A Murderer’s Identity
Lawyers for Anderson Lee Aldrich have stated that the shooter, who left 5 dead in Club Q earlier this week, is nonbinary. The anti-trans propaganda machine has already declared the shooting cannot be a hate crime. Was this the killer’s intent?
by Evan Urquhart
Attorneys for Anderson Lee Aldrich, the suspect accused of murderering 5 and injuring 18 in Club Q in Colorado early this week, have filed a motion informing the court that Anderson has claimed to be nonbinary and explaining they (the attorneys), will use they/them pronouns to refer to Aldrich.
Right wing outlets notorious for their anti-trans bias, such as the Washington Examiner, are rushing to trumpet the idea that, with this filing, doubt has been cast on the hypothesis that Aldrich’s crimes were motivated by anti-LGBTQ+ hatred. The insinuation that a claim of nonbinary identity exempts a murderer from being anti-LGBTQ+ is, ironically, being made by the very hatemongers who have contributed to a climate where violence like the events in Colorado was inevitable. It’s being pushed on the right despite other reports which paint a picture of a young person who used homophobic slurs and likely posted a racist YouTube video.
A countervailing hypothesis, which so far I’ve only seen from trans people on Twitter, is that Aldrich is fucking with us. This would make sense if Aldrich’s background turns out to be similar to the Christchurch shooter; in other words, an extremely far right, extremely online person whose violent extremism came through a right wing radicalization factory delivered via memes and trolling. If this is a false claim of nonbinary identity, it would have been made with the hopes of causing maximum confusion in the press, of exacerbating the pain in the LGBTQ+ community, and of making it more difficult to call out the anti-trans and anti-gay hatred the attack was based on. That sort of thing would be very much in line with an extremist coming from that sort of “alt right” environment.
For now, the facts are simply that the shooter’s lawyers have made a filing that claims Aldrich is nonbinary. We can’t be sure what to make of that, and unlike the right-wing press we want to be careful not to get ahead of the facts on this one. If Aldrich has connections to 4chan or similar sources of meme-poisoning, it seems certain this will be known shortly. If, on the other hand, Aldrich is a nonbinary individual, that will also become clear. We’ve decided to hold off on using pronouns to refer to Alrich, in the meantime. While we respect the preferred pronouns of everyone, even killers, we’re just not willing to take the chance that we’d be enabling a cruel mockery of our community because a hate-filled murderer wanted it that way.