The media are blaming the Nashville school shooter’s reportedly Christian parents’ rejection of her transgender delusions for turning her into a murderer. But her parents’ influence might have been the best thing to keep her from the path that led to her murderous rampage. Yet, like many parents, they were likely shut out of helping her in her distress.
Nashville police say the female shooter had recently begun using a boy’s name. She’d begun dressing more androgynously. In surveillance videos of the shooting, we see the young woman in fatigues and a backward cap smash her way through a glass door, brandishing a gun, stalking the halls with the gait and the puffed-up comportment of an angry young adult male.
There is little doubt the shooter’s parents knew their daughter’s life was in crisis. They must have known what many parents do when their teens express the desire to pose as the opposite sex: that their children have grappled with severe anxiety and depression.
We know from many studies that such children do not necessarily show signs of gender dysphoria at a young age but often have trouble socially, feel like outcasts, may be somewhere on the autism spectrum, or may have experienced sexual trauma. These children are not necessarily prone to violence but tend to be fragile, vulnerable, and often unpredictable.
They become less knowable to those who loved them as they seize a new gender identity.
Many children and young adults who express gender dysphoria end up isolated or angry with parents who do not wholly support their decision, or dare to question their choices. We don’t know where the shooter and her mother’s relationship stood, but a keen clue is that her mother referred to her child as her “daughter” on the day of the mass murder.
In our recently released “Dead Name” documentary, we meet three parents whose children are becoming strangers to them due to LGBT ideology. In one case, a young woman is fueled by anger as she rejects her biological sex, and her relationship with her mother deteriorates rapidly.
In another instance, a college freshman battling cancer shuts down the father who has stood by him through surgeries, the loss of a leg, and other hardships, because he doesn’t want to be questioned about his decision to pose as the opposite sex and take cross-sex hormones. In this case, the father was simply trying to prevent his son from taking hormones because of how they might damage his weakened endocrine system. Yet his efforts were futile, with ill-fated results.
The parents featured in “Dead Name” experience confusion, isolation, and alienation because the leftist demand that they affirm their child’s gender delusions makes them feel out of touch. Ultimately what they suffer is a grievous sense of loss, whether their child is alive or dies.
Many children setting out along the transgender path do so secretly. They seek support online, in schools, and from like-minded peer groups. If the teen or young adult is not “affirmed” or feels unaccepted at home, she may believe due to online projections that there’s a world out there to catch her. But it usually does not compensate for the safety and commitment of the nuclear family.
The Nashville shooter was living at home and probably not supporting herself financially. Clearly, she was suffering, and being under the care of a doctor was not enough. Her mother likely felt her daughter was slipping away long before she went on a suicidal mission to gun down young children. But she may also have felt helpless to get her daughter the kind of help she needed.
This conundrum needs to be discussed. If we want to tie together mental illness and gun violence, then we have to look at what that looks like. This latest shooting breaks the mold. It invites a discussion about the link between trans youth and mental health. There is information here to be mined.
The parents who appear in “Dead Name” want the correlation to be examined in a thoughtful way. Are we too polarized, too politicized, and too underwhelmed with the politics of school and mass shootings to use this incident to study this tragedy in a way that benefits us all?
