My new column in Taki’s Magazine is about how the single data point of the Trans School Shooter exemplifies a medium size trend, the F to M mania, which is the craziest illustration of a large trend: the rise in mental illness among young women.
Seeds of Discontent
Steve SailerMarch 29, 2023
Mass shootings represent masculinity at its most toxic.
Hence, we shouldn’t get carried away trying to discern important societal trends in the sample size of a single woman-bites-dog mass shooting in Nashville, in which a troubled young woman shot up her old Christian elementary school.
Moreover, I’m writing before the Nashville shooter’s manifesto or the name of the other school she had planned to attack is made public. All I know at present is that the police chief said that she had “some resentment for having to go to that school.”
Still…this was at least the third school or workplace public shooting of the past half decade to feature a real-life female who claimed to be male, as the Nashville shooter did intermittently. Another F-to-M shot up a Colorado school in 2019 because the kids made fun of her desire to be a man, and a third killed four coworkers in Maryland in 2018.
(In case you are wondering, I can’t find any reporting on whether any of these shooters were shooting up with testosterone.)
The only thing amusing about this tragic incident is that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press all strenuously avoided using any pronouns, masculine or feminine, when referring to mass shooter Audrey/Aiden Hale. Nobody can accuse the Gray Lady of misgendering a mass murderer!
Read the whole thing there.
By the way, the press still can’t agree on the burning question of proper pronouns. The Washington Post is going with “their”:
NASHVILLE — The attacker who killed six people at a small Christian school in Nashville had been receiving treatment for “an emotional disorder” and hid several weapons from their parents before opening fire, police said Tuesday.
While the New York Times laboriously avoids pronouns altogether:
The authorities said on Tuesday that the 28-year-old perpetrator had legally purchased seven firearms recently—including the three used in the shooting—and was being treated by a doctor for an emotional disorder. Chief John Drake of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said that the assailant’s parents had felt that their child “should not own weapons” and believed that their child did not.