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School shooting in Turkïye claims ten lives.
By this point, you know the drill. Teenaged male, terminally online, obsessed with anime (to the point of preferring to be addressed by the name of his favourite anime character), idolises Elliot Rodger and the Columbine shooters, in a polyamorous LDR with two people he'd never met in person. According to his manifesto (because these fuckers always have manifestos – the second you create a Google Doc with the word "manifesto" in the title, Google should automatically red-flag your Google account), he thinks he's the intellectual superior of everyone around him, and decides to prove it by shooting up his local secondary school. Nine students killed, along with a teacher who died heroically shielding them. Shooter is pronounced dead at the scene.
And, in what by now has become a trope just as tiresomely predictable as any of the foregoing, the perpetrator likes to be referred to with the pronouns "she/they/it", making it at least the third mass shooting by a trans-identified male so far this year (and this one, like Tumbler Ridge, occurred outside the US, so we can't just blame it on the NRA and call it a day). Boy, that sure is an awful lot of
heresymisinformation, isn't it Wikipedia? As I said recently, it infuriates me that the threat of incel-motivated mass violence is so relentlessly hyped up while trans-motivated violence is denied outright, even though the latter has surely claimed more lives this century than the former.People often talk about the demise of the monoculture, how we've splintered into a hundred niche echo chambers and no new true household names have been minted since 2014. This is true up to a point, and yet untrue in another sense: being autistic and terminally online is its own monoculture. It's not like there's one culture for mentally disturbed gender-distressed teenaged boys in the US and another for mentally disturbed gender-distressed teenaged boys in Turkïye: from San Diego to Shanghai, this demographic has just the one culture, with its own argot, cultural practices and set of values. If you're depressed, have a hard time fitting in at school and your parents buy you a smartphone, sooner or later you'll end up speaking in the same voice and with the exact same set of fixations (anime, gender ideology, Columbine) as everyone else meeting that description. I'm so grateful not to have been born a decade later.
Did you read the "manifesto"? There was clearly much wrong with this person beyond anything to do with being trans. Do trans communities generally tell people they're "the ultimate human" and "better than everyone around me intelligence wise"?
And if the shooter had these beliefs not caused by being trans/hanging around in trans spaces, then could their other beliefs – such as that shooting up a school is a good idea – also have come from elsewhere?
(I will also say that it's amusing seeing them write how they're intellectually superior to everyone else because they are "fluent at [sic] English".)
No argument here. I believe the causal pathway looks like "mentally disturbed young man retreats into online spaces -> some of these spaces are trans spaces which contain violent, hateful rhetoric -> young man eventually comes to believe that he has no choice but to commit a mass shooting". The trans and the violent lashing out are ultimately downstream of the mental illness and social awkwardness.
As I've argued before:
Spend enough time in trans spaces and you'll see plenty of people arguing that trans women are outright superior to cis women, or that people who don't buy into gender ideology are hateful and backward.
Sure, they could have. I'm just fed up of the double standard. If he was a self-identified incel, that would have been the end of the story: no one would be going full internet forensics trying to find out what else might have radicalised him other than participation in incel communities. "He once liked an Andrew Tate video– case closed!" But no matter how much violent, hateful rhetoric they spew, online trans communities seem to be awarded an inexhaustible benefit of the doubt.
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