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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20950 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Some what shocked there has not been a top level post about the Annunciation School Shooting yet given the obvious culture war angles and parallels to the Covenant School shooting of a few years back (religious school, trans shooter - though FtM vs MtF).

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/annunciation-catholic-school-minneapolis-shooting-08-27-25

I had missed that the Covenant shooter was determined to have not acted out due to any real culture war stuff, but just due to your generic mass shooter mental illness + desire to be remembered cocktail.

I would guess that throwing in the Culture War angle makes it a lot more likely that the shooter's name and face get passed around, though in this case seems like he was just crazy more so than any particular niche of the political compass.

Presumably gun control will be in the news again a bit.

So, trans shooter. That makes three of them now, right? The pro-trans side can, quite reasonably, say that they were generically crazy. And yeah, all of them were.

But the tie between trans and less culture warsy mental health issues is real. Whether these people were trans because they were crazy or if trans made them more crazy is a question for the ages. But don’t tell me there’s no connection.

I think there's a Psychopolitics of Trauma angle here. A plurality of trans people currently believe themselves to be at risk of genocide. Even setting aside existential risk, they all correctly believe themselves to be despised by half the population. Did German Jews in the 1930s have worse mental health than Gentiles? Wouldn't surprise me. This doesn't necessarily say much about the effect Jewishness and transness would have in an environment where people with those traits did not perceive themselves to be widely-loathed and/or in mortal danger.

Jewishness in Nazi Germany wasn't a trait you opted in to; visible transness in America is. Many of the people claiming to be afraid of genocide could just wipe off the make-up, ditch the programmer socks, and become indistinguishable from the average dorky guy in less than five minutes. This isn't proof that social disapproval has no effect on their mental health; but how strong of a force can it really be when its victims make no effort to avoid it and instead choose to present themselves in ways that will inevitably attract more negative attention?

For what it's worth: a trans person on reddit told me that Donald Trump winning the last election means they will be murdered by the military within a few months. That was around election time a few months ago. That's one example of the sort of hysterical rhetoric common among some online transpeople. I don't even go to trans subreddits, this is only me observing generic political subreddits.

Hard to exaggerate how much overly online transpeople are whipping themselves into a frenzy. Certainly not improving their mental health.

Don’t forget DOGE claimed that USAID was helping LGBTQ+ people in all sorts of countries, with the expectation that they’d become a natural revolutionary militia if said countries ever made a conservative turn. It would be no surprise to me were it revealed that NGOs funded by American taxpayers were pumping the “trans genocide” line within America.

Do trans in very progressive spaces have better mental health than those in more normie spaces(and there are some; I’m not talking about the Baptist Bible fellowship or sons of confederate veterans).

That's an interesting question, though not decisive. I think all the rhetoric about how Trump's goons could break down every trans person's door any day now, nation-wide, would be enough to unbalance even someone living in the queerest neighborhood in Portland.

And it's self-reinforcing. Unbelievably, some folks were questioning whether this shooting as a false flag which was itself gonna justify the goons and the gulag. One poster called it (and you can't make this shit up) a Reichstag-fire moment.

But believing that rhetoric is not a sign of mental stability- it’s just the equivalent of fema concentration camps.

I think it's too widespread for belief in it to count as evidence of mental illness. Or, rather, you can say that widespread belief in this stuff constitutes a massive mental illness epidemic, but at that point you're just making a point about wokeness writ large, not teasing out anything related to transness as a specific mental profile. Everyone who's sufficiently far left believes Trump is itching to throw sexual minorities in camps, whether they're trans themselves or not.

Fema camps are almost assuredly an at least as widespread belief, if lower status than trans genocide ridiculousness. I still wouldn't hire one to babysit.

I think all the rhetoric about how Trump's goons could break down every trans person's door any day now, nation-wide, would be enough to unbalance even someone living in the queerest neighborhood in Portland.

Heck, I'd say it's more likely to unbalance someone living in such a neighborhood, because it's disproportionately in those neighborhoods that such memes about Trump's goons tend both to get spread and to get taken seriously. I'd guess that the proportion of trans people who take such things seriously enough to meaningfully affect their mental health would be small in either case, and that it'd almost certainly be much bigger in progressive spaces.

I see the predictable responses of, "This is a gun problem." I want to ask them if they mean Trans-identified people should be forbidden access to guns.

Outsourcing my own research but is this one of the few shooters to come from a seemingly middle - maybe upper middle -class two parent home? I would say with the number of siblings it was a "good" catholic family though with the support of the lifestyle likely a rather progressive one.

Edit: never mind

Mary Grace and James Allen Westman, who divorced in 2013 after 25 years of marriage

Seung-Hui Cho 2007 Virginia Tech shooting seems to have had an intact family.

Going to keep my comments short since this is a well-trod culture war battlefield.

But its truly annoying to have to listen to the standard anti-gun positions trotted out once again without grappling with any of the other factors at play.

When only a couple months ago an attempted mass shooting at a church was stopped by at least TWO armed staff... and a guy with a truck.

Yes, it turns out that 'good guy with a gun' can be an effective counter to these threats.

So when the Dems once again trot out the gun control agenda I can only assume they're acting in bad faith because the only other explanation is having the memory of a goldfish.

After Nashville maintenance/security started open carrying at my old evangelical private school and some undisclosed number of teachers concealed carry. My church has many designated armed people as marked security and in the pews. Is that not allowed in Minnesota or the Catholics just not like guns?

Concealed carry in Catholic Churches is by diocese and to some extent by pastor. The diocese of fort worth(near me) requires ushers to have designated armed personnel trained in room clearing; the diocese of Dallas(also near me) bans concealed carry by default but allows pastors to make exceptions on a case by case basis. The SSPX requires concealed carriers to declare this to the head usher but doesn’t enforce it.

Do note that this was technically a school function and would have been regulated differently because it is a school.

Your example reminds me of this other example from a Church of Christ.

My Christian friends often wonder aloud with me what it'll take for us to again recognize an in-group cultural identity among ourselves (a conversation typically prompted by the construction of our brand new fuck-you enormously gargantuan Islamic cultural center), and my answer is always something that this is an example of: innocent Christians being persecuted.

And I wonder how many Christian children killed by trans gunmen will be enough. It's actually quite remarkable how much less sensitive than Jews Christians are to this kind of thing. Remember that Baptist hospital (now run by Episcopalians) that was bombed in the first few weeks of the war in Gaza? No?

Canada had an outbreak of church burnings over that Indian burials on schoolgrounds hoax, and not a word about it from any of my church staff. I'm not even sure if they were aware! NPR certainly kept quiet about it. Edit: NPR was not quiet about church burnings in 2006 and 2015, as long as you were a black church. I also briefly googled about the 2021 burnings and most forum discussion and coverage are contemporary, and they're taking the burial narrative at face value. Most sympathetic pieces are from very partisan sources.

Not closely related to what you just said, but it's something I think about more and more.

And I wonder how many Christian children killed by trans gunmen will be enough.

All of them.

Christianity doesn't really seem like the right toolkit for encouraging in-group bias and even defensive militancy. History may seem to contradict me here, but I'd posit that it's actually non-christian traditions that historically lent the means of protection to Christianity, that institutions of physical defence had to work in spite of Christianity, not thanks to it. And over the centuries, it looks to me like Christianity has worn down those alternate memeplexes until they became defunct, and is now, in the West, left without the memes to ensure its own survival and that of its adherents.

The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

I think that Christianity has had a good run, but owed much of it to other forces that allied with it and carried it through the centuries. It survived those, and in their place has grown some post-christian replacement non-religion that picked and chose a few elements of Christianity to run with while rejecting the name of the faith and any coherence that came with it. But I think they picked and chose poorly - they took up the most flawed pieces, and left behind most of the good bits.

Christianity and western leftism both seem doomed in the long run. But so is everything, I suppose.

Good luck.

Modern Christianity probably not. Most modern Christians are basically ecumenical believers— they believe that Christianity is true enough for them, but they don’t see Christianity as the one true faith, nor see themselves as christian before other group identities they happen to hold. That’s true today of Westernized Christianity, but there are times and places in history where this wasn’t the case. Orthdox, Traditional Catholics, and fundamentalist Christians are more likely to think this way, and more likely to see themselves as Christian before things like nationality.

It's actually quite remarkable how much less sensitive than Jews Christians are to this kind of thing.

I speculate it might be down to the size of the two groups. There must be at least an order of magnitude more Catholics in the US than Jews. It's entirely possible that every Jew in America is no more than three degrees of separation away from the couple gunned down outside the embassy, whereas in this case there are probably many American Catholics who are six degrees of separation removed from the children shot in the church.

History might well have a role as well. Jews have their entire history of being persecuted specifically for being Jews, and this obviously creates the solidarity, not just because you care about other Jews, but because history shows them that their survival depends on being aware of persecution of Jews because it will eventually come for them too.

And I wonder how many Christian children killed by trans gunmen will be enough.

How many has there been? We had 3 in covenant and 2 today.

Sure five lives is more than should die, but that's less than a life a year, that's like 1/600th the amount of people who die falling off ladders a year. And basically no one dies falling off a ladder. Apparently there's already been 60 deaths of kids shooting themselves unintentionally with a gun, so that's about 1/120th accidental gun suicides of children, and basically no child dies of accidental gun suicide.

If we include the important detail the two times it has happened, they had shot up their own school (so they could be shooting up their own spaces because that's what shooters do, rather than specific religious targeting), a case for persecution comes off weak.

innocent Christians being persecuted

A crazy trans person shooting up a Church is not being persecuted. From what I can tell, the Christian right and the LGBT* may be politically opposed to each other, but almost all of their members would be horrified when they learned that someone had shot up their opponent group.

Likewise, the fact that lots of mass shootings happen in schools is not proof that there is a coherent ideology which prizes the killing of US students.

Contrast this with Jews. There is a coherent group which will cheer whenever someone shoots up a synagogue. While I am sure that they likewise get their base rate of crazies without any antisemitic ideology (plus the odd youth who was formerly a member and blames the institution for whatever is wrong with their life), I would guess that nine out of ten murderous attacks against synagogues have an antisemitic background. That does not mean that these attackers are sane, but simply that on a per-victim-capita basis, a random unhinged person will encounter a lot more claims that the Jews are what is wrong with the world than that it is the Methodists.

A crazy trans person shooting up a Church is not being persecuted.

Even more relevant, this was their former school! It is the default of mass shooters to target their current and former workplaces/schools (often over highly personal grievance) so assuming it was a targeted attack on religion instead of just default mass shooter behavior could use some stronger evidence.

Contrast this with Jews. There is a coherent group which will cheer whenever someone shoots up a synagogue.

It's not clear to me that there is such a coherent group. At the very least, I have not seen them act before. There are certainly occasional anti-semites, but they don't seem to be unified in any way. Which I don't think is too dissimilar from Christians, to be honest - there are individual bigots who will cheer when someone hurts a church, but not a unified group. So it seems to me that both groups are equally persecuted - I would say neither group is truly persecuted right now, but if one argues that individuals being hostile towards Jews counts then I would say it should count for Christians as well.

Christian children

Are they really "Christian children" just because they're going to a christian school? I doubt many of them were given a choice in which school they were sent to.

It seems like the disproportionate number of shooters at these schools should also raise some questions. To me it seems obvious that subjecting kids to religious values is a bad idea.

  • -22

Do you have even the slightest shred of evidence to suggest that a disproportionate number of school shootings take place at private religious schools by students who attended private religious schools?

No, I'm working under the assumption that these two shootings by trans alumni of christian schools are significant. If that's not true, I'm not sure what the whole point of this thread is. I'm just pointing out that it fits perfectly with my worldview. I believe that transgenderism is probably biologically innate, so a person with transgenderism who is raised in an oppressive fundamentalist religious environment could end up harboring resentment toward the people who forced those values on them.

As for transgenderism being biologically innate, the shooter admitted that he was tired of being trans, but felt that if he cut his hair short and detransitioned, he'd lose face in front of the (presumably numerous) people who'd earlier advised him that coming out as trans was probably a bad idea. This whole pointless massacre came about because of a misguided sunk-cost fallacy, an arrogant nutcase who was too proud to publicly admit he'd made an error as an adolescent (also known as "the period of your life when making mistakes is most understandable and forgivable").

I suppose next you'll tell me that the shooter's transgenderism really was biologically innate, but years of exposure to toxic Catholic propaganda left him confused and suffering from internalised transphobia. It's so easy to claim that trans is something fixed and unchangeable as long as you dismiss all the counter-examples that suggest it might not be.

I will politely point out that "the people who forced those values on them" emphatically does not include "small children mercilessly gunned down who weren't even born at the time the shooters attended the schools in question".

Stop trolling.

Trolling? Are you implying that I don't sincerely believe this? I believe that raising kids under Christianity is harmful, just as raising them in radical Islam is harmful. In my liberal bubble this is not a controversial belief, at all.

As I understand it you are allowed to post this argument but you haven't put the requisite amount of effort into it.

That would be blatantly biased if true. People are allowed to post zero effort anti-trans posts where they assume consensus. I've never heard anyone here make an actual argument against transgenderism.

I've never heard anyone here make an actual argument against transgenderism.

People do this all the time, I don't know why you would say this with a straight face. There are lots of arguments, like that the belief that someone can be a gender other than the one associated with their birth(if this formulation of gender as separate to physical sex is even reasonable) is entirely unfalsifiable even to the person supposedly experiencing it. If there isn't one single argument against "transgenderism" it's because there are something like at minimum two and probably more like a dozen different entirely incompatible ideas of what the transgender phenomenon is under the trench coat of the trans movement. Is being trans synonymous with experiencing gender dysphoria(a thing itself with myriad definitions) or is it a purely social, you're trans if you like to wear the opposite gender's traditional garb?

If I didn't know you had in fact participated in past debates on this site on this subject I might think you had just somehow managed to not stumble upon those threads but no, you have and are either experiencing extreme amnesia or are lying.

Gender roles are important because society can do many bad things, but 'not work' isn't one of them. At a fundamental level people have to know their job in broader society and gender roles are a major part of figuring that out.

At the end of the day, a functioning society is based on the idea that 'sorry, you(personally) have a job to do. It doesn't really matter if you want to do it, that just makes you a bad person if you don't rather than making it not your job. Get it done. No, you don't have an unlimited say in the matter. Your sex, your age, your class- these all say what you're supposed to be doing. Much more of a say than you have. Keep the wheel of civilization turning even if it crushes you underneath it.' We should be very careful about allowing defections. People should conform to the wisdom of their elders because their own ideas are normally bad ones.

Trans undermines this whole memeplex by making gender roles a weird sex thing, not a fundamental attribute.

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Was the comparison you made between Christianity and radical Islam deliberate? Is non-radical Islam less harmful in your view than Christianity?

No that wasn't deliberate. Christianity is obviously less bad than Islam. Christianity converts people through relentless propagandizing, guilt-tripping, cultural subversion, and indoctrination from a young age, whereas Islam still converts people with physical violence.

To me it seems obvious that subjecting kids to religious values is a bad idea.

Until approx. 5 years ago I would have agreed with you, and maybe 8 years ago I would have strongly agreed with you. But it has not escaped my notice that most "normal Christians" I see just seem to have their lives together so much more: they're happier, kinder, started families sooner (or at all), haven't had to rediscover from first principles a reason to get out of bed and do anything, ...

I say this as an atheist who has gone to more masses in the past couple of years than the rest of my life combined, but has not and probably doesn't expect to find faith.

There is no value neutrality. If they aren't getting your values, they're getting someone elses. And since liberalism is a quokka factory producing naive and easily duped hothouse flowers, perhaps religious values aren't so bad after all.

There is no value neutrality

There may not be complete value neutrality, but telling kids you've figured out exactly how the world works and that they have to obey a specific list of rules otherwise they'll burn in hell is very far from neutral. Closer to neutral would be having conversations with them and telling them what you personally believe, but not forcing your values on them.

you've figured out exactly how the world works and that they have to obey a specific list of rules otherwise they'll burn in hell is very far from neutral.

Liberals do that too except 'burn in hell' is substituted for by social ostracism and killing their reputation right here, right now.

That's wokeness, not liberalism. Wokeness is highly illiberal.

Sure, if by liberalism we mean something that doesn't exist anymore and has been supplanted by wokeness in practice.

Classical liberalism is larval wokeness, or more precisely, wokeness came into being to profitably exploit liberalism. There's no reason to be extra careful about terms here, both are very bad news.

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"No enemies to the left" typical American liberals and progressives passively keep quiet while extremists and the woke wage culture war. Then fight like cornered animals when conservatives push back. Wokeness is indeed illiberal and modern self described "liberals" are its chief enablers.

Not of course principled classical liberals. But they are an endangered species with little in common with modern common "liberals".

What if you actually believe that the options are Christianity or Hell?

That said, if aren’t to some degree enforcing your values, they won’t take them seriously. Why should a kid believe that you really think pornography is bad if you don’t have any enforcement of rules against pornography? They won’t.

What if you actually believe that the options are Christianity or Hell?

And that's why religion is so dangerous, you can justify anything with that. If I sincerely believed that I might burn in hell for eternity if I didn't do something, that would be a very strong motivation. A much stronger motivation than any human should ever have. That's what makes people strap on bomb vests.

Why should a kid believe that you really think pornography is bad

Well maybe they would be convinced if you had a rational argument for it. If people need external consequences to know that something is bad, maybe it's not actually a big deal.

Stop taking the bait.

There's a focus on his identity among some online discourse but realistically until groups exceed the Chinese robber fallacy by a meaningful degree, it's not a particularly interesting discussion.

Estimates of trans/nonbinary identification differ quite a bit but it seems to be around 2-5% among youth (a few estimates going even higher), many of them being nonbinary identified which in my experience at least tends to mean pretty much nothing, a lot of them are basically indistinguishable from regular men and women except for taking on a special label and maybe doing a gender neutral name change or something.

Determining the identification of mass shooters likewise is hard but a lot of the estimates I find tend to be <1%, even if we assume those estimates are downplaying it by 5x then we're still at proportional amounts as expected of Chinese robbers. Yeah, unless there's evidence produced showing trans shooters are more common than current estimates find, it doesn't seem to be notable.

Also even if it did, we still expect the difference to be meaningful before anything is done. Like if .25% of the general population did mass shootings and .27% of the trans population did, it's hard to see any policy response or social treatment justified towards the trans population that isn't basically just as justified towards the general. If someone was like "wow .2699% was my exact cutoff between no action and full action" it'd be pretty suspicious. Some of the highest claims I'm seeing for total trans mass shooters is like six people, so even if we go the lowest estimate of .5% of the population, that is 6/1,650,000 or .000363636% leaving us with 99.999636364% of trans people having not done a mass shooting. Yeah is 99.999% of people being innocent really something that people would have preregistered as the crackdown threshold?

Over the past two decades and change, a great deal of energy and public resources have been invested into trying to prevent young people (especially young male people) from being sucked into internet echo chambers and radicalised into violence by the content they find therein. Government bodies such as the UK's Prevent were set up for this explicit purpose. These efforts have mostly been focused on the potential for violent radicalisation by three distinct ideologies/communities: radical Islam, far-right white nationalism/neo-Nazism, and incel/blackpill*. The latter, in particular, is considered such a pressing societal issue that the prime minister of the UK wants every secondary school student to watch a miniseries (which, tellingly, he erroneously referred to as a "documentary") about a white teenager who gets radicalised by incel communities and stabs a female classmate to death - in spite of the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a single case of a UK citizen or resident murdering someone because of the incel worldview.

Spend enough time looking at trans activism and you can't fail to notice how much of the messaging carries a distinctly aggressive bent which revels in the glorification of violence. Trans activists routinely call on their supporters to assault, punch* or decapitate TERFs ("TERF" here meaning not "trans-exclusionary radical feminist" but "anyone who doesn't unquestioningly validate trans people's claimed identities", a category which doubtless included most of the worshippers in that church). There's a literal "holiday" called the "Trans Day of Vengeance". There are subreddits which encourage trans people to take up arms against their oppressors. (I mean seriously, look at this shit.) The impression I get is that, among the alphabet people, the trans community is really something of an outlier in this regard: if there's a parallel movement of gay men urging each other to take up arms to fight back against their homophobic oppressors, I'm not aware of it.

A few years ago, progressives had a term for this: stochastic terrorism. The idea is, if you flood information pathways with enough messaging which covertly encourages people to commit violence ("dog whistles" optional), sooner or later a dangerously unhinged person will encounter it, take it to heart, and attack the people you want to see attacked. But because it's impossible to predict where and when such a person will strike, you have enough plausible deniability to escape accusations of incitement to violence. Well, just so.

I don't know for a fact that this specific shooter (or the one in Nashville) was radicalised by exposure to extremist trans rhetoric, but it seems a reasonable assumption given the extremely online bent of many of his declarations (seriously, would "I'm the Woker Baby/Why So Queerious" even mean anything to someone who doesn't spend at least four hours of every day staring at a screen?). Every trans mass shooter to date has explicitly couched their crimes in political identitarian terms.

Suffice it to say that I believe the question of whether participation in radical trans communities is a risk factor for violent radicalisation is one which warrants serious consideration and ought not to be just dismissed out of hand. I'm not even being funny, but one of the core tenets of gender ideology ("anyone who doesn't see you the way you wish to be seen is oppressing you") seems practically tailor-made to promote the narcissism and megalomania common to all school shooters (likewise a secondary tenet, "any lesbian who doesn't want to fuck you is a hateful bigot"). There's the even more obvious point that female people taking testosterone causes increased aggression which might make FtMs more prone to violence.

*Also worth mentioning that, if participating in incel communities is a red flag for violent radicalisation, many trans people fit the bill by default. At this point I find the existence of an incel-to-trans pipeline flat out impossible to deny (something a handful of posters on /r/MTF are self-aware enough to recognise). Spend some time in that sub, take a shot every time you see a post which boils down to "why won't cis lesbians fuck me even though I identify as a woman?" and you'll have alcohol poisoning before the day is out (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Incel and MtF online spaces are alike in that they largely consist of male people who are attracted to female people complaining about being sexually frustrated. See also the rivers of digital ink spilled about the so-called "cotton ceiling".

**This one was actually said by a man who's spent more than half of his life in prison for assorted violent crimes, including false imprisonment, torture and attempted murder. Suffice it to say that, when he encouraged people to assault others, I do not believe he was speaking figuratively or engaging in harmless hyperbole.

Something I find interesting is the relative lack of interest in, or ability to, self-police among progressive groups. Of course this happens on the right as well but such groups tend to be much smaller and further from respectable politics (like groypers). I wonder if it's got to do with deeper psychological factors such as respect for authority hierarchy.

I don't know for a fact that this specific shooter (or the one in Nashville) was radicalised by exposure to extremist trans rhetoric

We actually know (at least some) of their online accounts, they were on Nazi forums. There was even a place they posted about the shooting three weeks before it happened, an O9A (Nazi Satanist group affiliated forum. They called themselves "chief of executing lolcows".

We know what radicalized them and it wasn't trans related rhetoric, it was online psuedo religious terrorist slop.

I'm not opposed to the idea that trans rhetoric could be leading to mass shootings, but we would expect to see way more if there is, not .0001% (and that's the highest of estimates) of the population doing them, and we would expect to see a clear throughline from trans rhetoric > violence and not these other clear causes like a brainrot satanic Nazi site where they forecasted the shooting.

Your link doesn't work.

We know what radicalized them and it wasn't trans related rhetoric, it was online psuedo religious terrorist slop.

I like the implication that the belief that everyone has a gender identity wholly distinct from their biological sex and knowable only to themselves isn't pseudo-religious. I will also point out that the shooter's uploads to YouTube seem to point to a mish-mash of conflicting motives. Put simply, por que no los dos? Why does the fact that the shooter was active on Nazi fora automatically exculpate the trans community? Why am I required to believe that the Nazi fora was what done the radicalisation, and participating in online trans communities was incidental? Why exactly is that the null hypothesis?

Isn't it possible that this profoundly disturbed young man may have been driven over the edge as a consequence of participating in multiple scary online communities in which violence is glamorised and encouraged? Perhaps if you participated in one community which was full of sentiments like "the Great Replacement is underway, we must make preemptive strikes against our ZOG oppressors" and also participated in a moderate community of peaceful trans people saying things like "violence is never the answer, peaceful protest and civil disobedience are the way forward", it might come out in the wash and you decide not to do anything stupid.

But if you spend half your time in an online community in which everyone's talking about the Great Replacement, and the other half in an online community in which everyone's saying that Trump is going to round up all the trans people and put them in concentration camps - it would be hardly surprising if you ended up with tunnel vision, convinced that violence is the only way out. (Horseshoe theory strikes again: "Israel Must Fall" and "6 Million Wasn't Enough" are the kinds of sentiments which would sound equally at home in the mouths of a neo-Nazi and a Free Palestine dickhead wearing a keffiyeh.)

but we would expect to see way more if there is, not .0001% (and that's the highest of estimates) of the population doing them

Why, exactly, would we expect to see that? I very much doubt that as many as 1% of devout Muslims have been involved in a terrorist attack, yet surely no one disputes that radical Islam is a pressing matter. Ever since Elliot Rodger eleven years ago I've heard a nonstop deluge of handwringing about incel terror attacks, but Wikipedia (who are clearly trying to make the concept sound as scary as possible) can only dredge up 12 incidents over the course of 40 years, one every three years. Meanwhile, we've now had three consecutive years in which there's been at least one violent crime spree by a trans person (or group of trans people) in which they explicitly cited their trans identity as a motivating factor in the crime. Granted, maybe we're in a modus ponens/modus tollens scenario where you think that too much attention is also being paid to Islamist terrorism or incel terrorism. But if you believe that either of these is a real issue, it follows that the question of whether trans radicalisation is a real issue is worth investigating.

There's also the obvious "better an ounce of prevention than a pound of cure" angle. Sure, maybe radical trans rhetoric hasn't yet caused a comparable number of violent deaths per capita when compared to Islamist terrorism or incel terrorism. But that doesn't mean that it won't. If a particular community is displaying obvious red flags for radicalisation or cult-like behaviour, surely it's better to proactively get ahead of the problem rather than sitting on our hands waiting for the members of that community to do something really heinous?

Your link doesn't work

Weird, worked when I tested it. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53141759

Looks like I put an extra 9 at the end instead of ), it's right above the parenthesis on my phone keyboard.

I like the implication that the belief that everyone has a gender identity wholly distinct from their biological sex and knowable only to themselves isn't pseudo-religious

No such implication was made, but I wouldn't call it psuedo religious beciase there isn't any meaningful religious beliefs to trans idealogy.

O9A is centered around their religious beliefs. They believe in "dark gods" and hold explicit spiritual/cosmological views.

Adherents believe that the current aeonic civilization is that of the Western world, but that the evolution of this society is threatened by the "Magian/Nazarene" influence of the Judeo-Christian religion, which the Order seeks to combat in order to establish a militaristic new social order, which it calls the "Imperium". According to Order teachings, this is necessary in order for a galactic civilization to form, in which "Aryan" society will colonise the Milky Way.

Isn't it possible that this profoundly disturbed young man may have been driven over the edge as a consequence of participating in multiple scary online communities in which violence is glamorised and encouraged?

Alternative, most extremely violent people are broken to begin with and often don't need too much to push them over the edge. His messy life, beliefs and actions are incoherent and hard to understand just like most psychotic crazy people are.

Why, exactly, would we expect to see that? I very much doubt that as many as 1% of devout Muslims have been involved in a terrorist attack, yet surely no one disputes that radical Islam is a pressing matter

We expect to see terror attacks from the radicalized Islamists, but not your normal everyday Muslim. Even in Gaza, probably one of the most terrorist aligned nations, most people are not active fighters. Throughout history this same thing can be seen, most citizens in Nazi Germany were not actively involved in the Holocaust and most citizens during the cultural revolution weren't involved in killings.

Likewise wars are almost always fought by a fraction of the population without needing serious drafting in place to force people to fight. Almost 2/3rds of US servicemen in WW2 were drafted for example.

Humans in general are just rather peaceful. Populations might be willing to turn an eye to violence, but they rarely engage in much themselves. Most violent crime is done by a very small portion of repeat offenders.

Ever since Elliot Rodger eleven years ago I've heard a nonstop deluge of handwringing about incel terror attacks, but Wikipedia (who are clearly trying to make the concept sound as scary as possible) can only dredge up 12 incidents over the course of 40 years, one every three years.

Yeah and they're just as dumb.

I've been speaking about this type of issue since I was an older teen seeing Gamergate get called a harassment campaign because a few people sent death threats going "Hey that's not very fair, the large majority of people aren't engaged in threat sending just because a few did! In fact it could even be just one insane people sending several".

I said it about the 2023 pension protests in France "Hey, there's a million people marching you can't expect every single one to be completely moral and good. You shouldn't point to a person being bad and use it to blame the others there"

I said it about Jan 6th "Sure a few people were violent and those ones deserve to be locked up, but your average protestor didn't engage in a crime and it's unfair to say that they're a violent group"

I said it about police during BLM (the large majority of cops do not engage in killing innocents) and about BLM protestors (the large majority of protestors did not engage in looting or arson or other crime).

I've said it about Xianjang and the Uyghurs, I've said it about both the population of Gaza and the population of Israel (most of them are rather peaceful on both sides), I've said it about Russia and pushed back against calling their population orcs despite that I support Ukraine in war and think we should aid them way more!

And I'll keep saying it about other groups, like trans people now. People don't deserve blame for things they don't do, and they don't deserve blame for happening to share group/geographical area/etc with someone who commits violence. Especially because of the Chinese robber fallacy, but even without it.

beciase there isn't any meaningful religious beliefs to trans idealogy.

In my opinion, the belief that "everyone has a gender identity wholly distinct from their biological sex, knowable only to themselves and which can never be questioned by an outside observer" is an unfalsifiable dualist belief, functionally indistinguishable from the belief in an immaterial soul.

His messy life, beliefs and actions are incoherent and hard to understand just like most psychotic crazy people are.

Yes, exactly. Which flatly contradicts your previous ironclad confidence that it was his participation in Nazi fora specifically which drove him to violence. But I'm glad we now agree on this point.

And I'll keep saying it about other groups, like trans people now. People don't deserve blame for things they don't do, and they don't deserve blame for happening to share group/geographical area/etc with someone who commits violence. Especially because of the Chinese robber fallacy, but even without it.

I agree with you: people shouldn't be blamed for things they didn't do. They certainly shouldn't experience guilt-by-association just because they belong to the same immutable identity category as someone else who did a bad thing. Absolutely no argument here. I have friends and acquaintances who are trans, and I don't want to see them being stigmatised just because some people who happen to identify the same way they do committed horrific crimes halfway across the planet.

The point I was trying to make in my previous comment wasn't that "being trans should be treated as a red flag for potential violent behaviour" but rather that "radical trans rhetoric may be a potentially concerning memeplex". I don't think it's controversial to assert that people are more likely to commit violence in the name of certain memeplexes than others. If you're looking at a neo-Nazi skinhead and a dude whose entire degree of political engagement boils down to "legalise weed 4/20", you don't get any prizes for guessing which of the two is more likely to go out and beat up a Pakistani teenager minding his own business. Most Muslims are peaceful people, and yet the number of suicide bombers per capita is vastly higher among Muslims than among, say, Buddhists. We could debate until the cows come home why this is: are violent people attracted to ideologies/memeplexes/communities in which violence is encouraged? Most religious people tend to follow the same religion as at least one of their parents, so when a religious person commits an act of violence, it's impossible for us to control for whether it was the religion that "caused" them to do it, or if they had a genetic predisposition towards violence. But in spite of this, nobody thinks it's controversial to assert that certain memeplexes/ideologies/communities are more closely associated with violence than others. If you had a teenaged son and he started spending a lot of time on Stormfront, that would be cause for concern in a way it wouldn't if he started spending a lot of time on a D&D forum. This is true in spite of the fact that I am fairly confident that the overwhelming majority of people who post on Stormfront have never committed a violent crime.

The whole point of my previous comment was that the question "is the radical trans memeplex a potential red flag for violence, in the same way that certain other memeplexes are?" is a question which is worth investigating. I'm emphatically not asserting that it is. I'm emphatically not stating that if your teenaged son starts spending a lot of time in trans communities, that's exactly as concerning as it would be if he started spending a lot of time on Stormfront. I'm emphatically not stating that if your teenaged son came out as trans, you should be concerned about him potentially committing a violent act in the near future, in the same way you would if he started hanging around with skinheads.

But I am saying that there is a particular strain of trans activism which, to an outside observer, looks really scary and seems to actively revel in the glorification of violence, particularly gearing up with assault rifles and attacking unbelievers (and specifically, unbelieving female people). In the past three years, we've seen two acts of indiscriminate Columbine-style violence committed by perpetrators who may well have been active in this community, along with a crime spree committed by people (the Zizians) who were certainly active within it. The law of parsimony demands that we investigate whether or not these perpetrators' participation in these radical communities may have contributed to their decision to commit these horrendous crimes, in the same way it would if there were three unrelated crimes committed over the course of three years by, say, the members of a new religious community. I don't think it's good enough to just throw our hands up in defeat and say "whatever, there will always be mentally ill people and these things are impossible to predict". That, to me, amounts to putting one's head in the sand, intentionally overlooking potentially relevant patterns just because they make us uncomfortable.

Put simply, por que no los dos? Why does the fact that the shooter was active on Nazi fora automatically exculpate the trans community? Why am I required to believe that the Nazi fora was what done the radicalisation, and participating in online trans communities was incidental? Why exactly is that the null hypothesis?

The Nazi/rainbow overlap is even well-known enough to have a Stonetoss comic about it (the redditors refusing to understand the joke are icing on top).

And don’t get me started about Nazifurs and the 4chan creation Aryanne the white supremacist My Little Pony.

What people who know about these never seem to see is the vast distance between edgy performative jerkwads and conservative-liberal values.

Buttercup Dew/My Nationalist Pony would make for a great writeup, but honestly I think that most people would need a 5 or 500k word introduction to the 2010 internet first.

There was some great intersectionality between the alt right of the 2010s and Friendship is Magic. Apart from /mlpol/ and My Nationalist Pony, you also had things like The Dreaded Jim's "Rabid Puppies and My Little Pony" and AntiDem's "In Which I Determine Whether Friendship Really Is Magic" as well as his three part review of Friendship is Optimal. And I think "Just An Assistant" might have been a stealth neoreactionary story. All while Breitbart was reporting on Ted Cruz's favorite pony and wondering which little horse Trump could pick in response.

Good times.

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Just found it on archive.org and holy cow I was not ready for that.

And don’t get me started about Nazifurs and the 4chan creation Aryanne the white supremacist My Little Pony.

Christian/Neoreactionary Sunset Shimmer was better.

there's an interesting parallel between the logic you are going with here (which I don't even disagree with) and the same arguments I see on gun control (ie extremely low percentage of guns ever used in crime)

It's an interesting example of framing too!

Like we could say that 100% of mass shootings are done by someone holding a gun and it sounds scary and intense. That's also a completely factual point because they couldn't do the mass shooting without a gun.

But like .00001% or whatever it is of people who have held guns are mass shooters. Mass shooters are just extremely uncommon in general. It's scary in part because it's so violent and done by someone else on purpose, but they're just not a thing that meaningfully happens.

But I would hazard a guess even amongst the group of "people with violent tendencies" most of them probably have not done a mass shooting because they're just that rare and most violent tendencies people are just slamming their car horn at road rage imagining beating the other driver up or whatever.

Like we could say that 100% of mass shootings are done by someone holding a gun and it sounds scary and intense. That's also a completely factual point because they couldn't do the mass shooting without a gun.

I was thinking, too, that this figure was indeed tautological… and then I thought about it a bit more, and maybe not. I mean, it's plausible someone someone could shoot and kill four or more people in a single incident with a crossbow…

That both of the recent transgender terrorists targeted their own childhood school could mean something. Does their mental illness spring from a form of arrested development occurring at the puberty age? Could it have to do with a failure on behalf of those around them to reinforcement and affirm the biological changes that happened at this age? Could transgenderism — for the ones not seeking sexual gratification — be caused by the mind being “stuck” in the age where one learns about their body, due to some obscure early life trauma or a lack of social affirmation, and their mind tries to rekindle the feelings of that age through the artificial rediscovery of their body via “coming out” and hormones? This is something to dwell on, because there does seem to be a sub-expression of transgenderism which is obsessed with nostalgic things but which is not sexualized, and this is a distinct from the other subexpression which craves its own sexual humiliation (eg that Canadian teacher with the enormous boobs who sent her one sextape to her HR lady; the Matrix-dominatrix brothers…)

School shooters are narcissistic megalomaniacs who crave, more than anything, personal infamy. They notice that there are few crimes in our society seen as more heinous than murdering children (made particularly evident by the ghoulish amount of attention the most recent school shooting received). They conclude that murdering a bunch of children is the easiest way to achieve personal infamy. They look to places where large numbers of children congregate, and unsurprisingly find that schools meet this description. The nearest school is probably the one they are currently attending, or the one they attended (if they are a recent graduate or still live in the town they grew up). I'm not sure anything more needs to be explained beyond that.

On the TV Tropes page for the movie JFK, it's noted that one reason a lot of people didn't accept the conclusions of the Warren Commission was because they simply couldn't fathom the idea of a frustrated, unemployable, socially awkward loser murdering someone for no better reason than wanting to be famous for something, even something heinous. "Modern audiences, however, more than a generation after the Columbine massacre when such self-aggrandizing slayings have become almost mundane, might be more accepting that Oswald could indeed have acted alone." (Incidentally, there's something uniquely chilling about that phrase "self-aggrandizing slayings".) If Lee Harvey Oswald was around today, he would've been a school shooter: if all you're after is fame for yourself, it's much easier to gun down a bunch of minimally protected developing youths than a politician with a Secret Service detail. It also says something about how heinous a crime murdering children is that, for doing so, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are almost as famous as the man who committed the only one of the two successful assassinations of a POTUS in the twentieth century. Innumerable books analysing their psychology? Check, check. An Oscar-winning movie about their exploits? Check (bonus points for going out of its way to attempt to whitewash and exculpate Oswald), check (and there are several other movies about both which didn't win Oscars). A video game about them? Check, check.

the man who committed the only successful assassination of a POTUS in the twentieth century.

Czolgosz seethes in lack-of-infamy...

Good. Damnatio Memoriae for every assassin and school shooter.

Could've sworn McKinley was a few years earlier, mea culpa.

Eh, the 20th century didn't start until 1914 anyways...

That is a lot of conjecture for N=2.

I am skeptical of your nurture hypothesis. I think people have different sliders in their heads towards which genders they are sexually attracted and as which genders they identify.

Social approval of LGBT will then make it more likely that they will reveal their nonstandard orientation to the world. If your gender identity slider is at 0.7 away from your birth gender, if you see your classmate being called brave for coming out you might decide that you are trans. If your society reacts to LGBT by throwing them from tall buildings, you are much more inclined to play being a cishet.

Here is another explanation: quite a few kids make traumatic memories in school. Often because other kids are jerks, sometimes because teachers are jerks and sometimes without any concrete bully to blame.

I think mass shooters are somewhat likely to pick a place with strong emotional connotations rather than shooting up a random mall they have never set foot in before. Ideally, they would want to travel back to the past and shoot up the place where they feel it all went wrong, but the best they can do is to come back to the same place and murder some kids.

If your society reacts to LGBT by throwing them from tall buildings, you are much more inclined to play being a cishet.

Is it really “playing”? It seems completely obvious to me that even if these sliders exist, most people would be much happier with a wife and children, compared being some old queen alone in your apartment with a terrible body condition due to years of abuse.

You’d have to be pretty far off baseline for that not to apply.

I know a Mormon man, as queer as a three dollar bill. Married, many kids, greatly enjoys child birth. His son came out and his response was "Get over it, I'm gayer than you are!"

I know a Mormon man, as queer as a three dollar bill.

Probably not applicable to him if he's actually gay, but many of the Mormon men I've interacted with have an odd affect of some kind that trips the ol' gaydar. Of course, any given one is vastly out-reproducing me, so it's obviously not a hindrance for them with Mormon women.

I wonder if it's a closer-to-home example of the old "Saudi men holding hands" paradox. If you're in a culture where homosexuality is nearly unthinkable, you simply don't need to worry about innocuous behavior being misinterpreted as homosexual. If you're a heterosexual in mainstream modern culture, where bisexuality and homosexuality are officially approved of and celebrated but unofficially bisexuality would be brutal on your dating life, then you greatly want to avoid anything that might give misleading signals, and the fact that all the other hetero guys are doing the same just increases how misleading the signal would be if you slip up.

Sad story for the father and the son

How so?

I’m a catholic but I greatly admire the Mormons. What a story.

Married many kids, greatly enjoys child birth.

Excuse me, what?

Missed a comma or with. Married with many kids. Also literally watching his babies come out the shoot. He's loud, boisterous, tells raunchy - by Mormon standards - stories like gay dudes are known to do with all the women he works with.

Maybe he meant 'child rearing' and married with many kids.

Does this theory apply to the VA Tech, Uvalde, Sandy Hook, Parkland, UT clock tower, or Columbine shootings? Because that’s how far down the list I had to go before finding one that wasn’t a current or former student.

That both of the recent transgender terrorists targeted their own childhood school could mean something.

I'm not sure there's much meaning to be ascertained, most school shooters target their own current or former school as a default.

From my perspective, it seems pretty obvious that a lot of FtM types in particular are far less interested in becoming men than they are afraid of becoming women, and so their "dysphoria" is driven more by a desire to prevent adulthood. It's less about what they transition to ("boys"), than what they don't transition to (adults). This makes sense when you assume they've been infected by a highly virulent memeplex that is essentially uses their bodies to reproduce itself and spread laterally (using modern communications technology) rather than generationally. Arresting their development is a good strategy, because it prevents them from wasting time and energy on such irrelevant things as their own reproductive success. I perceive this pattern less among MtF types, but I guess it exists.

Older highly successful memeplexes tended to be much more symbiotic with their hosts, since being pro-natal was a good way of spreading itself. Making children was one of the most effective ways the memeplex's host could make more hosts, but modern communications and transport technology changes everything. This is probably the fundamental reason for collapsing birthrates, and transgenderism is an extreme manifestation of that.

I think that objectively, female puberty can be a rather unwelcome change.

Getting your period (and knowing that this will continue through the next few decades) seems much less desirable than getting the odd nocturnal ejaculation.

If you are a sporty 10yo who was so far playing soccer with 10yo boys, knowing that they will get more muscles while you will grow tits, and that your character sheet has just gotten a new core stat "hotness" which will strongly influence most social interactions in your adult life might very well feel unfair.

And the very idea of pregnancy might thrill some girls but invoke Alien-level body horrors in others.

Of course it's understandable, and also why it's no coincidence that the demographic now most likely to come out as "trans men" is the same demographic which a generation ago would have been most likely to be diagnosed with anorexia. In many regards, the practical end result is identical.

I have seen some reasonably compelling anecdotal evidence that FtM correlates very strongly with eating disorders ("take hormones to avoid getting curves!") and also with childhood sexual abuse ("I don't want to be seen as a woman if this is how they're treated!"). And also that those two are nontrivially correlated with each other.

Not trying to imply that this fits all cases, but it read as quite believable to me.

Also it feels like MtF are more likely to try and achieve some sort of performative attractive sexbomb femininity, whilst FtMs acknowledge they're not going to be Arnold Schwarznegger even with Estrogen blockers so settle for the invisibility of a 5'5 chubby guy.

it seems pretty obvious that a lot of FtM types in particular are far less interested in becoming men than they are afraid of becoming women

Huh...

This makes me think that FtM transsexuality and MtF transsexuality are actually a lot more symmetrical than I previously realized.

Someone here once mentioned that FtM transsexuality was driven by an urge to "self annihilation", which I thought was great and accurate. Although it did make FtMism out to be a rather different phenomenon than MtFism, since MtFism is pretty clearly driven by positive desire.

But if we instead think that the key issue underlying all forms of transsexuality is the individual's relation to femininity. FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity, MtFism = attraction to and desire to possess femininity. Then we can start to conceive of the two forms as being separate manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon.

I happen to agree with the radfems who claim that men are the "default" gender and women are a deviation from the default. Although I might disagree with them over the specifics. Rather than conceiving of femininity as a "lack" of masculinity, it's relatively clear to me that femininity is something that one possesses in addition to the "default" human state. And this is exactly what we see expressed in the two distinct forms of transsexuality.

FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity

I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine. I think both components are present, but to provide a pretty straightforward (hur hur) example, this and this comic (cw: furry, NSFW, FtM/F) says a lot of things about how the ftm character reacts to someone he's penetrating touching there... and also is more gynophilic in his partners than I am, and a longer-running thread revolves around wanting to be a dad, and not just (or even primarily) in the breeding kink sense.

Now, tbf, I haven't stalked the writer's twitter/bluesky enough to be sure they're specifically transmale... but a lot of transmale people in tumblr space found it pretty resonant. And it's not exactly an uncommon framework: most of the other good examples just look like M/M or M/F, are really gay, and/or just a lot kinkier than bedupolker's, but I can provide links if requested. Not always or even often a plausible one in every way -- very few transguys are going to get six-foot-three with a Christian-Bale-as-Batman voice -- but if we're talking about what people want or are attracted toward or fantasize about, it's kinda relevant that you can just look at people's fantasies, these days, and find at least existence proofs.

The problem with those comics is that they left me wondering "but can rats and mice be interfertile?" which is probably not what the creator was getting at.

(Also, it had me going "wait, a rat and a mouse? why is this transspecies? ah yeah, FtM, being a rat means they can be sure of being bigger - i.e. more masculine - than their partner if the partner is a mouse" and also "hang on, the mouse already has kids? how many kids? how many does she want? does she have kids with each new partner? how many kids can they support, we're talking mice and rats here who have litters: average for mice is 6-8 pups, average for rats is 8-9" but since this is anthropomorphic rodents, probably it'd be twins or triplets and only one litter per year, not their animal counterparts multiple pups per litter and multiple litters per year).

(Also also, who the hell wants to be a rat? But I guess these are lab rats, not ordinary dump, harbour, and other wild spaces, rats).

The problem with those comics is that they left me wondering "but can rats and mice be interfertile?" which is probably not what the creator was getting at.

Part of the second comic has the two treating a squirrel as if he'd 'perfect' donor, until the problem comes up that he's survived testicular cancer, not that he's from a different suborder. There's furry conventions where interspecies relationships are treated as their own type of birth control, but they don't really mesh with the 'return to small town' vibe here, so you're just not supposed to think about it much.

how many kids? how many does she want? does she have kids with each new partner? how many kids can they support, we're talking mice and rats here who have litters...

It's kinda cute. I think the theme is supposed to be more 'crushed on a girl, her baby-daddy/boyfriend is a jerk, and woo she's into me', which... uh, is not an unusual fantasy, nor is its distaff counterpart.

(Also also, who the hell wants to be a rat? But I guess these are lab rats, not ordinary dump, harbour, and other wild spaces, rats).

Rodents in general are a surprisingly common furry species, if not up there with the stereotypical dogs, cats, and dragons. FFIX's Freya (tbf, a white rat species) had a big impact on people. I'd say anthrofying them gets away from some of the real-world equivalent's grosser behaviors, but there's also a Skaven-specific fandom, so maybe it just doesn't matter.

Are those six kids from the past partner? Or from several past partners?

Anyway, I hope Ratty is a big earner because if they're going to have their own litter, there's going to be a lot of little paws pattering around the house.

To be fair, I do not get furrydom at all. And it doesn't help that a lot of the most visible stuff is yiff, and things like "snake women with breasts" which just makes me go "no!" If you're going to be an animal, why be unrealistic? Though yeah, I'm arguing about pretend human animals which is totally unrealistic in the first place. But, for instance, in what I suppose we can call classic 'anthropomorphised animal literature', there is no sense that Mole and Mrs. Otter can get together and have cute hybrid babies, because species are not cross-fertile like that.

(Also, I am now wincing at the idea of a mouse pregnant by a squirrel. More likely to explode while pregnant with the growing baby/babies, than to be able to successfully give birth to a hybrid squouse).

squouse

New furry name for intimate partner just dropped

Rodents in general are a surprisingly common furry species, if not up there with the stereotypical dogs, cats, and dragons. FFIX's Freya (tbf, a white rat species) had a big impact on people. I'd say anthrofying them gets away from some of the real-world equivalent's grosser behaviors

There's also been a trend on the internet for a while (thanks to people with pet rats) that obviously everyone knows that rats are lovely and clean and smart creatures, and only the ignorant associate rats with those old stereotypes these days".

I feel like there has to be a word or phrase for that sort of "this common knowledge thing was wrong/inaccurate, but there's been a bit of an overcorrection in the opposite direction".

I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine.

I'm with Iconochasm here: I've triangulated that I'm at the far high end of male tenderness and romantic shyness, and those examples strike me as painfully unmasculine. The rat character just feels hunched over, passive, depressed. Maybe a desire is there, but if this resonates with the trans masc community than I don't know if they really get what men aim to be like. Although I love my tenderness, I also don't want to be the guy who apologizes for kissing a woman who really wanted me to kiss her. Ask me how I know.

and also is more gynophilic in his partners than I am

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean -- I'm really not trying to be a jerk here. But, I mean, you are bisexual, and obviously you have a deep connection to gay culture. I'm not sure that being more gynophilic than you means a whole lot, particularly when we're talking about people who are exclusively attracted to women. Do you have a preference for women?

I admit, I didn't even realize you had any interest in the fairer sex until you explicitly said you were bisexual -- my ingrained mental image, which is hard to shake, is that you're twink who likes wearing programmer socks. I guess I've known too many geeky MSM or furries that fit that frame that I slotted you into it. And I genuinely want to know how wrong I am.

are really gay

The "trans men are really gay" thing actually contributes to the point you're refuting: if you're flying from femininity, what is less feminine than being gay? As you've said before, femininity isn't really all that prized in gay culture, stereotypes aside.

a longer-running thread revolves around wanting to be a dad

Well, a parent, at least. There are obviously differences between moms and dads, but I don't know how to meaningfully distinguish "I want to be a parent, but I don't want to get pregnant" (which would actually contribute to the point you're trying to refute!) from "I want to be a dad."

It is also slightly humorous that the rat character throws a party to interview candidates for impregnating his girlfriend, which seems, well, like something a lot of men would find somewhere between uncomfortable and enraging.

EDIT: A few more reflections after downloading the comic PDF. I braved the rat pornography so everyone else wouldn't have to.

But most of the sex doesn't come off to me as gay, or male -- they come off to me as lesbian wish fantasies about doing masculinity better than men. In particular, the initial sex scene in the comic features the rat character pulling a strapon out of his everyday carry bag (as one does) and then insisting on putting a condom on it, because ????. This is a contradiction to the stereotype that men won't wear a rubber.

Then, during the sex scene, he asks the female character, "how do you like to do it?" and she responds by saying, "Nobody's ever asked me that before!" Again, this is a contradiction to the view that men don't give a damn about women's sexual enjoyment, which is puzzlingly common among women. The point is that the trans masc rat is a Better Man (TM) than those dirty cis rat boys who didn't treat her right.

Maybe that is how a lot of men are, I don't know. But the idea that I'd have a sexual encounter and not aim to make it a good one for my partner is like suggesting that I set my pizza sauce-side down. What's the point of getting my rocks off without having a memorable experience that ends in mutual satisfaction?

(Of course, she doesn't know what she likes, and the trans man rat character just substitutes his own judgment for her inability to state her sexual preferences, and those happen to be absolutely exactly what she likes. Another trope in sexual fiction written by women.)

The "single pregnant woman meets Good Man (TM) with dad vibes" is also a common female fantasy -- obviously it's quite adaptive. But it's not necessarily something that I'd say reflects an internalization of maleness so much as a desire to perform proper maleness for women, or in other words to be the butchest lesbian who ever strapped on a dildo.

I did definitely enjoy the transition from "we literally just reunited on the street randomly" to "we are having sex, we can separate physicality from emotions, right?" to "we are now madly in love," which took all of one evening. Can I make a u-haul joke?

Also... it really does seem like the "main character" in the sex scene I read was the female character. It was all about her. I'm not getting "I AM A MAN FANTASIZING ABOUT BEING MASCULINE" vibes, but very much a projection of women's sexual desires onto the trans male character. Particularly in the "you're my princess but you're also my slut" thing, that's textbook girl next door with a naughty side energy. Of course, I think many men would be happy to do that for a woman if she asked (but in the comic she doesn't ask -- he intuits).

The comic's depictions of sex read more to me like something written by a woman than by a man -- might as well have been written by women I've dated, it's so painfully familiar. (ngl, didn't hate it.) He's a woman's ideal man, not a man's ideal man. That's not an insult, but it is important. I don't think this proves what you think it does.

Also... it really does seem like the "main character" in the sex scene I read was the female character. It was all about her.

You forgot the mouse insisting she wants babies by rat becasue she wants CUTE BABIES who will have his POINTY NOSE and BARE TAIL which are so HAWT and SEXXXXXY.

This is wish-fulfilment over "these are the parts of myself I hate and think ugly and think everyone else thinks are ugly, hang on, now I am being affirmed in my okayness by someone accepting me for who I am and moreover finding these things attractive?"

Imagine a guy writing a comic about a woman dying to have his babies because they'd have his cute lil' pot belly and bald spot (well, I guess some women might like a cute lil' pot belly on a guy, no accounting for tastes! dad bod is a thing, I have heard). He'd be slagged all over the place about it.

While writing wish fulfillment stories about it is a little silly, I do think it's a real phenomenon that women in love start having a halo effect feeling towards their partner's appearance. "I want to have a baby with your deep blue eyes and your cute nose and your bright smile" is a completely realistic thing you might hear from your girlfriend or your wife. Maybe not for a pot belly -- but obviously that's not exactly a genetic trait. It's not so much a statement of "they're so HAWT and SEXXXXXY" as it is a statement of "I want to have children by you in particular," which is just something that women say when they really love you.

I can say that pair-bonding with a woman also gives a halo effect about her appearance, where individual features that might not be the most attractive thing in the world dissolve into the gestalt of someone you love. You start finding her distinguishing features attractive because they're hers. I'd assert this is a symmetrical feature of human pair-bonding.

The unrealistic thing about the comic's depiction of this is that it happens so quickly, which is partly a joke I think.

I agree with your points, but since this is (we are assuming) a trans person writing their self-insert furry character, then "I am a rat and you are a mouse" take on extra meanings. And the characteristics described are ones where rats are different to mice: mice have cute little short noses and hairy tales, rats have big pointy noses and long, hairless, tails. Picking those characteristics instead of "I want babies with your white fur" or "as tall as you are" reads, to me, like a trans person picking the traits where they don't pass as the gender they present as/the traits that made them not fit in to their assigned gender at birth, traits they find ugly or dysphoric, and then this is the fix-it by cute feminine (very femme) mousie loving the ugly bits and finding them in fact attractive.

insisting on putting a condom on it, because ????.

From the long-ago lectures about safe(r) sex in the days of AIDS, because fluid transfer via sharing sex toys. If Ratty has used this strap-on with other partners, then no matter how much they've cleaned it, there's always the tiny risk. Plus good practice to get into the habit of using protection with new partners until you both agree to be exclusive and have the results of your STI tests.

(Also, Ms Mousie in the linked comics seems to be rather promiscuous, or at least baby-crazy, so it's safer to assume she's been around the block and to protect yourself as well by using condoms).

The rat character just feels hunched over, passive, depressed. Maybe a desire is there, but if this resonates with the trans masc community than I don't know if they really get what men aim to be like.

Yeah. This is the whole thing about socialisation, and how defensive MtF get about "male socialisation prior to transition" and the same for FtM about not having male socialisation prior to transition. I do think it's a female thing; if you read slash, there have been plenty of times I've gone "no, this is not how two guys interact or talk to each other or talk about things, writing like this is how I know you're a teenage/early twenties girl".

I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine.

I'm just going off of my general impressions from hearing FTMs talk over the years. There seems to be a much bigger focus on escaping the responsibilities and restrictions of femininity, and the actual positive desire for masculinity is secondary (but it certainly still does exist in at least some individuals, as your examples show).

It's noticeably different with MTFs because there's such an obvious strong fetishistic sexual component. Of course there's a confounding factor here that explains why we might not see that as much with FTMs, because women have fewer paraphilias overall than men, and the paraphilias they do have aren't felt as intensely. But FTMs could still desire masculine traits in a non-fetishistic way. My impression is that that part of it just isn't quite as important for them on average, but I freely admit I could be wrong on that point.

Of course, if it were the case that FTMs simply straightforwardly desired to be masculine in the way that MTFs desire to be feminine, then that would be fine, because it would still support my original claim that there's a symmetry between MTFism and FTMism. But enough people have pointed out that FTMism seems different on the surface that there should be some sort of explanation for this apparent difference.

I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine.

Presumably the presence of a real effort at actual masculinity. Isn't it kind of a trope that many FtM want to be soft, emo, cuddle-and-cry boys? It seems that many transmen don't really have any idea what being a man means, aside from yaoi porn.

I guess I'm curious what you'd say "being a man" means, then. I know transguys who fantasize about having a harem of their preferred gender, or for not-bedroom examples who spend massive levels of focus on code (though I guess they do mostly like Rust...) or woodworking or car stuff or small aircraft. But if literally wanting to become a father doesn't at least give something to update around, I'm not sure there's any information that could serve as information to the gender-critical side.

EDIT: and, conversely, I'm not sure it makes sense to say someone's rejecting femininity while literally screwing as feminine MILF-to-be as possible.

"Being a man" in the "toxic" sense. Being a protector and provider, a rock and the firmament. Do transmen dream of defeating villains and being dashingly wounded in an act of heroism?

EDIT: and, conversely, I'm not sure it makes sense to say someone's rejecting femininity while literally screwing as feminine MILF-to-be as possible.

I'm going to level with you: I gave at least a token effort to reading the trans-mouse erotica comics and I could not figure out what the hell was going on. Consider my comment to be a fully general take that does not relate to those specific pieces of media at all.

Isn't it kind of a trope that many FtM want to be soft, emo, cuddle-and-cry boys?

Many of them do; I suspect a dynamic (broadly) symmetrical with AGP-vs-HSTS.

See I tend to see it in the opposite way. Men are not the default, as men have to earn the right to be seen as men. Women have to basically grow boobs and they’re women. Children are children by default as they are born as children and remain so until they become something else. If I have to achieve something to be considered a real man, then being a man is not the default.

I think in both cases you see the person not really wanting to grow up. They want to be the opposite gender in ways that don’t force them into adulthood.

I think there are women saying something exactly symmetrical. What, men only have to get tall and hairy?

I think you’re both wrong; the struggles that are easily visible to you are not obvious to outsiders, and vice versa.

So are women issued a woman card? Does such a concept even exist? Men are constantly worried about being “man enough,” yet again women don’t have to sweat it. If they have boobs, they are a woman, whether or not they accomplish anything, whether or not they have kids, whether or not they dress like women, etc. There is no woman card to issue, because unlike manhood, it’s not something you have to achieve.

because unlike manhood, it’s not something you have to achieve.

Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive, lactation more expensive, and placental pregnancy yet more expensive still. Women are precious to the tribe, automatically, by nature; while men are the expendable sex, and have to earn their "value." Such has it always been, such will it always be.

Are men issued such a card? I appear to have missed mine.

That’s my whole point. You can’t see their card, and they can’t see yours. It doesn’t mean the card doesn’t exist.

It’s used quite often in conversation and even in marketing. It’s obviously a metaphor, but there’s really no equivalent for women. There’s no thought that being too into masculine things (like sports) makes you less of a woman, but there are numerous activities that men avoid for being too “feminine” and thus emasculating to consider. Art is a big one, and it’s almost assumed that any male who is into art is basically a sissy and probably gay on top of that. A woman never really has the same consideration. She can hunt deer, field dress it and drag it to camp secure in her womanhood. She can box and beat the crap out of people and still be seen as a woman. On the accomplishment side, a male would not be considered a man unless he had a reasonably high status job, his own place, and a non-junker car. He’s less than for that. A woman can have no job, no car, and live with mom and dad and still be seen as a woman. And on it goes. Men have to work to be man enough to be considered a man by other men and by women. If you fail, you’re stuck until you manage to leave and go accomplish masculinity.

From my perspective, it seems pretty obvious that a lot of FtM types in particular are far less interested in becoming men than they are afraid of becoming women, and so their "dysphoria" is driven more by a desire to prevent adulthood. It's less about what they transition to ("boys"), than what they don't transition to (adults).

Given the memes separating "women and children" from "men," there's something deeply ironic and perverse and even darkly hilarious about this. Of course, an FTM doesn't transition to becoming a man, but rather a transman, and I have to wonder, once we remove all the ideologically-based praise and support from being trans, if a typical FTM's experience as an adult in society is closer to that of a masculine/low status woman or that of a median man.

I think it's closer to that of being a short, chubby, not very athletic, not very up-and-coming in the '6 foot, 6 figures, 6 inches' notion of dating man.

In other words, a low-status guy with low sexual market value. If they identify as gay, they're not gay enough for cis gay men. If they identify as straight, same for cis straight women. And then the experience of male social structures and how men are treated/how men treat each other is another whammy: they want to be guys but then complain about being treated exactly how a guy is treated.

At least, that's my impression from the complaints online. I guess a tall, tomboyish/masculine woman with 'male' interests who transitioned close to puberty would have an advantage when trying to pass, but the ones I see online (again, probably not the majority) clearly were short, fat, plain women and are now short, fat, plain men (but with scrubby beards).

if a typical FTM's experience as an adult in society is closer to that of a masculine/low status woman or that of a median man.

Depends on the type of FTM. One type specifically tries to look like Danny Devito because it will make them invisible. Their dysphoria seems to be related to discomfort with getting attention from men, and becoming invisible is the way to avoid that attention.

Another group transitions, and either the desire to reify their masculinity by becoming culturally gay or perhaps the influence of testosterone, leads them to become hypersexual. 2rafa's description from a few years ago of someone she "knew as a girl and she was a blue hair, tumblr type, I suspect into Yaoi. Now he’s a twinkish bottom with a thin beard addicted to Grindr hookups" rings very true to me. I know people like this. There's always the beard.

Sometimes this seems to happen to people who identified themselves as lesbians before transitioning, which means that they jumped the shark from not wanting male attention to really wanting male attention. I once met an FTM transitioner in a marriage with a woman who was looking for men to sleep with. "I like women and she's nice, but I need to be fucked, what she doesn't know won't hurt her" was a real quote. First time I ever encountered the concept of a lesbian sham marriage. I guess in this case the beard was more of a person.

There's always the beard.

Well, yeah. How else to show you're a guy/on T without growing a beard? Women don't gots beards!

(Honestly, the number one thing that drives me up the wall about the trans activism online is the retreat to rigid, and rigidly enforced, gender roles of the "pink is for girls, blue is for boys" type. Sure, someone once in a while will 'challenge the gender binary' by referencing cis women who are mannish in appearance or, say, have PCOS - one symptom of which may be hirsutism - or women post-menopause who, again, may become more hirsute so that breaks the rules around body hair and body type and so on hence gender is a social construct, but then they go right back to "hey, if you are AFAB and have this interest/look this way, consider you may be a trans man!")

the number one thing that drives me up the wall about the trans activism online is the retreat to rigid, and rigidly enforced, gender roles

Because it serves their ends. They deny a binary exists as a means to exit, and then depend on the same binary as a means to gain entry. The fact it's inconsistent is by necessity entirely uninteresting to them.

"Heads I'm X, tails I'm not Y" is all that matters. Engaging in a spirit of anything less than full credulity (or flat denial) is like getting lured into a three card monte game and getting vexed that the money card isn't where they showed you it was.

I’m pretty sure “they” are inconsistent because “they” consist of a bunch of vaguely-aligned interest groups.

Those darn Christians, denying allegiance to the Pope one minute and then affirming it when it suits them.

More comments

That is certainly one dimension along which that particular type of person will benefit according to her own desires, as intended. I suspect that this, even moreso than other typical decisions which are already filled with them, is the kind of decision that has a lot of unintended consequences with significant impact in one's quality of life.

Could transgenderism — for the ones not seeking sexual gratification — be caused by the mind being “stuck” in the age where one learns about their body, due to some obscure early life trauma or a lack of social affirmation, and their mind tries to rekindle the feelings of that age through the artificial rediscovery of their body via “coming out” and hormones? This is something to dwell on, because there does seem to be a sub-expression of transgenderism which is obsessed with nostalgic things but which is not sexualized, and this is a distinct from the other subexpression which craves its own sexual humiliation (eg that Canadian teacher with the enormous boobs who sent her one sextape to her HR lady; the Matrix-dominatrix brothers…)

I see a lot of potential insight in this. One pattern I noticed is that the way that some transgender people's understanding of being the opposite sex appear almost nostalgic, certainly childish, and naive. Namely, MTF appear to see being a woman as akin to being a nubile, young, attractive woman, while FTM appear to see being a man as akin to being a high status man. Which are pretty likely and reasonable misconceptions for someone to form at adolescence.

Now, these are common enough misconceptions among non-trans people that it's possible that there's nothing particularly going on there. It's also possible that these misconceptions being so powerful play into making identifying as trans appear much more attractive. It's unfortunate that we lack a credible social science institution with resources to research something like this, since it's had such huge, transformative effects in our society just in the past decade.

This seems obviously correct to me, and has a ton of explanatory power when considering the motivations of advocates for childhood puberty blockers. There is a subset of the larger trans activist sphere who clearly see puberty as (at least in some cases, for some children) a profoundly traumatic and unwelcome experience. They want to introduce methods by which kids can have more control and more agency around their pubertal experiences, because they assume most kids (and even most adults) are dealing with the same level of angst about it that they are. These people are obviously typical-minding to an extreme degree — the vast majority of people navigate puberty without too much trauma and get over the awkwardness pretty smoothly — but it’s useful to understand their perspectives.

https://archive.is/JFfGt

The New York Times seems to have gone out of their way to have affirmed the shooter’s pronouns with the title “Suspect Knew Her Target” and calling the suspect Ms. throughout.

I feel like an odd component of the culture war on trans issues is a tacit agreement (Chris Chan, etc) that respecting someone’s gender identity goes out the window once they have done something bad. I’ve seen this in some left-wing spaces, which kinda shows that people are aware that they’re making an active choice to use pronouns - to be nice to the person using them. It seems like the New York Times position is that pronouns are sacrosanct, obviously.

I just imagine how good the writers room felt about themselves doing this - they probably feel like they’re fighting for civil rights in the 60s or throwing bricks or something in the face of public discontent with trans issues.

I dunno, in a kinda vengeful way I want the preferred pronouns in this case to be used. No dodging and 'no true Scotman' waving away of the Sophie Labelle kind.

They have the Transgender Day of Remembrance with the lists of people killed for being trans (very dubious reasoning in many cases*)? Well congrats, now you have your very own trans mass shooters! You're just like ordinary people and can be treated the same way!

*I went through one of those lists for every victim I could find any information on. Most were "domestic violence (like cis women); risks associated with sex work; traffic accident" and one was a trans guy involved in environmental activism who was in his tent during a police raid on the encampment and got shot. I don't see how you can possibly swing that last one to "killed for being trans" but his name still went on the list as a victim of anti-trans hate crime and violence.

If you ever want to have some cynical fun, look up a list of accomplished black people sometime and see if you can find any without at least one, and more often two, white grandparents.

There are some.

Pronouns being, much like many/most things to do with trans/gender ideology, sacrosanct, is pretty mainstream in my experience in progressive/"woke" culture in America. I didn't pay much attention to it, but the few times I ran into it on Twitter and such, it was common to see people being berated for not using Chris Chan's preferred pronouns, and in general it tends to pop up whenever there's some news of some trans person doing something most people agree is wrong. I also recall seeing a scene from some CW Batman show where a cop berates another cop for misgendering the suspect they're interrogating and kicks him out of the interrogation room, followed by him telling the suspect something like how they might be on different sides, but that doesn't mean he has to be an asshole to him, or something.

Of course, opinions tend to vary, as always, but one of the core tenets of this ideology is the relationship between someone's position on the progressive stack (i.e. oppression Olympics or the oppression totem pole) and the truth of their words or justice of their actions. As a result, in practice, the most extreme views espoused by some individual at the highest point on the totem pole with the least scruples about exercising social and physical acts for enforcement set the agenda. Straight men/lesbian women not discriminating against transwomen in dating/sex or including transwomen as full, undifferentiated members of women's sports teams and their lockers are other fairly extreme positions that seem not that commonly held when talking to individuals in private, but in practice, there's rarely more than some non-committal mumbling and foot-dragging when the extreme true believers demand all of society submit to these things, resulting in everyone having to behave in public as if they agree with those things.

I also recall seeing a scene from some CW Batman show where a cop berates another cop for misgendering the suspect they're interrogating and kicks him out of the interrogation room, followed by him telling the suspect something like how they might be on different sides, but that doesn't mean he has to be an asshole to him, or something.

Lmao thanks for the heads-up, I'm never going to watch this shit.

Low effort.

The union has a veto over the style guide that no doubt mandates specific pronouns (or at least a big say in it), and I highly doubt the style guide has carve-outs for sufficiently evil criminals.

Here's one of the videos. I don't know if the letter here is what people are calling a manifesto, it's more like a suicide note. He apologies to his parents, siblings, and friends says he's dying of undiagnosed cancer because of vaping and doesn't want to go out like that.

The panning over the writing on all the weapons are where things are weird.

List of phrases of weapons and magazines: https://x.com/talhagin/status/1960814311192059998

The "manifesto" is collection of writings in a diary written in broken Cyrillic/Russian. Most likely self-taught. The letter is indeed the shooter's suicide note I only read these two pages, but people get the gist. The gist is all I needed before I felt a pang of disgust and no longer felt compelled to learn of motive. Allow me to rant.

How kind, how caring, how comforting to leave a suicide note for friends and family. A depressive ritual, centuries old, that historically aims to share some of the burden of grieving with those left behind. A note acknowledges the tragedy a person creates, but attempts to leave some humanity along with with the selfish, often foolish act.

I don't see how the "suicide" note can do any of that in this case. In this case, the letter should impress upon friends and family a number of unusually burdensome regrets. This exit strategy will leave loved ones in a position where they will pressed to wake up thinking they wish their loved one had taken the easy way out. I wonder if the shooter considered what it might be like for a father to wake up wishing his son had taken his own life, and what that might do to a man? Suicide is usually a selfish act, but in comparison to the murder of children it is downright saintly. It would be better for the well-being of friends and family if they thought this person had a psychotic break without notice. I don't suppose we can expect moral clarity from a mass murderer.

The panning over the writing on all the weapons are where things are weird.

My read is that is pure attention grabbing. To my knowledge there's no Marxist or political commentary in the diary beyond Joo-maxxing. I don't think it's even accurate to call this type a misanthrope. They hate themselves and don't have the decency to do us the favor. I understand depression is colloquially said to be like emotional blindness, but I don't think it is appropriate to invoke that here. This is of a different category.

My hot take: if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were alive today they'd be trans. It wouldn't be the trenchcoat mafia, it'd be the transcoat mafia. I'm not sure how hard it is to successfully profile this type to send them off to boarding school in Idaho. Sure, there's constitutional problems, but there's problems disarming domestic violence perps and we do that. Once they're over 18 society is stuck with the consequences.

There was a suicide note written in plain English, and a journal/diary written in mostly-English but Cyrillic script. I wouldn't' call either a "mainfesto" though both provide a window into the motive.

It wasn’t mostly English, it was google translated Russian copied down with some mistakes. Why I don’t know and I don’t think the answer makes sense to anyone.

At the moment, it's looking like (1) transwoman (2) possibly attended the school, mother used to work in the parish office (3) general mental illness craziness from the very censored reports on the 'manifesto' which seems to have been a mix of everything from anti-Trump to racist to depressed to anti-Semitic to 'everybody hates me, I hate them' (we'll have to see what content is there if/when it's leaked).

So I don't think there was an agenda, just someone with access to guns and a grudge against society heading out to someplace they were familiar with as their most accessible representation of authority to shoot it up.

It seems that there is a bigger story here. This person was possibly groomed by a group called O9A/764, which is a satanic accelerationism/terrorist group that recruits kids into doing things like this.

This sounds like crazy talk to me, but I was surprised that this is a relatively well known thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_crimes_involving_the_Order_of_Nine_Angles

https://nypost.com/2023/09/28/an-inside-look-at-the-satanic-neo-nazi-cult-that-ensnared-queens-man-arrested-on-gun-charges/

https://x.com/klonnypin_gosch/status/1960770843614560527

There’s a broader story here that maybe deserves its own discussion: a lot of the things which the “le heckin science” types dismissed as stupid seem to be real actually? Like this seems as if the 1980s satanic panic stuff was just…true.

I think it’s wrong to try and fit this into left or right. These people aren’t really on the binary. It’s just anti society in general. You see elements of this on both the left, wanting to end society so they can build their glorious gay space communism society finally, and on the right, so they can build their glorious ethnostate.

I’ve seen both rightists and leftists trying to claim this guy for their outgroup, but I think it’s way more complex than that. Basically there is a third group which is the outgroup of everyone on purpose.

I think a lot of people are in denial about how much damage The Dark Knight movie did. Heath Ledger’s joker inspired an entire generation of social outcasts to become jaded antisocial nihilists. Are we really supposed to believe that this guy who shot up the sequel on opening night wasn’t inspired by The Joker? And now we have this:

”I’m the woker baby.

”Why so queerious?”

Much as Ghostface said: "Movies don't create psychos, movies make psychos more creative"

This isn't quite the case -- they're not being more creative, but they are using better lines written by actual creative people. But you get the idea.

What else is there to even say at this point?

Looks like the shooter went out of his way to piss off as many people as possible and make it hard to pin down his political orientation. Non-negligible chance of a psyop.

My immediate impressions is that this was a young person drifting through life, no particular job or engagement with anyone, and just blamed everything going wrong for them on 'society' or whatever, and decided to get fame and notoriety by this attack. I don't think there's anything more coherent behind it than lack of connections, lack of direction, and a desire that "at least this way people will know who I am and talk about me".

According to the Not the Bee, the shooter had also emblazoned "Israel Must Fall" and "6 Million Wasn't Enough" on their firearm.

the Babylon Bee

More specifically (to avoid confusion), its non-satire branch Not the Bee.

Good point, fixed.

I heard about this on the news, but the only angle I got was "we gotta stop this by taking away the guns". No mention that the shooter was trans, though that indeed appears to be true.

For what it's worth, the German print media I see reporting on this (Zeit, Sueddeutsche) all prominently state that the shooter was trans, while also (as is the default for German media) using female pronouns and descriptors.

Is the default using preferred pronouns, or is female just the default in German?

Default to use preferred pronouns. German print media is dominated by Green party sympathisers, which is basically the local offshoot of the US progressive movement.

Whether the shooter conceived of themselves as trans at the moment of shooting seems to be rather complicated.

Whether the shooter conceived of themselves

I’m not doing this to pick on you specifically, but I’m going to use this as an opportunity to express exasperation at this weakness of English which is laid bare when people attempt to talk about an individual whose gender is unknown or unspecified.

What is the word “themselves” doing here? Specifically the “selves” part. Does this one individual have multiple selves? Clearly not! Therefore, the correct reflexive pronoun — presuming we all agree that “they” and “them” are valid when discussing a single individual — should be “themself”! However, as a lifelong monolingual English speaker, I intuitively recognize “themself” as invalid. Not a word!

Now, apparently there are attestations of “themself” from 1350-1400; however, all of the written usages of this pronoun I was able to find on a cursory search were extremely recent. (Like, from less than a month ago.) It appears that there may be a concerted push by writers who, recognizing the dire need for a standard reflexive pronoun to refer to a single individual of unspecific sex/gender, are trying to make “themself” a thing. And, frankly, good for them! It’s shocking that a language as old and as rich as English lacks what seems to be a basic and invaluable word.

Every time I see “themselves” used to refer to a single person, I want to die. Sorry you had to be the immediate recipient of this rebuke, as you are nowhere near the first to commit this grievous offense, nor will you be the last.

If one "needs" a pronoun for indeterminate gender, the problem is not with the language, the problem is with the people. In the past, one either assumed the gender, or asked out of politeness, and that was that. If anyone would have been offended at either, they would most assuredly not have been satisfied with the use of the indeterminate, and would likely have been angrier than had the speaker mearly guessed wrong. If a foreign merchant, seeking permission to do business in the kingdom, facing, say, a particularly butch queen, or incredibly effeminate prince, tried to assure them that his goods were of the highest quality, "as They can see for Themself;" well, I can't say as I see that going over well.

You’re missing the very obvious other use case: discussing a person whose identity is unknown or unspecified in the context of the discussion. A hypothetical person, somebody who is being used as an example to demonstrate a point, etc. All we have right now is the clumsy construction “him or her”, “himself or herself”, etc.

In the past, this would just be 'he' unless there was context otherwise in which case you guess in what's now considered a sexist, stereotyping way (if you are talking about someone at an embroidery club 'she', if you are talking about a general 'he' etc. etc.). Feminism didn't like this, creating the subsequent problem.

[immediately does a Ctrl-F on his NaNoWriMo project looking for errant "themselves"]

How's that going for you?

Girlfriend read the second draft and rated it either 6.5 or 7 out of 10. I took @jake up on his kind offer to read the second draft, which he's in the middle of as we speak. I'm using both of their feedback to compose a "polish" draft.

I find all languages that use separate pronouns for men and women weak, personally.

Every time I see “themselves” used to refer to a single person, I want to die. Sorry you had to be the immediate recipient of this rebuke, as you *art nowhere near the first to commit this grievous offense, nor *wilt you be the last.

Corrected a couple of singular/plural mixups. If thou art acceding to the modern hyperformal second-person pronoun convention, at least avoid sloppiness regarding it.

...or, to be less facetious about it, verb-pronoun agreement follows the form of the pronoun and not the reality of the referent, as we all recognize ever since the second-person singular "thou" and its attendant verb conjugations were driven out of use by second-person plural "you" creeping outwards from the formal singular context to all second-person contexts.

I heard NPR say he was born male yesterday.

Doesn't quite say that in the written story but very close:

In 2020, Westman's mother applied to change the name of her 17-year-old child from Robert to Robin. In court documents obtained by NPR, the mother, Mary Grace Westman, wrote, "minor child identifies as female and wants her name to reflect that identification."

I hear NPR say he was born male yesterday.

Do you remember if they said "he was born male" or something like "the shooter was assigned male at birth"? I know it's a small distinction, but NPR flat out saying "he was born male" seems uncharacteristic. It would be a welcome surprise.

In the Minnesota Public Radio News article it was reported as

Additionally, [FBI Director Kash] Patel posted that Westman was “a male born as Robert Westman,” but [Minneapolis Police Chief Brian] O’Hara has referred to Westman as a man and said he could not confirm that Westman had ever changed names.

It was probably "the shooter was assigned male at birth". I was surprised at any acknowledgment.

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