The Latest School Shooter May Have Been Transgender — and We Will Get the Blame

How tribalization hurts us all

Anni Arbour

Published: August 27, 2025 | Last Updated: August 27, 2025

Unhinged. Gun nut. Transgender.

There was yet another horrific school shooting today, and all of these descriptors have applied to the presumed shooter.

Which one do you think the media will use in its headlines?

Mentally disturbed people are an accepted class within our society. We even vote them into elective office with startling frequency. Guns are favorite bête noires for politicians hoping to score some points, but they're not going away. There are more guns than people in the United States. Good luck getting them to turn them in.

But transgender people are an easy scapegoat. They live outside the norm, dress unconventionally, reject accepted beliefs. OMG! They deny the gender they were assigned at birth! The sky is falling!

Best of all — there aren't that many of them. The transgender community hovers around 1% of the U.S. population. Rugby has more fans in this country than that. (No joke, look it up.)

By tonight, you can be sure that Fox News and its ilk will be running scrolling text along the bottom of its broadcasts, labeling today's Catholic school shooter as a transgender person. And that charge will pop up in social media posts from the right every time this sick act is mentioned.

Ironically, just yesterday on another social media platform, I made a joke that read:

"Perhaps I'm a cynic, but I know it's only a matter of time before someone blames transgender people for Cracker Barrel's logo change."

Change the punchline to read "Catholic school shooter," and my snarky comment would have been eerily prescient.

As a trans person, that pisses me off. But the fact that the killer may have been trans doesn't absolve them, either.

I am not the sort of person who scrambles to defend someone just because we share a commonality. I am Italian, yet I wouldn't defend a Mafioso. l went to the University of Michigan, but whenever they have been caught doing something underhanded in the football program (hello, Connor Stallions!), I kept quiet as they were penalized.

So, too, I won't ever consider trying to find a way to absolve this demented SOB in Minneapolis if indeed they turn out to be transgender. And I hope you wouldn't either.

One of the many issues our society has is its affinity for tribalization. It has become a disease that causes sane individuals to accept and defend the ridiculous, the immoral and even the evil.

We have to get past that inclination. Use your inherent common sense. Do what's right, not what the tribe says you must do.

If it catches on, we will all be better for it.