The attacker in the Minneapolis school shooting filled hundreds of pages in her diaries, documenting a fascination with school shooters, a desire to kill President Trump, and a toxic mix of racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia.
But in the aftermath of the shooting on Wednesday at Annunciation Catholic Church, many right-wing commentators zeroed in on a single facet of the attacker’s life: At 17, the shooter legally changed her name to Robin Westman from Robert Westman, because she “identified as female and wants her name to reflect that identification,” according to court documents.
The shooting has inflamed an already vitriolic debate over the very legitimacy of transgender identity. Several prominent right-wing activists have pointed to the attacker’s own seeming ambivalence about her gender identity to bolster their contention that all trans people engage in a form of self-deception. Others have gone further, using this case to falsely portray all transgender people as prone to mental illness and violence.
Matt Walsh, a writer and podcaster at The Daily Wire, a right-wing site, posted on social media that “when you affirm the perverse fantasies of sick and delusional people — and you do it systematically, at scale — you are creating precisely this kind of catastrophe. It was inevitable.”
Like other commentators, he referred to the shooting as an act of “trans terrorism.”
The focus on Ms. Westman’s gender identity echoed the politicized reaction to a 2023 mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, which was carried out by a former student whom the police said was transgender. As with that case, Minneapolis authorities have not shared any evidence linking the shooter’s gender identity to the motive for the attack, which killed two children and injured 18 others.
But the Minneapolis attack took place at an even more difficult and challenging time for transgender advocates. The Trump administration and Republican-led states are seeking to limit official recognition of transgender identities in many areas of life — from driver’s licenses to school bathrooms to military service. Some Democratic politicians are urging their party to reconsider some support for trans rights. And polls show that while many Americans want to protect trans people from discrimination, they also think that society has gone too far in accommodating them.
With support so unstable, trans activists are worried that the reaction to the Minneapolis attack could fuel an even stronger backlash.
“To scapegoat an entire marginalized community in a moment of such intense national grief is wrong, dangerous, and dehumanizing,” said Brandon Wolf, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group.
Ms. Westman’s notebooks were full of chaotic and disturbing ideas, often mixed with self-hatred. Given the sheer volume of her writing, she wrote relatively little about being transgender or about trans rights, while often going on long hate-filled rants about other aspects of her life.
Her thoughts about being trans were often conflicting.
“I don’t know if I am a trans girl,” she wrote in June. “It is undeniable that I like how I look in girl clothes. I like thinking about being a girl.”
Ms. Westman, 23, also alluded to the distress that many trans people have said they experience: “My face never matches how I feel,” she wrote.
But some conservative commentators have focused on one line: “I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brainwashed myself.”
Most major medical and mental health groups in the United States have said that affirming a transgender person’s identity, medically and socially, can be effective in relieving the distress many experience because of the mismatch between their bodies and their internal sense of gender.
But conservative activists claim that left-wing orthodoxy has corrupted the medical establishment, and they have sought to link the depravity of Ms. Westman’s attack to her gender identity.
Chloe Cole, a conservative activist who returned to her female identity after living as a transgender teenager, suggested that such violence could be an outcome of social support for people who identify as transgender. Society is “lying to them, and telling them they were born wrong, yet we expect them to turn out normal?” she posted on the day of the attack.
Alabama’s Republican lieutenant governor, Will Ainsworth, wrote that “the sooner everyone accepts that God made men, and God made women, and one can never become the other, the quicker we can lessen these events from happening.”
Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA, a conservative group focused on young adults, argued for restricting the rights of trans people. “If you are crazy enough to want to hormonally and surgically ‘change your sex,’” he posted, “you have a mental disorder, and you are too crazy to own a firearm.”
Fixating on one aspect of a shooter’s identity is not that unusual. Social scientists said that the public tends to focus on the identities of violent offenders when they are members of minority groups.
But being transgender is not considered a mental illness according to the American Psychiatric Association. Nor are trans people linked to higher rates of violence, said John Pachankis, a professor of public health and psychiatry and director of a Yale program for L.G.B.T.Q. mental health.
“Violence is determined by a multitude of societal problems and personal life circumstances,” he said. “A school shooter who happens to be transgender has more in common with other school shooters than with other transgender people.”
Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper, a child and adolescent psychologist, has called for a slower and more cautious approach to medical transition for minors. But, she said, “it is deeply upsetting that, in the wake of such a horrific tragedy, so much attention is being placed on the killer’s gender identity rather than on the urgent mental health crises facing our nation’s youth.”
Aric Toler contributed reporting.
Amy Harmon covers how shifting conceptions of gender affect everyday life in the United States.
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