Lessons Learned from the Nashville School Shooting...
Trans School Shooting // Transurrection // Trans Genocide
Trans School Shooting
Sometime in 2017, Mister Metokur covered the Randy Stair workplace/supermarket killing spree. In his Internet Insanity video, Metokur explicitly links Stair’s “latent” transgenderism with a growing homicidal intent which resulted in the deaths of three coworkers and Stair’s suicide. Metokur’s stream helped popularize the idea that transgenderism is not a legitimate gender expression but the constellation of dangerous mental health issues masked in the language of gender expression to achieve social acceptability. This point was evidenced by an animation commissioned by Stair of himself and Amber, his “OC” (a self-reflective online avatar), committing a school shooting. By the end of the animation, the character of Stair has their female soul released through suicide. The wider point of Metokur’s video was that: people like Randy Stair are “an absolute joke of a fucking human being”, complete failures in life whose inability to reconcile with personal angst caused tragedy for several families. As such, people like Randy Stair should be subject to public mockery as a warning to other would-be shooters that they will be denied the glory of an infamous suicide.
In the aftermath of the Nashville Christian school shooting, Metokur’s video serves as a somewhat chilling echo from the past. Indeed, we know that the Nashville shooter, Aiden Hale, identified as female-to-male transgender, attended the school around a decade ago, expressed their intent to die through their actions, and was seen shooting at police. Although the manifesto is still yet to be published, there are significant questions around the degree to which the desire for revenge / to punishment school and the desire for suicide by cop converge as a radicalising factor for some individuals to commit school shootings.
News media appears to have been pretty adamant in misgendering Hale, referring to them as She and using the birth name Audrey. Unfortunately, some segments of the LGBT+ community were outraged at the misgendering, which only suggests that honouring Hale's gender identity is more important than the six victims they left behind. Indeed, for some right-wing commentators, it has become a point to reject Hale’s gender identity as a way to mock a monster, similar to mocking Hitler for only having one testicle. This reiterates Metokur’s point that monsters like Hale do not deserve respect because they transgressed a deeply held social value and committed an asymmetrical act of violence against the innocent.
There is also news value in having Hale be a female school shooter “dressed up like Rambo gunning down babies” to quote Nancy Grace. There is a social expectation that outward acts of violent aggression are typically “men's crimes”, while women’s acts of violence are typically framed as defensive. So, when a woman commits acts of violence against innocent people, it creates an inflexion point for public comments to contest “what went wrong” with the woman. In Hale’s case, the introduction of exogenous (medical) testosterone as part of gender-affirming healthcare is seen to be largely responsible for causing aggression. The other part of the perceived explanation is that Hale was never socialized as male to compensate for the testosterone. Both discourses draw upon the biological and social explanations of behaviour to broadly argue that “affirmative” care is a boundless concept which advocates for all forms of identity expression. As such, it is believed that affirmative care offers little guidance on preventing the escalation of anti-social behaviour, presuming that such social pathologies are caused by an unrealised gender identity rather than gender identity disorders being a manifestation of deeper mental health issues.
Transurrection
In the days following the Nashville school shooting, transgender activists and their allies stormed the Kentucky Capitol protesting proposed “anti-trans” state legislation. The “Transurrection”, as it was known online, became quickly framed as part of the so-called “Trans Day of Vengeance”. This framing created some unfortunate optics for LBGT+ advocates, with open suggestions that Hale had internalized rhetoric around the Trans Day of Vengeance as a justification for the school shooting.