The story of the Minneapolis mass shooting appeared below the fold on the New York Times website on Thursday, under the headline “Minneapolis’s Suspect’s Motive is a Mystery.” Nowhere on the Times homepage did “the suspect” get a pronoun. When you clicked through to the top story, it opened: “The person who the police say opened fire,” providing a tip-off that the paper’s ideologues knew there was a problem. Journalism is the business of specifics, and in the normal course of editorial affairs, “man” or “woman” would be preferable. But the issue couldn’t be avoided forever: eventually, the Gray Lady applied the pronoun “her” to Robin Westman, a 23-year-old biological man born Robert Westman, who identified as transgender and legally changed his name at 17.
The Times got around to mentioning Westman’s gender identity only halfway through the story, carefully framed by the information that “conservative activists” on social media would use the data to portray transgender people as violent or mentally ill. Other mainstream liberal news outlets have treated the issue in a similar manner. A BBC News story described the shooting as an “anti-Catholic hate crime” and avoided pronouns altogether.
Westman killed two children and injured 14 more children and three adults, who were attending an opening-of-school Mass at at Annunciation Catholic School, where his mother until recently worked. Like all such shooters, he became contested terrain in the culture wars the minute he opened fire. The most obvious battleground is his transgenderism. Mainstream outlets like the Times, operating for the defense, have elected to suppress the trans angle. Minneapolis’s progressive mayor, Jacob Frey, chose to get out in front, speaking out at a news conference against transgender hate and in favor of gun control. The Right-of-center New York Post, meanwhile, took a gleeful opportunity for trans-bashing, with the headline “Minneapolis school shooter confessed he was ‘tired of being trans’: ‘I wish I never brain-washed myself.’”
Without avoiding the shooter’s trans-ness or blaming it, however, we might instead acknowledge that the transgender mass shooter is uniquely telling of the mass-shooting phenomenon, and of our times. The Westman crime happens in the same month as an excellent article by Sam Kriss in The Point magazine. It locates March 30, 1981, as the moment “John Hinckley brought us into the world we all live in today. He did it by firing a .22 ‘Devastator’ round into the chest of the president of the United States.”
Kriss argues that Hinckley’s attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan was the first such event to divorce the target from the goal. In 1981, Americans responded to an act of public violence by worrying about “things that used to matter,” such as who was in charge of the country, and if the shooting was a Russia-designed first stage of a nuclear attack. But the real story was elsewhere, in proto-incel Hinckley’s frustrated masculinity and desire for self-expression. Hinckley wasn’t political (and Westman, with his confused jumble of signifiers, isn’t political in any meaningful sense either). The cultural shorthand is that Hinckley, inspired by Taxi Driver, shot Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster, who starred in the Scorsese film. But Kriss contends that this merely conceals the seismic event of a young man discovering “the door through which you can walk right out of the world and into eternity.”
Mass shootings allow the perpetrator to achieve the ultimate modern currency of selfhood — celebrity. “If you want to make yourself visible to the apparatus of electronic media,” Kriss writes, “you don’t need to be good at the guitar. You don’t need to sing. You don’t even need to drink the same peach brandy as a Scorsese character. All you need to do is kill and die.”
It’s true, but celebrity is fracturing these days, and Westman’s actions may be less about achieving fame and more about simply achieving something — a concrete, visible and indubitable accomplishment in a world in which young men are increasingly at sea. The action must happen on camera to exist, that’s a given, but it’s no longer about the camera, it’s about imposing and expressing himself, about making himself, finally, matter. This is not to say that the victims of the crime don’t matter in the real scale of things. Of course, they do. But they didn’t matter to Westman.
“A transwoman, both by choice and definition, is also a very sad man.”
There’s nothing more male than a mass shooter. Demographically, they are overwhelmingly white, disenfranchised, isolated, young, angry, too online, caught up in paranoias and fringe causes, living with Mom and Dad, have failed to launch, are total losers. The Kriss piece refers to Hinckley as “Mr. Toxic Shock,” allegedly because this was the nickname Foster and her roommates at Yale gave him (he was so unfuckable that you’d go into toxic shock if you tried it). Westman fits perfectly, and the “mystery” of his motivations is no mystery at all. Attempts to attach him to the Left or the Right, a Trump-hater or a Satanist, are irrelevant. It’s perhaps slightly less irrelevant that he worked for a cannabis dispensary and had claimed on social media that the weed was driving him insane. “I cannot control myself, and have been destroying my body through vaping and other means,” he wrote in a journal page circulating on social media.
Nonetheless, the motivation is the condition itself: a man experiencing the complete failure of masculinity. Westman does not represent all trans people any more than mass shooters represent all men, but a transwoman, both by choice and definition, is also a very sad man. In this quintessentially gendered crime, “she” as a perpetrator was inevitable.
So what should we do about the pronouns? Noah Rothman of National Review posted on X that since “honorifics” are withheld from convicted criminals, “denying attempted mass child murderers their preferred pronouns should be similarly observed.” From one viewpoint, the suggestion is an erosion of trans rights and Rothman is just being an evil conservative. Then again, excluding men like Westman — who are experiencing, fundamentally a crisis of masculinity — from the ranks of women, trans or otherwise, doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea.
