By Rod DREHER

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In Minneapolis on Wednesday, a heavily armed young man opened fire on a Catholic church full of children praying, then killed himself. The gunman, Robin Westman, 23, identified as a woman; sorry, U.S. media, the evil bastard left this world as he entered it: as a male. Two children died, and many more were left wounded.

Whenever there is a mass shooting, the American media and liberal politicians follow a well-practiced formula. The core reason is always the easy availability of guns in the United States. If the killer is somehow tied to the political Right, they emphasize his politics. If he is tied to the political Left, or to a faction favored by the Left, they de-emphasize that fact. The object, of course, is to control the narrative.

Jacob Frey, the Democratic mayor of the liberal city, told a crowd, “Don’t let anyone tell you it’s not about the guns, because it is.”

“I’ve heard a whole lot of hate directed at our trans community,” Frey continued. “Anybody that is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community—or any other community out there—has lost their sense of common humanity.”

We heard the same kind of talk in 2023, when a female-to-male transgender entered into the Covenant School, a Presbyterian elementary school she had once attended, and massacred children and teachers. Don’t say trans! was the media line. Whatever motivated that disturbed young woman to attack the school children, it could not have anything to do with her transgendered status. Same with Robin Westman.

I disagree. It is perfectly fair, and even important, to consider the role that Westman’s transgenderism played in this mass murder attempt. To be clear, not all trans people are potential mass killers. The connection, if there is one, has to do with two things: mental instability and a sense of violent grievance.

Not long ago, gender dysphoria, the medical condition that leads people to become transgender, was considered a mental illness. People who suffer from it are entitled to compassionate treatment, but still, they were believed to be suffering from a mental disorder.

With the Great Awokening, that all changed. Trans people became progressive idols. The media, educational institutions, and corporations, as well as the federal government and some state governments, celebrated transgenderism as a great and glorious gift. They even began normalizing transgenderism among small children and pushing for laws and policies allowing children to transition.

Major hospitals began hormone therapy and even radical surgeries, like mastectomies, on minors. We are now hearing testimonies from ‘de-transitioners’ talking about how health care professionals put them on hormones after a single meeting. In 2019, a physician at a major American hospital told me confidentially that the order came down from the corporate leadership there that doctors are to provide full trans care for anyone who asks for it, even if this violates the physician’s best judgment.

It became taboo to ask if a young person’s claim of trans status was in fact a manifestation of a deeper mental disorder. It is widely recognized today that American youth are in the midst of an unprecedented mental health crisis. For example, a 2023 study in JAMA Pediatrics, a leading medical journal, found a 50 percent increase in youth visits to emergency rooms over the period 2011 to 2020—especially for anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation.

A 2020 study in the medical journal Pediatrics found that transgender youth are two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than their non-trans peers. The standard explanation for this is that they suffer from discrimination and rejection. This is very hard to believe, given that for some years now, LGBT people have been treated in popular culture as special, privileged entities. Woke America is a place where a small boy who performs as a “drag kid” can appear on national television and be celebrated for his courage. “His bravery is inspiring so many,” said the newsreader.

Might it be the case that at least some mentally ill people identify as transgender as a manifestation of their deeper mental illness? The video and writings that Robin Westman left behind revealed that he was obsessed with murdering children, with antisemitism, with killing President Trump, and with other creepily anti-social impulses. His gender dysphoria might have been only one aspect of his overall mental breakdown. But in a culture, medical and otherwise, in which transgenderism can only ever be affirmed and celebrated, doctors and others would have missed that.

There is also a rising glorification of grievance and radical violence among trans people and their allies. Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan once sported a t-shirt featuring a large knife and the slogan “Protect Trans Kids.” So many violent Antifa members on the U.S. West Coast are trans that the term “Trantifa” has been applied to them.

This past January, a member of a transgender cult is believed to have shot and killed a guard at the U.S.-Canada border. Teresa Youngblut, the male transgender identifying as a woman, who was charged in the killing, is a member of a transgender rights collective suspected by authorities of ties to other killings across the United States.

After the Minneapolis shooting, prominent male-to-female transgender Brianna Wu posted a tweet on X denouncing the killing, saying in part:

Obviously, I will not defend this. Nor will I deny that the trans community is getting more radicalized and more comfortable with violence. I denounce it unequivocally.

But then adding:

I would ask you to understand, there is an organized project to eliminate us from public life right now. It affects our mental health. It’s hard for me to believe we have a future in America many days.

What Wu calls a project “to eliminate us from public life” is the commonsense restoration of the rights of biological women to their own private spaces and their own sports teams. It’s the removal of gender ideology from elementary schools. What we see here is a very common argument we have heard for years from trans people and their advocates: “Give us what we want or we will kill ourselves.”

Americans have finally had enough of being held hostage by these disturbed people and the bullies who advocate for them. That community—the transgendered and their allies—work themselves up into a frenzy of imagined persecution. The media have for many years framed debate over transgenderism as a matter of arguing over trans people’s ‘right to exist.’ See how that works? If you criticize transgenderism, you might be genocidal.

In 2022, NBC News reported a 266 percent increase in homicides against trans people in just one year. An epidemic of trans slaughter, right? If you read the story, though, you find that only 11 trans people had been killed that year, versus three the year before. At the time, I investigated the circumstances surrounding those 11 murders. In only two of these cases might anti-trans hatred have been the motive.