In August, trans-identifying male Robert “Robin” Westman sprayed bullets through stained glass, killing two children and injuring 14 at Annunciation Catholic School. In 2023, trans-identifying female Audrey “Aiden” Hale shot and killed six schoolchildren in Nashville, and in 2019, trans-identifying female Maya “Alec” McKinney shot indiscriminately into a Denver classroom, killing one student.
These massacres foment a question: what is driving the seemingly pervasive trend of violence from trans-identifying individuals?
As uncomfortable as it may be, trans ideology in practice must be examined if that question is to be answered. Often, gender transition is a canary-in-the-coalmine for deeper mental illnesses — gender dysphoria, bipolar depression, or PTSD — that manifest as self-hatred. In the face of these genuine mental sicknesses, gender transition offers an “escape” just short of suicide: a new self, a new name, and a new body.
For example, social gender transition requires the death of a birth name — coined, literally, a “dead name” — and the death of everything associated with that previous self: “pronouns,” style and dress, and often, relationships, communities, and family ties.
Medical gender transition requires doctor-inflicted mutilation: the amputation of breasts, removal of healthy sex organs and genitals, facial plastic surgery, voice alteration, and, on a chemical level, cross-sex hormones meant to alter behaviors and endocrine function.
Once a trans-identifying person’s old self is “dead” after social and medical transition, objections to trans ideology are not merely general or intellectual, but personal. To question transgenderism is to question the lives and identities trans-identifying people have individually created and purchased for themselves. Any acknowledgement of the old, dead person to the new, trans-identifying person (for example, using the wrong “pronouns”) is existentially offensive because the old person is “dead.”
Trans ideology has never existed without stark opposition, but right now, the “existential threat” to transgenderism is growing: “common sense” is making a popular comeback in vocal conservative and Republican circles, the Trump administration flatly rejects trans ideology, and many Americans are realizing that “gender-affirming care” is not healthcare. Trans ideologues took a hit this Supreme Court term, and the majorities in both houses of Congress affirm the administration’s executive order recognizing only two sexes.
Trans-identifying individuals see these broad cultural changes as personal attacks — and in the face of “existential threats,” violence is rubber-stamped as a valid defense mechanism. Just a month before Robert Westman opened fire on schoolchildren, Eugene Weekly published its weekly magazine, titled “Are You Triggered?” with the subheading, “As the Trump administration attacks trans people, some queer folks are armed and ready to bash back.” The front page featured a man dressed in women’s clothes, wearing purple eyeshadow and painted nails, and sporting a large semi-automatic rifle.
While some trans-identifying ideologues (like the editors at Eugene Weekly) channel violence in verbal or written fashion, others are incited to actual, physical violence — what else was the Eugene Weekly’s cover intended to incite among an already mentally unstable population other than literally “bashing back” with bullets?
It should be no surprise that some trans-identifying individuals have killed and died defending their self-made identities in the face of “existential threats” — first, because they’re being told to arm themselves, and second, because mass acts of violence are not too much farther down the road of violence already embarked upon in the “suicide” of social and medical gender transition.
Take Robert “Robin” Westman’s manifesto, for example. He described feeling trapped in transgenderism and blamed his mother for his crimes because she allowed him to transition from male to female. He etched anti-Christian messages onto his ammunition and used a photo of Jesus Christ as target practice. He was ready to die and take as many children as possible with him. Audrey “Aiden” Hale, the trans-identifying woman who committed the 2023 Covenant School shooting, wrote a similar manifesto. She expressed suicidal thoughts, despair over her mental health, and questions about her identity despite already transitioning.
In both cases, untreated mental illness and the suicidal self-destruction of gender transition birthed violence in response to a growing cultural rejection of trans ideology. Transitioning did not alleviate but worsened their mental illnesses. Audrey and Robert committed violence against themselves; consequently, they were easily mobilized to commit violence against the Christian communities often associated with the cultural rejection of trans ideology.
All in all, the first act of violence committed by trans-identifying individuals is gender transition. It is self-rejection and self-harm born from genuine mental illness — a metaphorical death, nearly suicide. Beyond that first act of violence, further violence is but another step down a road of self-harm, desperation, and irrational defensiveness.
So, as we grapple with the question of trans violence as a society, let us first consider that transgenderism itself is born of violence — violence against one’s own body, mind, and soul.
Hannah Lape is Legislative Assistant for the Concerned Women for America Legislative Action Committee, dedicated to promoting Biblical values and Constitutional principles in public policy.
