True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was a girl – famously providing the peg for the Boomtown Rats’ hit ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’. But that was a long time ago. Since, American mass shooters have been overwhelmingly male. One would expect, then, that when the culprit in a high-profile attack on young children is a woman, that anomaly would merit journalistic remark. After all, following these baffling bursts of nihilistic animosity, there’s little enough to say. Yet after ‘Robin’ Westman opened fire on kids at mass in a Catholic school in Minneapolis last week, segments of the media were conspicuously incurious about how ‘she’ came to be consumed by such commonly masculine rage.
This grotesque incident was, as usual, pointless – and as a longtime commentator on such shootings, I despair that there are so few, if any, productive observations to advance. While still exhibiting the classic, seemingly antithetical traits of grandiosity and self-loathing, this killer was, to me, uniquely repulsive. Craving distraction, then, I’ve idly kept track of which media outlets have perversely and pugnaciously referred to Robin (né Robert) Westman as female.
Naturally, for the New York Times the transgender killer is ‘she’ or ‘Ms Westman’. The BBC has also followed its guidelines to ‘generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question’ – even if the ‘person in question’ committed suicide on site and is no longer in a position to have preferences of any kind.
When Senator Amy Klobuchar bewailed that ‘this horrific offender… that he… it was all-purpose hate, right?’ and called Westman ‘a madman’, the interviewer from America’s National Public Radio appended: ‘And just a point of clarification, Sen Klobuchar referenced the shooter as “he”. Although police have identified a suspect, it’s still unclear at this time what that person’s gender is or how they identify’ [italics mine]. Yet the shooter having been born male had already been retrieved from the public record. The sheep-in–conservative-clothing commentator on the PBS NewsHour, David Brooks, repeatedly referred to Westman as female – no big surprise. But when a Wall Street Journal editorial also reported that Westman had ‘changed her name from Robert’, my jaw dropped. Even Fox News reported the killer ‘had their name legally changed’ [italics mine].
The New York Post’s flat-out ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘gunman’ is more courageous and factually informative
I have begrudging regard for ABC’s militant neutrality. In fastidiously citing ‘a person’, ‘Westman’ with no title, ‘the shooter’ and ‘the suspect’, the network boycotted pronouns altogether. That takes semantic discipline. But the right-of-centre New York Post’s flat-out ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘gunman’ is more courageous, not to mention more factually informative. At long last, the Daily Telegraph dared to identify Robin Westman as male – though historically the paper hasn’t covered itself in glory on this matter, having even referred to preposterous, manipulative fake-female criminals such as ‘Isla’ Bryson as ‘she’.
For journalists to take a trans-mollycoddling stand in the pronoun wars isn’t merely to default to niceness. Misidentifying the biological sex of figures in news stories is an implicit declaration of support for an incoherent, unhinged ideology. This grammatical loyalty to progressive dogma apparently trumps journalistic integrity – the obligation to report the truth – and even decency. Chronicling the Annunciation Catholic Church and School shooting, the New York Times and the BBC are pandering to the tender feelings of someone who’s 1) a would-be mass murderer (the successful kind, by a rather arbitrary definition, kills four or more), 2) insane and 3) dead. We alive people resent once-reputable news outlets choosing the occasion of two murdered and 15 sometimes seriously injured schoolchildren and three injured adults in their eighties to propagandise and yet again defy biological reality.
Media kowtowing to trans orthodoxy alienates their mainstream audiences. Incorrect pronouns drive news consumers nuts. Alluding to a burly guy with five o’clock shadow in a pink wig as ‘she’ makes journalists seem like fools, and readers and viewers feel mocked. Even the wussy middle course of calling trans people ‘they’ leads to grammatical confusion. Also last week, the Telegraph reported that another (male) transgender killer, ‘Joanna’ Rowland-Stuart, ‘stabbed their partner to death with a samurai sword’. The following paragraph refers to Joanna’s attack in ‘their Brighton home’. Is that the couple’s home, or only Joanna’s?
Worse, in reporting the same story, the BBC ran the headline ‘Wife killed husband with samurai sword’ and began the article: ‘A woman killed her husband’ – when in fact a man stabbed his presumably gay husband 50 times. This is farce.
In that case, the court has deemed the killer Joanna ‘unfit to plead’, meaning he’s bonkers. Is a pattern developing? Despite multiple cases of trans murderers whose sanity was dubious, I’d not claim, as some conservative pundits, do that trans people are grossly overrepresented in the depressingly long roster of American mass murderers. Yet people who are mentally ill in other respects are consistently the most susceptible to deciding they were ‘born in the wrong body’. The trans cult attracts the insecure, the lost and ungrounded; the unstable, disturbed and, yes, outright deranged.
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We’ve turned confusion about which sex you are into a reasonable, dare I say normal, source of distress that demands redress, and not by curing a delusion but encouraging it. Declaring you’re trans is a moment of self-discovery that we celebrate for its ‘authenticity’ and ‘bravery’. In the olden days of Psycho, a man wearing women’s clothing sent an ominous signal that there’s something off about this guy. Yet Robin Westman’s transgenderism was so socially acceptable that it functioned as disguise – cloaking a manic mishmash of malice towards Jews, children, blacks, Hispanics, Christians, Donald Trump, doubtless everyone else and, not to forget, himself.
Rather than signal there’s something wrong here, Westman dressing as a woman actually camouflaged the warning signs that the young man was out of his tiny mind. The seminal mistake in the progression of this demented transgender movement was no longer recognising gender dysphoria as a mental disorder.
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