by Kellie-Jay Keen, Spectator
The latest “trans violence” was committed by a heterosexual man who went to a hockey game in Rhode Island and shot his family, then himself. His daughter described him as sick and mentally ill. Robert Dorgan, who preferred the name Roberta, is just the latest in a long line of violent people claiming to be transgender.
Last week, a 6’0 18-year-old boy who wanted to be a “petite” woman carried out the worst mass shooting in Canada’s history. Last summer, a male called Robert Westman killed two children and injured many more at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. The 2023 Nashville school shooter was a girl called Audrey, who identified as a man called Aiden. Snochia Moseley, who killed four people in Aberdeen, Maryland, in 2018, was a trans man, i.e. a woman who thought she was a man. The list goes on.
Each case prompts a furore. Various media organizations invariably accuse “right-wing outlets” of stoking hatred by pointing out that the killer’s confused sexual identity. But it’s important to remember that these stories are not really driven by identity, since trans identities don’t really exist. These are simply men who think they’re women, and women who think they’re men.
The point cannot be stressed enough: one cannot change into a different category of human. Attempting to do so can lead to a dangerous warping of an individual’s sense of self, and thus an appetite for destruction. In the case of killer men who dress as women, their testosterone does not evaporate simply because a government form has been amended.
We should be able to ask what drives this trend without pretending that the crimes of these violent killers are different because of their preferred pronouns. When a man slips on a little dress, a badly fitting wig and some clip-clopping shoes, we are expected to act as if we don’t notice his shovel-like hands, his manly skull, his broad shoulders and everything else male about him.
The modern state may treat self-description as an act of courage that we must not doubt. But the psychology of public violence has not changed because we’ve gone weak at the knees for zee/zi/zir.