Following the tragic shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, which left six dead, including three children, thought leaders and pundits on the right have wasted no time capitalizing on the fact that the shooter was transgender. Politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., (whose Twitter count was restricted after she repeatedly shared anti-trans messaging) and prominent conservative anchors on Fox News have contributed to rhetoric that dubs the Tennessee shooting an act of “trans terrorism” — a hashtag that went viral in far-right circles almost immediately after police identified the shooter as trans.
On Tuesday night, much of Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show was a deeply disturbing diatribe targeting trans people, painting them as terroristic anti-Christs, afforded special privileges by the elite. “The people in charge despise working-class whites, but they venerate the trans community,” Carlson said.
Carlson is wrong; if there is one measure that would curb rampant gun deaths in this country, it would be making it more difficult to obtain assault-style weapons.
“The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity, and therefore its natural enemy,” he continued, echoing violent and fascistic ideologies, like crypto- and neofascism. “In Christianity, the price of admission is admitting that you’re not God. Christians openly concede that they have no real power over anything, and for that matter, very little personal virtue. … The trans movement takes the opposite view. Trans ideology claims dominion over nature itself. ‘We can change the identity we were born with,’ they will tell you with wild-eyed certainty. Christians can never agree with the statement because these are powers they believe God alone possesses.” He concluded the segment with a warning for Americans about the dangers of the so-called trans movement: “Yesterday’s massacre did not happen because of lax gun laws. Yesterday’s massacre happened because of a deranged and demonic ideology that is infecting this country.”
Here, of course, Carlson is wrong; if there is one measure that would curb rampant gun deaths in this country, it would be making it more difficult to obtain assault-style weapons, of which police said the Nashville attacker had two (plus a handgun). As my colleague Hayes Brown argued, access to guns, not ideology, is fundamentally responsible for the mass shooting crisis.
But, given the tragic reality of rampant access to guns, research shows that there is a commonality among mass shooters, who often experience trauma and deep levels of social rejection and bullying. And ironically, it is precisely this kind of rhetoric Carlson shared, which targets and vilifies entire groups of people, that will increase the likelihood of this type of violence, in lieu of a ban on assault weapons.
Sociologist James Densley, a criminal justice professor at Metropolitan State University, and Jillian Peterson, associate professor of criminology at Hamline University, conducted a rigorous study on the profiles of every mass shooter, defined as everyone “who shot and killed four or more people in a public place, and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces and places of worship since 1999," to gain better insight into any potential commonalities. The hope was that an evidence-based approach to the psychology of mass shooters would make it easier to detect people prone to committing these acts of violence before tragedy struck. The duo’s research was funded by the Justice Department and ultimately compiled into a book, “The Violence Project: How To Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic.”
“There’s this really consistent pathway,” Peterson said of mass shooters in an interview with Melanie Warner in Politico last May. “Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers.”
Crucially, this internalized pain at some point becomes externalized, Peterson explained: “What’s different from traditional suicide is that the self-hate turns against a group. They start asking themselves, ‘Whose fault is this?’ Is it a racial group or women or a religious group, or is it my classmates? The hate turns outward.”
The hateful rhetoric of those such as Carlson helps perpetuate these very social dynamics. In fact, Carlson’s rhetoric is so divisive and unhinged that it helps create the social conditions that hurt and isolate both the victimized — “working-class whites” — and the vilified — trans people. Carlson creates a direct and spurious connection between the perceived social injustices of working-class, white Americans and “the rise of transgenderism” (referred to on Fox News earlier this month as a “social contagion”). In so doing, he is terrorizing the trans community, fomenting hate and social isolation.
Watching Carlson’s segment tears at something deeply embedded, corroding already painful wounds which work to convince us, as trans people, that we are not worthy.
Many within the trans community are gripped by acute feelings of social rejection and concomitant fears. It is the reason for the mental health crisis among transgender youth, which includes extraordinarily high rates of suicide and suicidal ideation. “Data indicate that 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth,” a study on the subject in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence from 2020 concluded. Some of the leading risk factors include “interpersonal and environmental microaggressions, internalized self-stigma” and social exclusion from school, peers and family — all of which are the byproduct of the worldviews espoused by the likes of Greene and Carlson.
Watching Carlson’s segment tears at something deeply embedded, corroding already painful wounds which work to convince us, as trans people, that we are not worthy at best and unnatural at worst (notions I can, of course, resoundingly reject intellectually, but which can be harder to do emotionally). In proselytizing this worldview, leaders like Carlson and Greene foster political and social conditions which, as I’ve written about before, made me want to take my own life when I first came out as trans. It makes the world a more frightening place to operate in as a trans person, and I say this as someone who has the benefit of an enormous amount of privilege. “We were already fearing for our lives. Now, it’s even worse,” Aislinn Bailey, the acting president of Tri-Cities Transgender, a Tennessee-based trans-led support and advocacy group, told NBC News, as trans people across the state became further gripped by fear this week.
I want to clearly declare that, first and foremost, we must blame the unfettered access to guns for this crisis. I say that unequivocally. But, again, given the terrifying reality of lax gun laws, the social isolation and trauma induced by the right’s hateful rhetoric should not be overlooked. This hateful rhetoric breeds violence — to say nothing of the fact that this hateful rhetoric is violence.
