By now, you may be aware of the shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville. This attack was allegedly carried out by a transgender man. It feels inevitable that the peanut gallery will spin this into an attack upon ‘good’ Christian values, by the misguided and unstable trans community.

Except, the usual pattern for school and mass shootings doesn’t involve trans individuals. The usual pattern involves white people. Between 1982 and March 2023, 73 out of 141 mass shootings were carried out by white people. The victims vary. The victims have included people from across various denominations and ethnicities. You can guarantee the fundamentalist religious right will only care about the perpetrator of this latest attack. ‘Christians are being persecuted!’ No, they’re not. This attack was heinous and cowardly, and more needs to be done to prevent such atrocities, but let’s not pretend this is the work of evil transgender ideologies.

The motives are not yet clear, yet the attacker in Nashville was said to have felt resentment from their own time at the school. To me, what this says is that when you fail to listen to trans people, when you demean them, hurt them, push them, nothing good comes from it. The only outcome is pain, and in this terrible, tragic case, that pain is felt by an entire community.

There is much I could say on the subject of guns, and I have already said a great deal, so instead, I will finish with this thought. If you don’t want minority groups to violently lash out, don’t treat them like second-class citizens, then have the audacity to claim you act out of love.