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Notes -
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.
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…)
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.
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!"
Excuse me, what?
Maybe he meant 'child rearing' and married with many kids.
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