TWIBS: When Journals Become Manifestos
The Tennessee Star and theocratic fascist Matt Walsh have recently reported on writings they allege to be from mass shooter Aiden Hale’s journal, passages which quickly become part of a “perverse” manifesto when the person who penned them just so happens to be trans.
Opinion, by Alyssa Steinsiek
You know, of course, that This Week in Barrel Scraping is typically a humor column. It’s the end of the week, we’re exhausted, we need to yuk it up at how braindead and gross right-wingers are. And I would say I’ve done a pretty good job of framing some truly shitty news stories as something we can all choose to laugh about. Given the unenviable “laugh or cry” position that we most often find ourselves in as trans folks, or folks who love trans folks, I’m pretty satisfied with that.
So I want to be very clear here: There is nothing funny about this story. An unwell person visited horrible violence upon innocent people, six of whom died, three of whom were children. This is, an unspeakable tragedy, no less so for being so commonplace in America that The Onion (a satirical publication, for our readers visiting from the Andromeda galaxy) releases the same article about it multiple times a year. I’m not making light of, or trying to provide levity to, a heinous act.
Instead, I’m here to be righteously fucking angry at alt-right weasels who think a mass shooting with six dead victims is the perfect time to twist the knife in the transgender community. For example, guys like Steven Crowder—credibly accused of abusing his wife and sexually assaulting his coworkers, and known to be suspiciously fond of crossdressing for a transphobe—will caterwaul about their 2nd Amendment right to own instruments of death no matter the harm, and insist that any conversation about gun control following a mass shooting event is needless politicization. But they absolutely love to politicize any act of violence that might have been perpetrated by a trans person.
On March 27th last year, Aiden Hale entered a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, that he attended in his youth, armed and planning to hurt people. He killed six innocents, three of them children, before being shot by Nashville police. According to journals found in Hale’s car and at his home after the shooting, he was a transgender man who used masculine pronouns.
In November, Steven Crowder acquired photographs of Hale’s journals, which he and other outlets falsely described as a “manifesto.” It’s an absurd word to use for what are clearly the unmoored, angry scribbles of somebody who desperately needed some sort of help or, failing that, to be put away before he hurt someone. The photographs Crowder shared then are of a cheap journal filled with furious passages about middle class school kids, as well as a planned schedule for what Hale referred to as “Death Day.”
Morons on Twitter tried to pin the shooting on “Leftist ideology” and “political terrorism” because Hale was trans, but considering he repeatedly used the F-slur to describe kids, I don’t quite buy into that narrative.
In March, a Middle Tennessee judge ordered the FBI to turn over documents relating to the shooting as part of a lawsuit instigated by the editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star. The FBI insists that releasing those documents would in some way impede their investigation, and it remains unclear whether or not the documents will be released to the public. The Star, however, alleges that they have received copies of some portion of the journal, and have published a handful of articles detailing its unpleasant content.
Most recently, theocratic fascist Matt Walsh tweeted alleged segments of Hale’s journal, which he fluffs up as “anti-Christian, pro-trans, and perverse,” but which mostly consists of Hale expressing a wish to have transitioned earlier, and rants about how much he hated his parents.
I’m not here to defend Aiden Hale or justify his actions. What I am furious about is the way reporting on this tragedy is absolutely inundated with hypocrisy. When a cisgender evangelist mass shooter takes the lives of innocent people, mass media has nothing to say about their religion, sexuality or gender. When a shooter is trans? That’s the only thing anybody can talk about.
Aiden Hale never wrote a manifesto. I doubt he had any explicit plans for strangers to read his journal. He never mailed copies of his writing to any news outlets. He never penned any grandiose statements. He never declared himself a martyr, or a champion, or a hero. He vented an unbelievable amount of fury and demons into a Dollar Store journal, and he left it in his car when he went into that school, and now it has become so much more than the sum of its parts.
My advice to you, TWIBSies, is to refuse to buy into this sort of rhetoric. We are not inherently more dangerous or unstable because of our identities. We are no more prone to violence or dark thoughts than cis people. If this happens again—and I desperately pray that it doesn’t—I can only hope that we can push away from the obscene transphobic narrative that dominates Aiden Hale’s actions.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!