Transgender Nightmare: A Trans Conservative Looks at the Nashville Shooting

On Monday March 27, a young transgender male in Nashville told a friend that he would die that day. He did, but not before killing six other people and firing, by police estimate, over 150 rounds.

Why, O Lord? Why? Why must we see a mass shooting carried out by a transgender person? As bad as any shooting is, this one is so much worse for our community.

I want to scream. Even if this was the final act of a tortured soul who could not go on any longer, what did this person expect to accomplish with this act of vengeance and violence?

Here is how I learned about the shooting.

I first heard about the shooting Monday afternoon. It did not hit me at the time as being especially important. Yes, I know that sounds horrible but it is the truth.

Later that evening, a friend sent me a Facebook message to warn me that the shooter had been identified as transgender. This friend was worried for my safety. I was at home but understood her concern.

I sent a message to a transgender group on Facebook to let them know what I had heard.

The next day, I kept a special watch on the situation as I got a meal and handled a few errands. At the restaurant, I chose to pick up takeout food rather than go in. It seemed slightly safer.

Fortunately, nobody said or did anything to suggest that they wanted to attack me in revenge. As usual, I kept to myself and went home once the errands were complete.

Here is what we know about the situation at this point, about a week after the shooting.

The shooter was a birth female who had recently made the transition to living as male. It looks like they had not changed their legal name. The media almost always referred to “her” by their birth name, Audrey Hale. A few places said that Hale was calling themself Aiden and using masculine pronouns. I will use masculine references in this article.

You could tell that some media outlets did not want to correctly identify Hale. They clearly wanted to refer to him as female.

We know that Hale lived in an extremely transphobic household. His parents would not allow him to dress in masculine clothes in the house. He had to change clothes after he left home.

These people seemed to be the epitome of clueless and fanatic parents who would never accept their child as anything other than birth female. That must have driven Hale up the wall.

We know that Hale had acquired a number of firearms and hid them from his parents. They thought he had disposed of one gun and did not have any more. Again, totally clueless.

One might have thought that Hale would have been saving money to move out of that hell house instead of buying more guns. This person clearly had major psychological problems on top of living in an extremely unfriendly situation.

We know that Hale planned this attack and wrote some kind of planning document that may have discussed his situation and reasons for doing this. The Nashville Metro Police have not yet released any info from this document but claim that the document will be released to the public. They have since claimed that Hale had been planning the shootings for many months.

As noted above, we have heard that Hale told one friend that he planned to die that day. Therefore, he knew he was on a suicide mission. We do not know if he had a plan to kill any specific people or just fired on anyone who came in range. One media outlet suggested that he may have planned to kill one or both parents.

I watched the video of Hale being tracked down, shot, and killed. I could not see much from it. I could not tell if Hale was shooting at the officers but presume that he was. Under that assumption, the Metro Police did what they had to. Still, it was not easy to see Hale’s lifeless body lying on the floor in the school.

Let us look at the wider situation for transgender persons after the shooting.

As a resident of Tennessee, it is already somewhat unnerving to live in this state and watch state legislators introduce one bill after another to attack transgender people. A shooting of this kind makes one even more concerned that these legislators will use this as an excuse to come after us even harder. One has to wonder if we will see an attempt to put transgender people in jail, take away all of their medicines to force detransitions, or run us out of the state. All of these things are believable now.

For the first time in my post-transition life, I have begun to wonder if I should leave the Volunteer State because the situation is becoming so scary. I had looked at the question before, but not with this kind of sword hanging over my head. I have never been in trouble with the law in my life – nothing more than a couple of traffic tickets. I would like to keep that status. I probably would not survive a stint in any jail in this country.

My conservative political stance has caused me some angst on this issue. As I look at media that lean to the right, I see their thinly-disguised loathing of trans people. As noted earlier, none of them have used masculine pronouns for Hale. They seem to assume that all trans people are mentally unbalanced and untrustworthy. It makes me wish that I could get the word about that there are a few transgender conservatives out there. I suspect the conservative media does not want to hear that message.

And as always, the gun haters have used the incident to call for ever more restrictions on legal gun ownership, all the way up to outright bans. They cite the Japanese experience to back up their claims. But these people, while mostly well intentioned, do not understand the American psyche.

Guns have always been part of our national experience. As many guns as there are in this country, no government could ever confiscate all of them. Criminals would always find ways to acquire more. If nothing else, it would be quite easy to smuggle them over the border from Mexico or by boat from almost anywhere. If you ban guns, only the criminals will have them. Honest citizens will have very little chance to stand up to the armed criminals.

If it were possible to get rid of all guns and keep it that way, I might be willing to accept it. But it will never happen. Besides, in a world without guns, the biggest bully usually wins. A firearm gives the smaller or weaker person a chance to defend him or herself. That is why the old Colt .45 revolvers were sometimes called The Equalizer.

The widespread presence of guns also gives us at least a small chance of standing up to a tyrannical government. It is true that governments have weapons that are denied to the average citizen. But even the lowly handgun can do enough damage to make a potential dictator think about his actions.

As much as I have come to loathe Gov. Bill Lee for his enthusiastic support of anti-trans legislation, I do agree with his desire to have an armed security guard at every school in the state. One reason that shooters like to hit schools is that schools are soft targets with no guns around. If the shooters knew that every school had someone with a gun ready to act, they would have to account for that. We have been told that Hale rejected going to a different school because it had better security.

In general, our society needs to harden up as many soft targets as we can. We could learn much from the Israelis about living in a hostile world. They know they can never get rid of the guns and other weapons, or the fanatics who are willing to use them to attack the Israeli people. Therefore, the Israelis devote their energy to defending themselves as much as possible.

Before we end this piece, let us remember the victims. The adults are gone. The kids will never grow up to live their adult lives. In the end, no matter how sick she was, Audrey Hale is responsible for that situation. We can never accept this behavior. I presume Hale will get a standard burial. It is too good for him.

At the same time, I wish his parents would wake up and smell the gunpowder. They helped bring this about with their blindness and rigidity.

I know how these people think. I lived around people like them for a number of years while growing up. They cannot imagine that any person can be anything other than the birth gender into which a person was born, or that it could ever disagree with a person’s internal vision of him or herself, or that it could ever change. They simply refuse to believe that transgender people truly exist. They either want to get rid of us or make us change back to our birth genders.

One of the more frustrating parts of this experience for me is not having any political action organizations in Tennessee for transgender people other than local support groups. If they exist, I cannot find them. We need to organize to stand up to the zealots who want to persecute us. I am not the person to organize such a group, but I very much wish that somebody would. They are more likely to come after us if they think we cannot defend ourselves.

Maybe this kind of incident could make a person question his or her decision to make the transition from one main gender to the other. Not me. As scary as this time is so far, I know I needed to make the transition. I would not have been able to live with myself once I knew that I was truly female. But the future worries me. I have nightmares of police busting down my door and hauling my ass to jail just for being transgender, or having the Legislature try to take away all of my hormones.

Let us pray for everyone involved with this. If we know that someone is considering or planning a violent assault, we need to say something to somebody. As much as we want to stand together, we cannot support this kind of violence. We are not Russians. We want the world to accept us, but we must never start violent activity to get our way. Let us remember that we are the civilized people and the ones who hate us are the misguided souls. Let us be better than they are.

Tags: featured, opinion, Transgender

Category: Transgender Opinion