A Connection in the Making?
The ongoing investigation of the tragic murder of leader, activist and thinker, Charlie Kirk, hints at ties between the transgenderism and the shooter. His partner was in the process of transitioning. Kirk was well known for questioning the legitimacy of people attempting to switch genders. It is a connection that we should wait before assessing. We ought to resist the frenetic pace of the news cycle until a clearer picture emerges.
Yet there are other disturbing correlations that raise this question. Sophie (nee Nicholas) Rosky is trans. He attempted to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 after the Supreme Court Dobbs decision leak. Audrey Hale, who, murdered three children and three staffers at Nashville Chistian school in the Spring of 2023, was trans. Mass shooter Robert Westman, who killed two children and wounded seventeen others at a Minneapolis church this summer, was trans. There are organizations in America like the Socialist Rife Association (10,000+ members), with many trans members, which suggest severe acts of violence. They provide “queer-friendly firearms education.”
What do these things mean?
Hiding in the Trees
Even when the picture of the Kirk assassination does come into clearer focus, the connection will likely be murky, for the following reason.
There certainly are those for whom trans is a motivating movement. I call these the “Activists” in my book. They may have nothing to do with actual gender dysphoria. They see tearing down the gender binary as a moral milestone, an important cause to which all right-thinking people ought to enthusiastically subscribe. These people can be, sadly, prime candidates for a pursuing a path to violence. Even though they go under the umbrella of trans, no gender-related condition bears on their destructive, and sometimes, evil behavior.
The murkiness swirls because at times Transgenderism, the movement, has taken up and hidden behind the increasingly real identity crisis of the younger generations. It reminds me of how trans took over those with Disordered Sexual Developments (DSD’s, also known as intersex). The vast majority of people with such conditions, mercifully rare, never wanted to be poster children for the Transgender movement. But it didn’t matter. Queer Theory scooped them up as reasons to disregard the categories of male and female. These unfortunate trophies were like a tree that the trans program crouched behind, peeking out to see when it was safe to emerge.
Sometimes it feels to me as if the gender dysphoric, whom I particularly care about, are functioning as just another tree on the advance down the field of cultural overturning.
Most of the different kinds of gender-disturbed are far away from any kind of activism, violent or not. Honestly, it just takes autistic youth a lot to sustain their accrued identity. Actual drag queens, I mean those you might meet at the local library, are not capable of murdering someone. They are too taken up with fussing over their make-up.
Both the Buckets
But, as I also point out in the book, sometimes the activists do suffer from a body alienation of their own, as some of those mentioned above in my introduction. As I put it, they may have one foot “in each bucket.” Then we might need to explain a connection between gender problems and violent crime. What would it be?
We know that gender is a deep part of who a person is (Genesis 1:27). To deny that identity in yourself is a severe act. So, denying the revelation about one’s self in one’s body ushers one into a morally dangerous zone. Diana Miconi’s revealing study of 3,100 Canadian students published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2022 (“Meaning in Life, Future Orientation and Support for Violent Radicalization Among Canadian College Students…”) noted that the transgender youth in their cohort were the group at highest risk of supporting violent radicalization.
This is how it could work. But we should be careful with this suggestion. A destabilization like gender rejection can go along with murderous rebellion. But it doesn’t have to.
Thinking Through Kirk’s Legacy
One of the things Charlie Kirk did so well was treat angry people as individuals worth talking to. America just witnessed one the largest funerals in her history because the man in the casket left a legacy of hope for change in activists. He saw that sometimes helping someone take his foot out of one bucket gives him a footing to take his foot out of the other one.
Kirk’s work as a Christian believer was to win over many people like the man who shot him. That’s always possible if we think as he did.