Mental health issues that manifest in gender confusion, combined with potent cross-sex hormones, can be a recipe for violence, some experts have said.
Since 2018, five people who identified as transgender or were gender-confused have gone on killing sprees at schools and businesses. Authorities have been increasingly slow to confirm so-called gender identities and motives in cases such as these.
When shooters’ “gender identities” were revealed, some news outlets and commentators were quick to point out that people who identify as transgender and those who say they’re neither male nor female represent a small fraction of mass shooters.
But the numbers show a concerning pattern.
A mass shooting is defined by the Crime Prevention Research Center as the killing of four or more people in a single incident that’s not gang or drug related.
Of the 37 public mass shootings from 2018 through 2023, two were carried out by gender-confused individuals, according to John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Three additional shootings were carried out by gender-confused individuals that resulted in fewer than four victims.
The case that has received the most intense media scrutiny is that of 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who went on a killing spree at the Covenant School in Nashville in March 2023.
She gunned down three 9-year-olds and three adults before police shot and killed her.
Ms. Hale identified as a “transgender man,” according to Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake.
Ten months after the heinous act, a clear picture of Ms. Hale’s motive remains unclear. Media organizations have filed lawsuits asking to view her journals, which are still held by police.
After most mass shooting incidents, any writings that suggest a motive are released to the public quickly, Mr. Lott said.
Eventually, three pages of what police confirmed to be Ms. Hale’s journal were leaked to media commentator Steven Crowder, who posted the writings online. The pages contained racial slurs against white people. Ms. Hale was white.
Aside from Audrey Hale, there was Anderson Lee Aldrich, a man who identifies as nonbinary. He was sentenced to more than 2,000 years in prison for killing five people at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs in 2022.
The three other shootings with fewer than four victims include an incident in January at Perry Middle School and High School complex in Perry, Iowa, involving a 17-year-old who reportedly used the hashtag “gender-fluid” to describe himself on social media.
On Jan. 4, he fatally shot a sixth-grade student and wounded six others before killing himself, according to Iowa police. Principal Dan Marbuger died from his injuries 10 days later, his family announced.
In 2018, a woman who identified as a man gunned down three co-workers and injured three others outside a Rite Aid warehouse in Aberdeen, Maryland, before she shot herself, according to police.
And in a 2019 shooting, 17-year-old Maya “Alec” McKinney, a woman identifying as a man, was one of two Colorado students charged in a shooting that killed one person and injured eight at a Highlands Ranch charter school near Denver. Ms. McKinney was sentenced to life in prison.
And although 0.6 percent of the 13-and-older population identifies as transgender, 5.4 percent of the mass shootings in recent years involved gender-confused individuals.
Language of Violence
It isn’t the norm for those suffering from gender dysphoria to commit violence, according to Kathy Platani, who directs the Southwest Ohio Critical Incident Stress Management Team.Still, society shouldn’t ignore the trend of escalating violence, she told The Epoch Times.
“Hormones change brain chemistry,” said Ms. Platani, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology. “And if you change brain chemistry, you might just be changing behavior.”
Brain-altering hormone treatments used in attempts to alter gender may be what’s leading to trantifa (a combination of “trans” and “Antifa”) social media posts that seem to encourage violence toward “transphobes.”
The subject of the video appears to be a man dressed as a woman and seems to coyly threaten a mass killing. The video caption reads, “If the transphobes keep going for my sisters I’m gonna start sounding like Anakin.”
The person lip-syncs to audio of the Star Wars character Anakin Skywalker’s admission that he killed a population of men, women, and children.
Many commenters expressed outrage at the post about the seemingly homicidal sentiment.
But social media posts such as that suggest that retribution is justified, and that can lead to unrest and violence, experts told The Epoch Times.
If those who believe they’re born in the wrong bodies don’t find acceptance with friends or family, it can spark feelings of resentment, Ms. Platani said.
“They want to pay back the world for either bullying them, disapproving of them, or completely abandoning them. And this is how they make a statement,” she said.
“Once you feel ignited by this, and you’re already angry at the world, this is a perfect storm.”
Mental Illness and Hormones
The disproportionate tendency for extreme violence may be explained by biology.Some people think that changing their bodies to reflect a new “gender identity” will solve their mental health problems, according to neuropsychologist Alan Hopewell.
People with gender dysphoria may try hormone treatments first, which makes them more susceptible to mood swings and health problems, Mr. Hopewell said.
Patients attempting to live as the opposite sex take “massive” doses of testosterone or estrogen, he said. Treatments meant to try to alter gender also disrupt brain function and the entire physical system of the body, he said.
A systemic review of the effects of testosterone given to women who identify as men was released in 2020. It examined seven different studies on aggression in individuals who identify as transgender.
The studies focused on aggression levels before and after taking male hormones.
In their analysis, researchers wrote that women trying to live as men are warned of “increasing aggression when initiating testosterone therapy” because of past associations between male hormones and aggression.
Testosterone has been connected to what’s known as “roid rage,” unwarranted rage or angry outbursts often associated with the use of steroids.
Mr. Hopewell’s patients in the 1970s who identified as transgender often struggled with mental illness, he said. He saw them while working at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
Transgender patients often suffer from other mental issues, such as depression and anxiety, he said.
He added that he’s seen that administering hormones to a person already under mental stress can exacerbate mental health issues.
An analysis of data showed that the need for psychiatric care was greater both before and after medical “transitioning” compared with the need for psychiatric care of people in the study’s control group.
Individuals who transition “present with many more common psychiatric needs than do their matched population controls, even when medical GR [gender reassignment] interventions are carried out,” study researchers wrote.
When treating patients with gender dysphoria, many in the medical community seem committed to affirming a patient’s desire to change genders, Andrew Brown said. Mr. Brown is associate vice president of policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank focused on free enterprise and liberty.
And that, he said, is causing immense suffering in patients.
“The kids who are struggling with gender dysphoria—they’re in pain,” he said. “They are experiencing a very real mental health issue, and they need counseling and mental health treatment. They don’t need medicalization.”
But the trend, he said, is for doctors and psychologists to affirm a patient’s belief that he or she was born in the wrong body and that a medical “transition” will make things better.
That, he said, “only furthers the pain that these individuals are experiencing.”
And when they find they’re still suffering with mental health issues, they often eventually pursue more radical steps, Mr. Hopewell said. That may involve removing genitals or having surgery to add what resemble the genitals of the opposite sex.
When surgical measures don’t help them feel less confusion or discomfort, their mental health issues are exacerbated with feelings of more anger and a sense of isolation and alienation, Dr. Hopewell said.
‘Volatile Cocktail’
The increase in killers who are gender-confused certainly deserves scrutiny, experts told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Brown said he isn’t surprised that there’s a disproportionate number of shootings committed by people who identify as transgender.
People with gender dysphoria are struggling with a state of distress or unhappiness caused by feeling that their “gender identity” doesn’t match their sex. They often say they were born in the wrong body and their true gender doesn’t represent the sex they were “assigned” at birth.
That mental health challenge can be exacerbated by the violent rhetoric of some transgender activists, Mr. Brown said.
“It’s not a far leap for those two things to come together and really create this perfect storm of factors that can lead to violence,” he told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Brown’s close observation of the issue while evaluating public policy suggests to him that people who identify as transgender are being exposed to a “volatile cocktail of both mental health as well as chemical and physical modifications.”
Laws such as that have ignited emotional protests in 2023, as more states—such as Florida and Tennessee—passed legislation to ban hormones and surgeries for minors.
Texas Democrat lawmakers and politically aligned activists worked fiercely to stop the Texas bill banning “gender-affirming care” for minors from becoming law.
They said children deserve access to “gender-affirming” care.
Despite some studies that show it isn’t true, they claimed that helping children “transition” to another gender can reduce the chance that those with gender dysphoria will commit suicide.
Studies have been inconclusive on whether suicidal thoughts or attempts at suicide are reduced with the use of cross-sex hormones and gender-altering surgery.
Fighting to allow children to mutilate their bodies as part of gender reassignment plays into a larger political strategy, Mr. Brown said.
Many in the Democratic party believe a “Marxist lie” that groups of people—such as those who identify as transgender—are “oppressed,” he said.
That perceived oppression gives rise to violence.
Ms. Gaines said she began to fear for her safety. As she ended her speech, protestors inside the room ran to open the locked doors, letting in a large group of angry activists.
“They rushed at me with fists raised, most shouting,” she told lawmakers. “I was assaulted.”
A campus police officer led her out of the room, she told lawmakers, but they were met with an even larger group of protesters in the hallway who were blocking the stairway exit. She and the officer were forced to barricade themselves inside an office for three hours.
Meanwhile, she said, the activists screamed “vengeful, racist, violent, awful things” and could be heard demanding “ransom” from a college administrator in exchange for her safe release.
Officers from the City of San Francisco eventually cleared the hallway so she could leave, Ms. Gaines said.
Chaotic confrontations such as that are part of a common Marxist strategy to stoke anger, rage, and discontent, Mr. Brown said.
“It is [seen by Marxists as] the duty of the oppressed to overthrow the oppressor,” he said.
“And you build power within that worldview by making more and more people feel as though they are oppressed and then aligning them with each other.
“Now you’re seeing that take it to the next logical step, which is violence.”
