Nashville, Murder, and Its Ripple Effects

Evelyn Dieckhaus (9)

William Kinney (9)

Hallie Scruggs (9)

Mike Hill (61)

Katherine Koonce (60)

Cynthia Peak (61)

My heart breaks today. Once again, a person armed with a gun walked into a school and destroyed so many lives. That the shooter was a trans man is irrelevant. What happened is evil and I’ve seen every major voice from my community unequivocally condemn this senseless act of evil…unlike conservative evangelical leaders when the target is the queer community. Their silence was deafening. Trans people...ours cannot. We don’t have that luxury. In fact, we must scream condemnations of the attack even louder, because what we’re also seeing is that many within the same partisan camps as the previously silent evangelical leaders are using these dead for bigoted political purposes.

My already broken heart sank even further when I first saw it reported that the shooter was trans. I knew what this meant. All trans people knew what this meant. Sure 99.5% of school shootings are committed by cisgender people, but that matters not to many. After those shootings, the political right jumps into action. Not action meant to curb gun violence or to take an axe to the rotten tree of the perverse gun culture that has taken root in the heart of America. They jump into action to fearmonger about those who “want to take muh guns”. It’s why you see gun sales spike immediately following school shootings. After issuing their hollow “thoughts and prayers”, they circle the wagons to protect the life-stealing object of their fetishistic desires.

But this time they finally have a reason to change that pattern. Much as Ronald Reagan did while governor of California when the Black Panthers armed themselves, they now acknowledge that we can pass laws to address the gun problem in America. The only issue is that they do not see the “problem” as being one of a saturation of guns (over 400 million) or an unholy fixation on the myth of redemptive violence. They see the “problem” as being one of who has the guns. I’ve now seen multiple calls from not insignificant conservative voices to restrict gun ownership amongst the trans community.

I’m a pacifist who has already had my guns beaten into garden tools…literally. I have no desire for guns. I believe all Christians should live out Isaiah 2:4 in the here and now and beat these damned swords into beautiful life-producing plowshares. But that’s not what these voices want. They want to disarm a marginalized community that they have already been targeting for years via the legislative erosion of our very basic rights.

The rhetoric has become exceedingly violent, and unfortunately fringes within the trans community have also joined that vicious cycle. Please….STOP! In the past 24 hours, I’ve received multiple death threats. In the past 24 hours, I’ve had multiple people tell me to commit suicide. I must now walk around much more aware of those around me because of what we’re seeing. Before this shooting, a prominent conservative voice stood before CPAC and, to loud cheers, called for my eradication and of those like me. Before this shooting, an editor for The Economist magazine called to “reduce the number of trans people” because we are “a problem for a sane world”. Before this shooting and senseless evil, Republicans around the country have attempted to deny our basic rights to lifesaving healthcare. Before the shooting, prominent friends of billionaire JK Rowling called my mere existence an act of rape. Before the shooting, JK Rowling amplified to her cult-like following of millions a tweet calling trans people “shit” that needs to be removed from the LGBTQIA+ community.

This was all before a trans man, armed with guns, walked into a Christian school that he used to attend, and opened fire. The narrative since has been disgusting. It has been virulent. While using these dead children as cover, certain elements of society are only increasing their hateful rhetoric against the trans community. A community that has wholly condemned this senseless act of evil.

I’ll be blunt. THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT THESE CHILDREN! We know this because we have seen them, time and time again, care more about protecting gun culture than protecting children. We live in a society where schools are putting ballistic walls in classrooms. We live in a society where ballistic backpacks are a thing. We live in a society where our schools are having to operate more like prisons than centers of education. We live in a society where, if you suggest that Christians voluntarily lay down their weapons as Christ calls us to, you are branded a coward, commie, or liberal heretic who hates their own families. So spare me the faux-indignation from the gundamentalist crowd. You do not care about these children. This is a problem that has long existed in America, and you have fought every conceivable solution from the beginning. Only now do we hear calls from this crowd to restrict guns, and it’s only because of the identity of the shooter. So, again, spare me your hollow words.

I’m hurting today. Many are hurting today. An act of evil took place. An act of evil that I, without the slightest hesitation, condemn with every fiber of my being. Nothing is more tragic than the loss of life, especially the lives of children. I’m also hurting because I know that this evil will beget more evil. This was the school shooting that the political right has long wanted. Not that they want school shootings to occur, but given that they chalk school shootings up as the “price of freedom”, this is the one that they can actually use to their advantage. They have made their visceral hatred of the trans community no secret, but as I’ve already experienced on social media, they will use these poor slaughtered innocents as a shield to shut down any pushback to their bigoted anti-trans agenda.

Even the mere act of urging trans people to be careful and leave states like Tennessee, given the increasingly violent rhetoric we were already hearing, resulted in my mentions being flooded with countless people screaming that I’m a narcissist, or that I’m making a mass murder all about trans people, or that I don’t care about these children, or that I hate Christians. It’s an attempt to shut down any opposition to their narrative.

Sadly, this evil will beget evil. It’s the American way. It’s the way of Satan. It’s not the way of the Cross. Instead of addressing the root of the problem…America’s gun fetish and the dogmatic belief in the myth of redemptive violence…the focus will be on attacking an already marginalized community. It will do nothing to prevent the next shooting, and believe me, there will be a next shooting. Why? Because we will continue to focus on symptoms and not the actual disease. It’s the American way.

Again, though, let’s draw the attention back to what really matters. These people bore God’s divine image. Just as the shooter did. The world is darker today because, in a schoolhouse in Nashville, evil triumphed. Evil will continue to win if we, though, choose the way of vengeance (yes, I’m also looking at whoever was organizing the “Trans Day of Vengeance”…STOP IT!) and hatred. To let the cycle continue is to disrespect those who were needlessly murdered:

May we do better. May we reach the point where we stop having to have memorial lists like this. We owe them at least that much: