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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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
RIP AntiDem, according to Anissimov last week https://x.com/MikeAnissimov2/status/1957118600264695829
I'd guess Cadence. The insecurities and personal failures of the mane six among others would add up too quickly for him. Cadence seemingly owns her big failures re: Chrysalis and Sombra, but they really genuinely aren't her fault. Going purely from memory, been a long time.
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