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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.
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.
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.
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