On The Nashville Shooter From a Trans Perspective

Over the last decade, like many of you, I’ve sat day after day, week after week, reeling from the horrific mass shootings that have turned America into blood drenched battleground. From churches, shopping malls and departments stores, to city parks and college campuses- and even small schoolhouses where our most vulnerable are learning their alphabet; Murder is commonplace by gun wielding extremists who leave death in their wake.

It is clear that our legislators simply don’t care- in fact, after each unspeakable tragedy, the immediately take to the conservative airwaves and television networks to defend guns instead of console a mourning nation. While the world looks on in horror, Americans have become mostly desensitized to the new normal. It is a common, predictable occurrence now that fetches nothing more than thoughts and prayers from lawmakers who will lay blame at the feet of the mentally ill, the poor, people color or wherever it is most advantageous for them to thwart accountability or a responsibility to the safety of the lives they govern.

The shooter in Nashville, Tennessee, the southern US city where the most recent killing spree took place at a Christian school- where the murderer one attended as a student- happened to be transgender. It is lawmakers in the state of Tennessee have aggressively attacked trans individuals, using Drag Queen performers, their attire and culture as a red herring to actually disenfranchise transgender women, children and their families. They implemented draconian laws reminiscent of historical dictatorships that policed identity, expressions, cultures and belief systems to push trans people out of society and provoke violence and hysteria toward the minority community.

Of course, that this shooter happened to be trans was a gift to hyper-conservatives; one to be used to condemn and provoke more fear of an already embattled sect of society. Where just a week ago, Tennessee lawmakers were attempting to portray trans women as threats to women and children, now they had an effigy of a trans person to hold up as justification of their cold, cruel agenda to persecute transgender Americans who are guilty of not upholding a biblically influenced doctrine regarding sex, gender and the role each is to play in a social hierarchy as they are assigned at birth.

No one is going to defend the actions of brutal murderer, especially not the Trans community, most of whom have experienced violence and death…