shooting. It’s about the issue of trans and a different (but intersecting) issue – gender ideology. It’s about how we talk about issues and groups and policy in this country.

Before I continue I will state my own beliefs on this issue. They’re not ‘hard’; they could be changed by data and persuasion. They emerge from a years-long study and that study has made it clear that our media is actively suppressing and distorting relevant facts about trans. The media showed itself to be unreliable during the early years of COVID 19 (and, indeed, before). Human error is universal and in a world of uncertainty and bias there will be mistakes and false conclusions, but when all of the falsities fall in one direction and that direction corresponds with the explicit biases of the Twitter intelligentsia there’s something else going on. There have been historical issues where the media let its bias overwhelm journalistic standards. The coverage of the Soviet Union from the 1920’s through the 1940’s is one case. Regarding COVID, the ideas that vaccines are a positive risk-benefit proposition for ALL demographics or the ideas that shutting down in-person schooling for young children or the idea that masking was extremely helpful as a prophylactic or that closing parks and beaches was a justified public health measure are all examples of propositions where the media’s political affiliations overwhelmed fair reporting and contrary information was simply not reported, and reporting it was met with penalties and condemnation and serious reputational harm. These important topics were actively suppressed on a number of levels. From what I can see the reporting about trans-related issues is even more mired in bias and dogged by censorship. It’s difficult to trust any article about the issue from the mainstream media (MSM) but that doesn’t mean that I credit every dissident or contrary voice (a mistake that many conspiracy theorists make). For many of these facts I will admit: I just don’t know to a certainty. I would have a surer grasp of the facts IF our media wasn’t propagandizing in this area but they certainly are.

Trans is probably not one thing. As the general belief that a person would be happier or more psychologically sound if they lived as the opposite sex, it could have multiple causes and I believe it does. In every manifestation it is a mental illness. This isn’t to stigmatize the condition. Many of the people who argue loudest against trans being a mental illness are the same people who argue that we need to de-stigmatize mental healthcare. The attitude seems to be “there’s absolutely nothing wrong with mental illness but don’t you dare say that trans is a mental illness.” Contradictions abound, as we will see, and they indicate to me that many people aren’t thinking rationally about this issue. Trans, perhaps more than any other, is based on articles of faith and emotional attachments and those attachments are symptomatic of which social group a person identifies with. You can chip away at the facts on offer but the attitudes remain unchanged, for they are sub-rational and beyond examination. Trans is a mental illness because it predisposes a patient to greatly increased risk of suicide and it requires extensive medical intervention to address it and it causes functional impairments and it is comorbid with anxiety and depression and borderline traits and it is literally a deep-seated feeling that one’s entire body is wrong. What could be more disordered than that? I’ve spoken to dozens of people who consider the claim that ‘trans is a mental illness’ to be transphobic and these people universally also consider lifetime hormone treatments and dozens of surgical procedures and intensive therapeutic support to be necessary to the happiness of trans people. I cannot see how those positions can be reconciled.

Trans is different from non-binary gender identity or the increasingly weird and esoteric profusion of gender ideas of the gender ideology movement. Trans people have probably always existed but the idea of ‘trans’ is relatively new. Basically every human society has been based on a sex binary that was very closely (but not exactly) mirrored by gender roles. There are certainly instances where feminine or non-conforming men lived as women or served some special function (often ritualistic or religious) but they LIVED AS WOMEN. There has never been a society that behaved as if gender could be chosen or was a deep and meaningful quality aside from sex or that allowed men and women to ‘transition’ and live as the other sex at will or based on choice alone. Probably more than 99% of all humans who have ever lived have lived as men or women (as biology dictated) and were expected to fulfill those sex/gender roles by default. Intersex is a medical condition that can be chromosomal or teratogenic and is evidenced by ambiguous or deformed genitalia but the condition has nothing to do with trans or the gender ideology movement. Patients with this condition are surgically altered at very young ages when necessary and they seek to live in the male or female bodies of their birth normally. I’ve never met or heard of an intersex person who was involved in gender ideology (although I’m sure they exist). The condition is used to erode the idea of the sex binary, but the fact is that basically all humans have large or small gametes and none have both. This is as binary as it gets, and it reflects the core fact that sex exists to mix and transpose genes through sexual reproduction, which is a binary process in every species that uses it. These facts are not open for debate and the fact that we have anthropologists (and even some biologist) trying to do so reveals how deep and emotionally salient gender ideology is.

Gender ideology is a simple and unscientific worldview that considers ‘gender identity’ to be an innate and meaningful construct that isn’t reflected by any medical measurement or physical attributes. It’s literally a self-conception, but one that is automatically more meaningful than ANY PART of a person’s body. It arose out of a concern with trans people (who often did have a gender identity that differed from their bodies) but has taken on its own momentum and beliefs. It is extremely difficult to reconcile with either science or sensible policy-making concerns and the now infamous question “what is a woman?” brilliantly shows how disordered the basic attitudes become upon contact with the real world. A woman is an adult human female, but that excludes trans people, so now a woman is whoever identifies as a woman. This is a ridiculous tautology of course (“okay, but what IS that?”) but it is the kind of epistemological nonsense that gender ideology delivers. Essentially, they’re piggybacking on both traditional and scientific notions of human sex (like femaleness/womanhood) to subvert the categories (ostensibly in order to empower and assist trans people) in question. They can’t offer anything BEYOND those categories though. Trans women want to live as women in the full sense, which requires an established and separate category of ‘woman’ but that category (and all that are like it) is precisely what gender ideology seeks to dissolve.

The central conflict between trans and gender identity is that the aims of gender identity (to dissolve the sex binary and establish a promiscuous and flexible set of gender categories based purely on self-conception) is fundamentally opposed to the lives and aims of most trans people. Trans people WANT the sex binary. They want to cross it. A trans woman doesn’t want the category of womanhood to be abolished. She wants to live in that category, as normally as a biological female might. The solution seems simple: keep our well-established sex binary and acknowledge that nearly all people live comfortably within it, and allow certain members of society to cross it (with medical and therapeutic support) while recognizing that they are not, ultimately, women in the biological sense but have the full social status of women. This is the goal that the trans rights movement had until fairly recently and the fact that the goal ITSELF is now considered ‘transphobic’ shows how deranged the conversation has become and how ‘trans activists’ (many of whom are not actually trans) are using this beleaguered minority to advance a much more radical agenda. Like all radicals they believe that their ultimate aims are righteous and that the ends justify the means but their ends are completely untested in human history. The sex binary is probably the deepest fact of human life and the fact that so many young Westerners think that its abolition is not only preferable but necessary reveals (to me) how much modern people take our social and technological progress for granted. The most important goal for a society is to produce and raise children (who themselves will produce and raise children, and so on) and our society is beginning to fail at this mission. The casual attitude that gender ideologues have towards sexual reproduction and sex roles tells me that they have deeper aims. I don’t think there CAN be deeper aims than the creation and molding of children, unfortunately. Any society that behaves otherwise will eliminate itself from the arena of intercultural competition and fade into memory as a strange cautionary tale, told by the descendants of those who survive.

Gender ideology has considerable overlap with some similar (but distinct) ideologies: anti-humanist environmentalism, third-wave feminism, and critical race theory. They are all essentially American creations (although based heavily on neo-Marxist theories that originate in Europe). They all envision a radical dissolution and refashioning of society. None of them have ever been tried, even at the community level. Unlike anarchism or labor Zionism (which included constructive and grassroots means to build their society) their purpose is the destruction of the current order. What might replace it has been given shockingly little thought and the correctness of their aims is literally an article of faith. These ideologies BEGIN with the goal and work backwards, fashioning a vision of reality to promote and support that goal. As with other exclusively ends-oriented political ideologies, there is a strong “ends justify means” ethic and the conception of their chosen groups (trans and queer and non-binary people, in the case of gender ideology) as oppressed minorities in the racist and capitalist superstructure of modernity only deepens that instinct.

These ideas in their complete form are not popular in the United States at this time, but it is incredible to me how widely their corollaries are believed without question. Those corollaries (and the contradictions they raise) are what we see in the aftermath of the Nashville shooting. The ‘coming darkness’ of this essay’s subtitle refers to a painful near-future period when we will have to reckon with the cost of these bad ideas. I argue that we’re already being confounded as a society by the mutual incomprehension of a corporate news machine that is fairly determined to only represent certain narratives and points of view and has systematically ignored or suppressed any information which deviates. Try finding the number of minors having gender modifying treatments. Surely this is relevant to the debate? Good luck. Try finding the actual statistics on anti-trans violence (that is, AGAINST trans; violent crimes committed against trans people evidently for being trans). As far as I can tell they barely exist. Surely this fact is relevant to the debate as well? Not enough to include in any of the dozens of news stories I’ve read on the subject, apparently.

Morality is based on intent and effects, on utilitarian calculations and on ontological norms. In political ideology, morality must also be concerned with accuracy. Many political ideas would themselves be justified (as ends anyway, even if the means were deemed unacceptably harsh) IF they were correct. If eugenics led to a healthier and more fit society and considerably less suffering in the aggregate, it would probably become moral. If the Marxist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ led to a purely democratic, post-scarcity condition for humankind it would be a price we would probably be willing to pay. These ideas are not immoral because their intent is flawed. They are immoral because they are based on incorrect conceptions of human nature and sociobiology and therefore create additional suffering which cannot be justified. EVERY political ideologue believes that their cause is just. The Nazis were evil because of their genocide, but they were also evil because their goal was fatally flawed. Racial category isn’t very meaningful as it turns out. The Jews are not a parasitic historical group that weakens its host society (quite the opposite, actually). An Aryan future would not have any particular advantages in terms of human potential over our current polyglot circumstances (quite the opposite, actually). The Nazis believed that they were working towards a utopian future (even if many psychopaths within the organization enjoyed inflicting suffering it was not the goal of the movements as a whole). They were wrong. Evaluating the accuracy of political claims always has an intense moral dimension.

Political urgency always comes from a sense of crisis. When we see radical and brutal measures being taken we can be fairly sure that they have been justified by appeal to an even GREATER danger being averted. Often these ideas relate to the endangerment or destruction of a chosen group. Evaluating THESE claims is therefore especially important. Regardless of the motivations of the claimants, the sense that a group is in great danger will occasion violence and immorality. Our psychology is wired for this. We use inconsistent moral standards when evaluating ‘our’ group versus the enemies and a sense of existential danger provokes a mob mentality and the urge to annihilate the ‘other’. This is the mechanism behind every genocide in human history.

The sense of urgency is actively being stoked by both sides. On the Left there is a sense that homophobic and transphobic legislators and parents are trying to make lives harder for LGBTQ people and on the Right there’s a sense that children are being dragged into the fight. I tend to believe that 80% of Americans share the same rough political values on the broad ethical points. It is the facts available to each group that differ here and this is a situation which has been created by uneven and dishonest reporting.

There are errors of political vision. Marxism-Leninism was based upon a faulty understanding of economics and used the drastic inequalities and morally objectionable privileges of capital concentrations to erect structures worldwide in which the state (managed by lawless and brutal bureaucrats) could not admit any challenge to ostensible social mission or to sanctioned narratives. Untold millions died. There are errors of political fact. The Civil Rights movement in the mid-century United States was routinely denigrated on the right as the tool and manifestation of Soviet manipulation. Before that a deeply insecure Senator (Joseph McCarthy) created and nurtured a myth of hundreds (and then thousands) of known Soviet agents working at the highest levels of government. While there were certainly spies and the Soviet Union had some influence on domestic reform efforts both of these claims were empty but managed to persist for too long within echo chambers of political conviction in the United States. They were empty narratives kept afloat by a swarm of misinformation and assumption. When errors of political vision are fed and inflated by errors of political fact the costs can be disastrous and the misbelievers are often very difficult to convert or correct. This is what I believe is happening currently in the debate around gender identity in the United States and the costs of these errors are the coming disorder that I allude to in this piece's subtitle. We have a utopian and unworkable political vision of a post-sex, post-gender world, created and spread by queer theorists and trans activists, and we have errors of political fact in the widespread misunderstandings around these issue. Thousands of minors are now undergoing surgeries and hormone treatments to modify their sex. That is a fact. Many of these minors have had FAR less than the previously recommended (required!) two years of intensive therapy support. That is a fact. Many therapists and psychologists are being actively discouraged by laws and professional standards from doing anything with these patients other than affirming. That is a fact. These facts are not widely known, and this is not purely unintentional.

I like to check into various subreddits and interact with believers of different ideological commitment and background on Instagram. My consumption of content (like everyone else’s) is certainly biased toward creators who I already agree with. Unlike everyone else I spend a significant portion of time listening to the claims of those I disagree with though. Anti-racists and gender ideologues and intersectional feminists and the various other denizens of privileged critical theory schools are represented. Radical environmentalists, anarchists, Marxists – I read them all. I’ve spent the last few years systematically digesting the foundational works of social justice (books by Judith Butler and Kimberle Crenshaw and Michel Foucault). This is probably something that very few of the modern woke believers have done (and I’m sympathetic-those authors take opacity and imprecision and tedium to new and incredible depths; perhaps only Foucault would I recommend to people interested in learning about the world). One of the subreddits is R/WitchesVsPatriarchy. During the past 2 or 3 years I’ve seen the boards almost completely captured by trans and pro-trans ‘witches’. This is one of the alarming and telling features of gender ideology: it cannot persist in a pluralistic and tolerant environment. Like fundamentalist Islam or the Trotskyists or the Pilgrims of the early American colonies these ideas need the power of unanimity; they are fundamentally intolerant. They must either take over (if only by the silent assent of many skeptical and uneasy participants) or be beaten back but they cannot abide a situation in which their claims are routinely challenged or questioned. This is powerful evidence of the frail and unsustainable quality of the belief system.

R/WitchesVsPatriarchy has become a blindingly supportive place (not for dissenters, of course; I was forbidden from posting a LONG time ago). The normal course of things is for a trans witch to post a selfie or a news story and the responses can be perfectly predicted. They could be copied and pasted across posts and there would be no dissonance. The photos are greeted by compliments and support which is a bit touching and also a bit cloying. This kind of praise and affirmation is typical of feminine spaces, where the praise is less indicative of real observations (as it would be with men) and more a signal of unity and association. The responses to news stories which deal with trans-adjacent current events are equally predictable and unanimous. I find a very interesting phenomenon: when it comes to debates about women’s spaces or athletic competition the members literally CANNOT conceptualize any legitimate disagreement. The only reason to support these “anti-trans” policies is transphobia. All political debates involve competing interests and trade-offs but these (mostly) women cannot fathom how any woman might take a different position. This is especially striking because the larger debates around the issues are quite sincere, and the interests are important and distinct. When deciding whether to house trans women prisoners (often with the full suite of male biological features) with women the stakes are very high. To expose women to predatory males who may only pretending to be trans in order to improve their prison environment or to pathological autogynephiles who also may be sadistic and anti-social and aggressive is a terrible risk and the women have no recourse or protection once the decision is made. Certainly SOME of these prisoners fall into those categories. The countervailing interest is the protection of feminine or gender non-conforming prisoners… but this can be partially accomplished by housing the trans women in male facilities and placing them in protective custody (PC), which is the normal practice. The REAL interest (if you listen to advocates, which I do) is to affirm these prisoners’ self-conception. Such a personal and subjective goal seems like a shallow basis upon which to change centuries of prison policy, so its urgent nature is backstopped with the looming implicit threat of suicide or self-harm if the trans prisoners are NOT affirmed, which is a specter that looms over every part of the gender controversy. It is a manipulation tactic. When making the wrong decision leads to many people killing themselves it ispo facto becomes a life-and-death decision. Whether there might not be an alternative remedy (mental health support, for instance) is not considered to be a legitimate avenue of inquiry. Put the trans women with women (for “trans women are women!”… which, if it were true, would make this entire debate incoherent) or they will be driven to suicide. The redditors take the suicide threat quite seriously and apply it to women’s changing areas and sports leagues. Yet the protection of the lives of trans women is not sufficient to sustain the narrative. The competing interests also must be negated, and so the Reddit witches deny that having biological males competing with women or adult “women” with penises disrobing in the same facilities as those used by young girls is an issue. They simply deny that injury is likely (in the former instance) or that there is a much higher risk of sexual assault (in the latter). They are able to do this because of a fairly rigid and consistent media blackout. They haven’t encountered any cases of adult trans women abusing girls or women in the news – yet it happens every week. One third of all sex offenders in the California state prison system are trans. They maintain a collective illusion because they are swaddled in the thick and comforting fabric of systematic media omission.

I’m certainly not trying to perpetuate any transphobic beliefs or attitudes. I’d be surprised if trans people were any more likely than anyone else to offend criminally and sexually, but they’re still people (many of them are men, after all). The idea that there’s NO risk is absurd on its face. When you add the massive incentives (available in the U.K. and, to some extent, in certain US states) to ‘identify’ as a woman while in the grip of the criminal justice system it further complicates the issue. You’re giving HIGHLY stigmatized people the chance to adopt an entirely new identity. The identity has a kind of automatic cachet among virtually every person and organization on the Left. You’re also introducing the distinct possibility of being housed upon conviction with women instead of men. Were I facing a long prison sentence I would certainly choose to be housed with women rather than men. Enough to become Jamela and start wearing makeup and a wig? I’m not sure, but I am fairly sure the incentives have influenced personal decisions here. That’s what incentives do and pretending otherwise – that this is one area where predation or deceit simply can’t exist because we’re talking about trans people – is foolhardy. I won’t describe any of the cases of women convicts being raped by trans women or trans women sex offenders using the confusion around their transition to get access to battered women in a shelter, or to children, or trans women using their identities to victimize the vulnerable but these things sadly do happen and policy-makers must reckon with this. If THAT’S transphobic, then so be it.

We need a functional media to sort these topics and other related questions out. Our current situation, in which people have entirely different conceptions of the scale and shape of gender ideology-related issues, leads to many sincere and intelligent people literally believing that OTHER sincere and intelligent people are abetting a genocide. When you combine that kind of deep conviction with ready weapons and mental illness you will see violence. Aside from that, though, the minors now struggling with gender dysphoria and the prisoners now serving time and the mental healthcare providers now seeing patients need US – we, the citizens and voters of this country – to arrive at a workable compromise, which acknowledges different interests and values. This will please almost no one but the current situation – in which half of the country is suspected of grooming children and the other half is accused of promoting mass murder of the vulnerable – cannot continue without great suffering among the most marginal people in our society, whether or not those people happen to be innocent schoolchildren, hiding in classrooms.

Thanks for reading