The original version of this column ran in the Washington Examiner on April 10, 2023. Here: http://bit.ly/3Mu82jy.
The sad murders of three young children and three staff members at a private Christian school in Nashville have been followed by bitter protests at state capitols, White House commentary, and a swarm of media kowtowing.
But this wasn’t aimed at banning assault weapons. This was in support of transgender rights in the wake of a shooting by a transgender assailant, who was “gunned down” by police, as some media outlets put it.
Awkward fact: this was at least the fourth mass shooter ( and at least the fifth attempted one ) since 2016 who had gender issues. She was born female and decided a few months ago she was now “he.” That settles matters for everyone on the Left these days: simply asserting it makes it so.
This outcry is bizarre. We have worked mightily to accommodate transgender people to an extent far in excess of their presence in the population — five persons in a thousand, or 1.65 million people in a nation of 330 million. This is five one-thousandths of 1% of the population. Yet transgenderism is now the tail that wags the dog of the entire Democratic Party.
Last week, upset that children can’t access puberty blockers and sex-change surgery, protesters stormed the state capitols of Texas, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and Florida. Transgender activists insist they are victims of genocide and bigotry. They wallow in the noblesse oblige of choosing a life that exposes them to such horrible risks. But this fraught, drama-queen depiction is statistically and anecdotally false. The Biden administration, the Democrats, and the media capitalize on it to blame MAGA Republicans for a problem that is nonexistent.
“Our hearts go out to those — the trans community as they are under attack right now,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday. She offered no such words for the families of the six victims in Nashville.
NBC News ran a sympathetic story on how transgender people were feeling fearful because of the reporting on the murders, as did Reuters and NPR . Other media outlets spoke of the 28-year-old killer’s self-described “whimsical and light-hearted feel” in her artwork, and took pains to refer to her as “they,” shedding a thousand years of English grammar.
On Friday, as part of a previously planned “Transgender Day of Visibility,” President Biden put out a histrionic statement that laid it on a little thick: “The bullying, discrimination, and political attacks that trans kids face have exacerbated our national mental health crisis… Loving parents are terrified for their children’s futures.” Terrified?
The Nashville murders occurred three days before a planned “Transgender Day of Vengeance” had been scheduled in Washington. A poster of the event , declaring “Stop Trans Genocide,” was tweeted more than 5,000 times on Twitter, which then took down the tweets.
Thereafter, the organizers canceled the event and cited a “credible threat to life and safety,” which was “the direct result of the flood of raw hatred directed toward the trans community after the Tennessee shooting.” You can see what they did there — they blamed the victims and other people upset about the shooting for their own discomfort.
But the entire transgender martyr story is a myth. FBI crime statistics show that in 2020, a total of 266 hate crimes against transgender people were recorded nationwide. All of 44 transgender people were murdered; this works out to a murder rate for trans people of just 2.66 people per 100,000 transgender people. The murder rate in the general population is almost three times as high — 6.52 people per 100,000 .