The rhetoric has come even from members of Congress, with Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene questioning whether the shooter was on hormone replacement therapy or medications to treat mental illness.
Anti-transgender rhetoric and disinformation in the days following the shooting at a Nashville Christian school that killed six people have heightened the fears of a community already on edge amid a historic push for more restrictions on trans people's rights this year.
For hours Monday, police identified the shooter as a woman. Later in the day, the police chief said Hale was transgender. In an email Tuesday, a police spokesperson said Hale “was assigned female at birth” but used masculine pronouns on a social media profile.Police have said Hale was under a doctor’s care for an undisclosed emotional disorder and was not on the radar of police before the attack. Hale was fatally shot by police at the school Monday.
“This disinformation, one of the things that it is doing is further isolating, stigmatizing and demonizing trans people, allowing us to be targeted by all forms of violence, both from the state and from individuals,” Jones said. “That’s what the disinformation is doing.” “There is a vocal minority of people who try to stoke fear of what they don’t understand, who label trans people as ‘other’ and tell us we don’t belong,” the National Center for Transgender Equality said in a statement. “Because of this, trans people, especially trans women of color, face very real threats and violence.”
Advocates say the disinformation and focus on the shooter's gender are distracting from needed discussions about how to prevent mass shootings. “The anti-trans rhetoric has become so pronounced that’s it’s drowning out mourning the victims," Morris said. "It’s drowning out necessary calls for gun control and important conversations about what might actually make schools safer."
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