Right-Wing Rushes to Demonize Trans Community in Wake of Shooting

The tragic shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, TN has resulted in an all-out propaganda attack on the transgender community, based on the likely trans male identity of shooter Aiden Hale.

by Evan Urquhart

In the wake of a tragic shooting at a small Christian school in Nashville, TN, the gender identity of the shooter has come to dominate coverage in the right wing press. Three adults and three 9-year-old children were killed in the Covenant School, and police have said the shooter was prepared to kill more people before they intervened, fatally shooting the attacker. Early reports identified the shooter as “female” but social media accounts indicate he listed his name as Aiden Hale and pronouns as he/him, according to the New York Times and other news sources. This has led to widespread, and quite reasonable, speculation that Hale was a transgender man.

screenshot from the New York Times

The New York Times and several other mainstream outlets have chosen to avoid pronouns when referring to Hale, while right wing outlets have invariably used she and her. (Assigned will be using the pronouns we consider most likely to be accurate, which are he and him. This is an editorial judgment based on the facts as we understand them at this time.) 

While there has been speculation from far right accounts on social media, including fringe congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene, that testosterone could have played a role in Hale’s actions, there is no reporting that the 28-year-old had accessed cross sex hormones or any other form of gender affirming care. The Daily Mail (a UK tabloid that is not always an accurate source) reported on Tuesday that Hale’s parents were conservative Christians who did not accept his identity, and Hale lived a double life as a result.

screenshot from the Daily Mail

In the right wing press, the shooter’s transgender identity has come to dominate the coverage, with many stories referring to Hale as a “transgender killer” or “transgender shooter.” Multiple stories from the right have further speculated that the shooter, who had once himself been a student at the Covenant School, was targeting the school based on its Christian affiliation. As of this writing, there is no evidence to that effect. Police reports have suggested that other possible targets included Hale’s family and a local mall.

One prominent right wing figure who strongly endorsed the theory that Christians were being targeted for their faith was Tucker Carlson, who called the trans movement “the natural enemy” of Christianity.

screenshot from Fox News

Carlson and others highlighted a statement which was claimed to have been put out by a now-locked Twitter account, from a group calling themselves the Trans Resistance Network. The account was created in June 2022 and has about 3200 followers. The statement (which cannot be verified as having come from this or any other trans rights group but at least superficially appears legitimate), expresses “deepest sympathies and heartfelt prayers” for the families impacted by the shooting, before speculating that Hale “felt he had no other effective way to be seen than to lash out by taking the life of others.”

A second strain of coverage on the right has tied the Nashville shooting to a small number of other shooters who identified as transgender. Among the four shooters listed is the alleged far right anti-LGBTQ+ shooter in Colorado Springs, whose claim of a nonbinary identity was first made to that shooter’s lawyers in the immediate aftermath of their alleged hate crimes. The other shooters listed include Hale, a trans man who killed himself and three others in a Rite Aid in Aberdeen, MD, and a trans male teen who took part in a school shooting in Denver where one person was killed by his cisgender co-shooter.

Data on ideologically motivated shootings in the US has long shown that the overwhelming majority of such shootings are undertaken by members of the far right. A report by the Anti-Defamation League found that every single death in an ideologically motivated shooting in 2022 was perpetrated by an adherent of the far right, and that right wing extremists were responsible for 75 percent of the deaths in mass shootings in the past decade.

Every mass shooting is a tragedy, and shootings that involve children shock the conscience on a level little else does. The likely trans male identity of the Nashville shooter is a fact that does not need to be denied or glossed over. This shooting was an act of horrific evil, perpetrated by a murderer who does not deserve our sympathy, or our excuses. However, the attempt to paint the transgender community as uniquely violent and dangerous is evil as well. Trans people are rightly seeing it as being of a piece with the ongoing efforts to demonize and dehumanize every member of our community, to target our rights with legislation which has grown too sweeping to easily summarize here, all with the larger goal of eradicating trans people from public life.