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At the moment, this is the seventh most viewed story on the Guardian.
They call her by her preferred pronouns, but also mention that she was trans:
Naturally they do not spin it as 'trans shooter' but mainly focus on mental health issues, which I find fair enough.
So if you are implying that the woke MSM is burying the story I think you are mistaken.
First paragraph:
The article is 1,291 words long, and it's not until the tenth paragraph, 375 words in that we get any indication that the perpetrator was anything other than a "woman" in the traditional (i.e. adult female) sense of the term: "McDonald said police 'identified the suspect as they chose to be identified' in public and in social media". How many people are going to read down that far?
Also surely not a coincidence that they didn't include a photo of the perpetrator (despite doing so for the Brown University shooting and this UK shooting in September 2024), as no one could possibly mistake him for an adult female.
They may not be burying the story, but they're certainly running interference.
CNN had an article at the top of the webpage this morning. It refers to the shooter as female, which is strictly false, and intermittently swaps between "she" and "they" for pronouns. Eventually, far down the article, it quotes someone else explaining that the shooter was born male.
The central philosophical grounding of transgenderism is that gender is socially constructed (and correspondingly malleable) and thus separable from the biological notion of sex. The idea that a "woman" (gender) is not necessarily "female" (sex) may be arguable, but it is at least comprehensible. Forget expecting future Supreme Court justices to know what woman means--journalists don't even seem to know what female means. Or, more likely: they are part of the trans prospiracy to simply deny facts about biological human sex typing. The sex/gender distinction was drawn for political purposes, and now is being collapsed for those same political purposes. They are pointing at deer and calling them horses.
"Running interference," indeed.
Because the anti-transgender faction, in response to the distinction as initially drawn by the pro-trans faction, was to take social matters of 'gender' and re-cast them as matters of 'sex', thus attempting to undo the exact goal of the pro-trans side, namely that biological sex ought not determine anything in social situations.
That principle is downstream of a more general left-wing ethos, that it is unjust for people to be limited by the circumstances of their birth, and that where we have the ability to make people not thus limited, we ought to do so. From this axiom, one can derive many other left-coded beliefs, which are left as an exercise for the reader.
They haven't re-cast them as sex, they just disagreed with the goal of the pro-trans faction. Seeing that they can't make a persuasive argument directly, the pro-trans side started playing language games, hoping they can hide the ball long enough to push their goals through.
The re-casting was how they sought to thwart the goal of the pro-trans faction.
To the best of my understanding, the pro-trans faction proposed to divide sex from gender, such that all social distinctions would fall under the latter category, and the biological differences would be as private as any other medical history, HIPAA avant la lettre.
The anti-trans faction, believing themselves entitled to know, and act on the knowledge of, the genital/gonadal configurations of strangers, then started referring to 'sex' instead of 'gender', 'males' instead of 'men', and 'females' instead of 'women'; thus allowing them to make the assertion that other people's genitalia are any of their business without being seen to make said assertion, and avoid anyone asking why they are concerned with other people's anatomy.
I am so, so fucking sick of trans activists suggesting that gender-critical people are perverts because they want to know what sex people are, by framing this desire in the most maximally uncharitable way. I've said before that the reason they frame the desire this way because they themselves are so pornsick that they can't conceive of wanting to know a stranger's sex for any reason other than sexual gratification. And, well, my opinion hasn't changed.
So let me try, once again, to explain why it's perfectly reasonable and understandable (and not in any way indicative of sexual depravity) for people to want to know the sexes of the people in their vicinity.
Female people face a disproportionate risk of rape and sexual assault, and most rapes and sexual assaults of female people are committed by male people. Male people also commit a disproportionate amount of violent acts in general, not just sexual ones. Owing to their smaller size and reduced strength & speed compared to male people, female people are particularly vulnerable to assault, including rape and sexual assault: that is, if a male person attacks a female person, then 9 times out of 10 he will succeed in overpowering her. Ergo, if a female person is walking down a darkened lane alone at night and notices someone walking behind her, it matters to her a great deal whether that person is male or female. If that person is male, the female person instantly knows that he is vastly more likely to assault her than if that person is female; and that if he assaults her, he stands a very good chance of overpowering her compared to if the person is female. Thus, knowing whether a stranger is male or female plays a vital role in a female person carrying out a risk assessment. If she's walking down a darkened lane at night and notices a female person walking behind her, she'll probably keep walking; if she notices a male person walking behind her, she might try to duck into a bar or a restaurant rather than risk being attacked.
"Propensity to commit assault and sexual assault" is predicted by sex, not by the unobservable, unfalsifiable "trait" called gender identity. Trans-identified males who have medically transitioned commit violent crimes (including violent sex crimes) at 18 times the rate of female people, which is functionally indistinguishable from the rate at which non-trans-identified males commit violent crimes. In other words, if a female person is walking down a darkened lane at night and notices a male person walking behind her, the fact that said male person purports to "identify as" a woman doesn't change the risk calculus at all. It's a completely irrelevant statement, like whether or not he likes strawberries or enjoys the films of Jean-Luc Godard.
Likewise, physical strength and speed track sex, not gender identity. A male person does not magically become less strong and fast (less capable of overpowering a female person, should he choose to) simply because he purports to "identify as" a woman.
To a lesser extent, all of the above is true of why male people might want to know the sexes of people in their vicinity. When a male person gets assaulted, it's usually by another male person, and male people (being stronger) pose a vastly higher threat than female people. Thus, if a male person wants to avoid getting seriously assaulted, knowing the sexes of the people in his immediate vicinity is of paramount importance: male people are vastly more likely to commit assault than female people, and vastly more likely to cause serious injury should they choose to. If you're a male person walking through the streets and a drunk female person starts mouthing off at you, unless she has a broken bottle in her hand then she's at worst an annoyance. But if a drunk male person starts mouthing off at you, then you may want to beat a hasty retreat, as there's a very good chance he's capable of killing you with his bare hands should he choose to.
As a final point, this really has nothing to do with "genitals". "Sex" really just refers to the reproductive organs a person was born with, not the reproductive organs they currently have. As previously established, even emasculated males are vastly more prone to committing violent crimes than female people.
Well, I just told you why they're so concerned. I've been moving in gender-critical circles for years, and most of these activists are not the least bit shy about explaining why they want to know the sexes of the people in their vicinity, especially in intimate quarters. You're acting like there's some ulterior motive they're refusing to disclose, but that's just – a lie, I guess?
I mean, if this is the state of affairs you want to bring about, I can't stop you. But politics is the art of the possible, and what you're demanding would make King Canute roll his eyes. While sex is ultimately determined by whether you were born with the organs associated with the production of small or large gametes, contra your dark insinuation, getting a close look at these organs is rarely necessary in order to identify a particular person as male or female, and we have a range of near-instinctive heuristics to do the job for us (height, wingspan, facial features etc.). From as young as 3-6 months old, babies can already distinguish male faces from female, before they even know what genitals are. Like it or not, virtually everyone can accurately "clock" an individual's sex within seconds of meeting them, even if that person has spent a small fortune doing everything in their power to try to pass themselves off as a member of the opposite sex (as freely admitted by innumerable trans people). Certain parts of one's medical history can (and should) remain private: if you've been diagnosed with HIV, if you suffer from diabetes, if you have a prosthetic leg etc. Other parts of your medical history simply cannot remain private: if you suffer from obesity or require the use of a wheelchair, everyone you pass on the street knows about it, sorry. No prizes for guessing which category "sex" falls into. This isn't even me passing comment on whether it would be desirable if our sexes were known to ourselves and no one else: I'm just pointing out that, with very few exceptions, most people can reliably infer most people's sexes at a glance.
(I can envision one hypothetical state of affairs in which an individual's sex really was a private matter: if everyone, male and female, was required to wear burqas in public, platform shoes to normalise their height, shoulder pads to normalise their perceived wingspan, chest binders to flatten their chests if necessary, and vocal processors to disguise the pitch of their voices. Boy, it didn't take us long to end up in the trans version of the "Harrison Bergeron" universe, did it?)
It's really tiresome that you're insisting that gender-critical people are disgusting perverts simply for accurately inferring a trait about someone that pre-verbal babies reliably can before they've even achieved object permanence. Or are you suggesting that 6-month-old babies are also creepy sex pests because they can tell male and female people apart? Goddamn, this whole "every accusation is a confession" concept is really paying down dividends.
I also just want to come back to the first part of your comment I quoted:
I will reiterate: babies as young as three months old can reliably tell the difference between male and female faces. This is not some subtle difference that gender-critical people have carefully honed their ability to detect, like a sommelier who can estimate the alcohol percentage of a glass of wine by sight. This is a skill learned from such a young age that it might as well be instinctive. Whether people are "entitled" to know (and act on the knowledge of) the sex of people in their vicinity is beside the point: they do know, at an unconscious, pre-verbal level, and they can no more train themselves out of it than they can train themselves not to experience vertigo atop a tall building.
What you essentially seem to be demanding is that people not use a valuable, evolutionarily advantageous skill that they learned before they could talk; that they pretend not to notice the accurate information this skill is bestowing upon them; that they consciously refuse to make use of this accurate information in their decision making, even if doing so would be in their own best interests. And why should they do this?
Because it makes a bunch of autogynephiles sad when they don't. Because this group of totalitarian, controlling narcissists cannot tolerate the slightest suggestion that anyone, even a complete stranger, is failing to "validate" them and their "identity" 100% of the time, even unconsciously. You are not only demanding that cisgender people yasslight trans people, but also that they gaslight themselves. "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
I'm actually sort of astonished that someone could openly promote such a nakedly psychologically abusive worldview without once stopping to ask themselves "are we the baddies?"
As a trans person, none of the GC talking points actually matter in my daily life and it can actually be more disruptive for me to use the spaces (bathrooms, changing rooms) of my biological sex due to my appearance.
My experience is that the average person is absolutely not a sommelier when it comes to differentiating cis from even moderately passing trans people. If you look enough like a woman, you’ll get called ma’am by service workers and you’ll get weird looks if you try to use the men’s public bathroom (or even have the toilet attendant run after you to tell you you’re using the wrong bathroom). I’ve even had people be very surprised to learn that one of my friends was trans after interacting with them all day.
I appreciate your perspective, but I will point out (probably not for the first time to you personally) that there is a difference between a service worker mistaking you for a female person, and making an educated guess based on your appearance that you are attempting to present as female, and going along with it so as to avoid causing you offence.
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