At the Transgender Day of Visibility, celebrated in March at the Minnesota Capitol building, one attendee wore a T-shirt with words colored like the trans flag: “You can’t erase us.” But as it turns out, if a trans-identifying person commits a mass shooting of school children, his transgender identity can and will be erased by major news outlets protecting the narrative that transgender people are well adjusted and mentally healthy and everyone should submit to the delusion that hormones and a good haircut can change genetic reality.
Covering the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, The New York Times (NYT) has a piece tacked to the top of its coverage that describes “the suspect,” “the attacker,” “the heavily armed assailant,” and finally names Robin Westman, 23, as the shooter. These descriptions helped the writers avoid using gender pronouns. Yes, writers — it took four NYT writers to dig into the shooter’s background, and they never mentioned he identified as transgender in that piece.
“Robin” used to be Robert. A name change document, signed by his mother when he was a minor is all over the internet.
That document is mentioned eight paragraphs into another piece, “The Minneapolis suspect knew her target, but the motive is a mystery.” Here, the NYT picks the pronoun “she.” Purportedly because Robin would have wanted it that way. This piece offers a bit of detail — “She worked at a local cannabis dispensary for several months earlier this year” — but concludes “it is hard to fathom what drove Ms. Westman to attack before killing herself, despite the dark and violent writings and videos she left behind.”
The piece makes a point to defend those who identify as “trans” by attacking “the right-wing uproar over Ms. Westman’s gender identity.”
“On social media, some conservative activists have seized on the shooter’s gender identity to broadly portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill,” the reporters wrote.
CNN also buried the gunman’s trans-identification. CNN reporter Chelsea Bailey mentioned that “Suspect Robin Westman, 23, graduated from Annunciation Catholic’s grade school in 2017, according to a yearbook obtained by CNN,” but her lengthy online report never mentioned that Westman claimed to be transgender. The story also avoided pronouns, although the CNN reporter quoted Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara referring to “the gunman.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper ostensibly tried to clear up the gender confusion: “She identifies as a female,” Tapper said, so “her” name is now “Robin.”
USA Today’s faith, identity, and social justice reporter Marc Ramirez covered the shooting by exploring “safety in houses of worship” in a piece that never mentions transgender anything. Instead, Ramirez quoted a Voice of America report to turn the focus onto “perpetrators with a history of racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Christianity and Islamophobia, with ties to white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.”
Ramirez then managed to squeeze a completely unrelated Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reference in his piece by quoting Mathew Schmalz, a religious studies professor at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts: “Religious denominations are really being pushed to decide how open these spaces are going to be when you have threats of random violence or an ICE raid,” Schmalz said. “Are churches really open spaces anymore? Or do they have to be protected from a society where there seem to be threats all around?”
Individuals who claim to be transgender want to be called by whatever pronouns they prefer, and the propaganda press plays along with the delusion. But it does not ask important questions, like why have so many mass shootings and acts of violence involved transgender shooters?
Could it be hormone replacement therapy? Hormones that are strong enough to put hair on a chest, miraculous enough to grow an entire human in a womb, and wild enough to make a pregnant woman weepy, could certainly cause rage in someone jacked up on the wrong hormones.
Could it be mental health? A 2019 study found 58 percent of trans-identifying individuals “had at least one psychiatric diagnosis compared with 13.6% … in the control patient population.”
People who believe they are transgender are worthy of love and acceptance, but the most loving thing we can do is not lie to them. We should not pretend that sex is changeable.
And we should demand studies on the potentially violent effects of hormone drugs used for off-label treatments related to gender. Or better, stop using them all together.
Instead, the propaganda press ignores the key transgender angle and, in the case of USA Today, makes the shooting about God, suggesting churches are becoming unsafe places, hinting it would be safer if people would just stop going to church.
“As houses of worship become the sites for such crimes and other sociocultural unrest, their traditional roles as places of refuge risk erosion,” Ramirez wrote.
Refuge from what? Evil? There is no sanctuary on earth that can keep us from the evil of man’s sinful design. The church is not a building with a “traditional role.” The church is a people with an ageless hope so well described in Romans 8:38-39:
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
