The media are blaming the Nashville school shooter’s reportedly Christian parents’ rejection of her transgender delusions for turning her into a murderer. But her parents’ influence might have been the best thing to keep her from the path that led to her murderous rampage. Yet, like many parents, they were likely shut out of helping her in her distress.
Nashville police say the female shooter had recently begun using a boy’s name. She’d begun dressing more androgynously. In surveillance videos of the shooting, we see the young woman in fatigues and a backward cap smash her way through a glass door, brandishing a gun, stalking the halls with the gait and the puffed-up comportment of an angry young adult male.
There is little doubt the shooter’s parents knew their daughter’s life was in crisis. They must have known what many parents do when their teens express the desire to pose as the opposite sex: that their children have grappled with severe anxiety and depression.
We know from many studies that such children do not necessarily show signs of gender dysphoria at a young age but often have trouble socially, feel like outcasts, may be somewhere on the autism spectrum, or may have experienced sexual trauma. These children are not necessarily prone to violence but tend to be fragile, vulnerable, and often unpredictable.
They become less knowable to those who loved them as they seize a new gender identity.
Many children and young adults who express gender dysphoria end up isolated
