The Nashville killer’s status as a trans person wasn’t ever in doubt. What one couldn’t truly be certain of was whether their being trans had anything at all to do with the attack.
After all, there have been a ton of mass murders where the killer wasn’t trans, had no interest in being trans, or anything of the sort.
Which is why there was so much interest in the manifesto left by the killer. What was going on inside that sick brain?
A report from the Daily Mail reveals at least some what the killer was thinking, and it was all rage.
Transgender killer [name redacted] wrote about her ‘imaginary penis’ and how she would ‘kill’ to get puberty blockers in the weeks before her horrific attack on the Covenant School in Nashville last year.
The Tennessee Star obtained some four dozen pages of [the killer’s] writings that shed light on her female-to-male transition and why she shot and killed six people at the elementary school in March 2023.
[The killer] wrote about anger toward her parents, how she hated her conservative Christian upbringing, and how she had suffered because hormone blockers were not available when she was as a child.
The explosive writings, sometimes referred to as [the killer’s] manifesto,’ have been a source of controversy, with many accusing officials of keeping them secret because they would hurt the trans community.
Now released, they help explain why the 28-year-old artist, who identified as a male named Aiden, shot her way into the Tennessee school, killing three adults and three nine-year-olds, before responding officers killed her.
…
[The killer] used violent language when talking about the emergence of puberty blockers in the 2010s.
They were hailed at the time for helping transgender pre-teens safely delay the onset of puberty’I’d kill to have those resources,’ wrote Hale.
2007 was the birth of puberty blockers and a newfound discovery for treatment of non-conforming transgender children.’
They came too late for [the killer], who ‘was in the 6th grade, puberty already hit me,’ she wrote.
My own take is that it didn’t matter if puberty blockers had been available or not. That’s not what led this individual to decide to take people’s lives.
There’s one thing we see all too often with mass murderers like this, regardless of what the ostensible motivation is–either being upset that the world didn’t conform to transgender ideology much sooner, out of a desire to force gun control to be passed, or incel misogyny–the unifying theme is rage.
I’m not talking about just being angry from time to time. We all feel that. It’s part of being human.
What I’m talking about is the rage with which some people seem to view every aspect of society. This rage that some people seem to carry with them like it’s their wallet or keys. They can’t seem to go anywhere without it.
For most people, that rage just makes them unbearable to be around, but in some others, it breaks them. They don’t understand where the line is and so they take their rage and explode, hurting or killing innocent people. If you look, you can see that most of the time, they feel righteous in what they plan to do. They’re absolutely convinced in that moment that they’re in the right, that they’re doing a good, noble thing.
That’s because rage infects your mind and convinces you that everyone else is to blame. It convinces you that you’re “othered” to such a degree that you flip it around and begin to believe that those others aren’t really people anymore.
Again, most people who buy into the rage ideologies–those who take a position and become furious that anyone would dare disagree, that take it as a positional good that is a test of whether one is moral or not–never really progress beyond yelling or, at worst, throwing a punch. (Does anyone else remember “Punch a Nazi” by a group that was convinced everyone who disagreed with them was a Nazi?) It’s bad, but it’s not the end of the world.
These people take it in a whole new direction, though, because they’re already filled with rage for some reason.
This is why the manifesto needed to be released. We need to understand the rage behind these attacks so we can start working to defuse it.
Assuming, of course, the other rage-aholics will ever come to terms with the fact that this is a thing.
