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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.
I've spent plenty of time in trans spaces and I haven't seen any of that.
Well, yeah, believing your political opponents are backward is par for the course, is it not? Do you not believe trans activists are backward?
"My political opponents are being uncharitable, so I'll be uncharitable back!" Many such cases. But isn't that against the rules on this website? And, you know, a bad thing in general?
I'm going to reply to @ZeStriderOfDunedain here since this is the same basic idea. He writes:
If the other side is being uncharitable or plain dishonest, point it out and ask them to be charitable and honest. Don't stoop to their level.
Well, lucky you, but I will admit I have a bit of a hard time believing this. "Die Cis Scum" was a meme over a decade ago. Trans Day of Vengeance? The avalanche of death and rape threats directed towards JK Rowling or Kellie-Jay Keen (the latter of whom was actually physically assaulted in public)? Assorted macabre, threatening protest placards like "The only good TERF is a ____ TERF"? SNP members photographed standing next to a placard reading "decapitate TERFs"? None of this ringing a bell?
Sometimes, not always. Communists usually strike me as either resentful or naïve, but not "backward" as such.
This was, ironically, a profoundly uncharitable reading of what I said. All I'm advocating is consistency. If we must trawl through the entire digital footprint of every trans mass shooter to determine exactly what it is that drove them to commit their horrific misdeeds, we should do the same with every mass shooter and resist the urge to buy into a simplistic narrative of their having been radicalised by Andrew Tate or whoever. I'm not advocating for trans criminals to be treated especially uncharitably, but rather for consistency in how criminals are treated regardless of their identity characteristics.
I, for one, am not stooping to their level. The claim that there is an epidemic of incel-motivated violence in the UK is simply untrue. I am unaware of even a single case of a young man in the UK murdering someone after being radicalised by incel/manosphere content. While there has been incel-motivated violence outside of the UK, the scale of it has been greatly exaggerated. Contrary to PM Keir Starmer's claims, Adolescence was not a documentary, nor even based, however loosely, on a true story. I did not describe the content of a fictional Turkish miniseries as if it had anything to say about the real world. I rather resent your implication that there is no moral difference between a) reading too much into a real case that actually happened and b) producing a fictional miniseries about a problem that does not exist and using it as a cudgel with which to beat an entirely blameless demographic.
It is not untrue for me to assert that there have been at least three mass shootings committed by trans people so far this year. It is not untrue for me to assert that there have been at least eight mass shootings or killing sprees committed by trans people so far this decade. It hardly seems unreasonable for me to infer that a pattern seems to be emerging here, nor that it might be worth investigating what commonalities the perpetrators might have besides their gender identities.
While trans-motivated violence has claimed more lives this decade (and probably this century) than incel-motivated violence, in the linked post I went out of my way to point out that the former is still small in absolute terms, and a drop in the bucket compared to e.g. Islamist terrorism – this is, to my mind, exactly the opposite of the hysterical scaremongering seen in the incel debate. I am not demanding that Netflix produce an arty miniseries about a trans person who commits a mass shooting, nor that every British teenager be made to watch it. While I have my disagreements with trans activists, I don't recall ever urging people to beat them up or decapitate them. I am not stooping to my opponents' level, and it's repugnant of you to suggest that I am.
I did think of this, but I thought it was obvious that it was a joke. Do you seriously believe trans people want the 99% of the human population who are cis to be exterminated?
Spicy rhetoric, yes, but I don't see any actual calls for violence. The event, which was cancelled, was supposed to be peaceful protest.
This is not about trans people specifically, but in general, I find it odd that people talk about "death and rape threats" as if they were actual, credible threats, and not, you know, just a thing a random anonymous person wrote online. I imagine these are boomers taking these things seriously, people who grew up before the internet. This applies just as much to the alleged victims of Gamergate, to trans people who receive such "threats", etc.
No, I hadn't heard of her having tomato juice poured on her. The perpetrator was convicted. Was there widespread sympathy for the perpetrator among trans people?
No, I hadn't seen any of those, either. Perhaps the problem is that I hung out in trans spaces – places where trans and questioning people talk to each other and the odd curious observer like me – and not at public events where the rhetoric is meant for the general public. You'd think they'd want to tone things down for the public, and be forthright about their ill intentions in more trans-focused spaces, but in fact, in the latter, I've seen zero calls for any kind of actual violence.
But, in general, I'm sure you could cherry-pick a similar amount of violent rhetoric if you looked at the fringes of anti-trans activism. (One that comes to mind is the emote of a trans person being hanged on rdrama.net. "Trannies get the rope" gets 196 hits on Google – and that's just one, highly specific phrase.) In neither case is it representative.
You seemed to be advocating for consistency in the opposite direction: that trans people and incels should both be treated as violent threats to society. If you agree that both are overblown as a whole, and that individual cases should be examined individually, then we are in agreement.
I don't know, arguing over which is worse seems a bit pointless. Can we agree both are bad?
Tumbler Ridge and Turkey, what's the third one?
Eight events in the entire world is not enough to suggest a pattern of any kind, given that there are tens of millions of trans people in the world.
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