Charlie Kirk and the apocalyptic narcissism of trans

It is the blackest irony, like a sick joke by the universe, that Charlie Kirk was gunned down as he discussed gun violence. That word – ‘violence’ – was the last he ever uttered. Milliseconds later, violence of the gravest kind was visited on him. Actually, we need to be more specific: Kirk was discussing trans violence in the seconds before his death. He was pushing back against one of his student interlocutors who seemed to downplay the phenomenon of trans mass shootings. The student badgered Kirk to say how many such shootings there have been. ‘Too many’, Kirk replied. Seconds later, his carotid artery was severed and he was dead.

I’m not suggesting Kirk was executed for daring to talk about trans violence. The gunman will not have been able to hear what Kirk was saying – he was on a rooftop 200 yards away. Yet while it might be coincidental that Kirk was so tyrannically slain in the very moment he was lamenting the violent turn of trans ideology, it nonetheless feels chillingly noteworthy. For it captures a dark truth about this act of militant cancel culture, this savage censoring by bullet: namely, that Kirk was seemingly targeted for his love of giving blasphemous voice to facts and ideas the woke would rather redact.

The thing is, he was right: there are too many trans shootings. There has been a violent turn in the trans ideology. The trans sect does seem ever-more consumed by a brutish animus for anyone who dissents from its post-truth orthodoxies; for those phobes, bitches and heretics who dare to withhold their validation from men who claim to be women or youths who claim to be non-binary. And for people like Charlie Kirk: witness the sick celebration of his death among the post-sex, post-social blue-hairs in that digital cesspit of trans lunacy. You thought the ‘revolution’ would be ‘magically bloodless’, asked one well-known trans activist before Kirk’s body was even cold.

Both the circumstances of Kirk’s killing and the fallout from it shine an unforgiving light on the apocalyptic narcissism of late-stage trans hysteria. It is profoundly significant that he was shot to death while expressing ‘wrongthink’ about trans activism and that much of the posthumous demonisation of him by the activist class has focussed on his ‘transphobia’. The trans spectre casts its shadow over almost every element of this barbarous assassination, and we must be free to talk about that without fear of cancellation or retribution.

There is talk of it being a trans-inspired shooting. We will hopefully learn more now that a suspect – one Tyler Robinson – is in custody. A preliminary report of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says that bullet cases recovered from the assassin’s gun were engraved with ‘transgender and anti-fascist’ statements. This has now been partially confirmed. Officials at a press conference today said one bullet casing said ‘Hey fascist!’. Another had the lyrics to an Italian anti-fascist anthem. Another said ‘Notices bulges’, which is reportedly a reference to a meme about normies’ obsession with trans people’s bulges. We await further info on exactly what was going through this man’s mind as he allegedly laid waste to the life of Charlie Kirk.

For me, though, what’s striking is the sheer chutzpah of commentators who furiously slammed those who wondered if this might have been a trans-inspired assassination even as they themselves flagged up Kirk’s ‘problematic’ views on trans. ‘How dare you say this murder was trans-related’, they said in one breath, and then in the next they were damning Kirk as a sinner against their sacred trans beliefs. They seem to want it both ways – to bury the idea that this had anything to do with trans while also grossly hinting that Kirk’s ‘transphobia’ made him a bad person and possibly a target. It sounds to me like they’re saying: ‘Trans activism didn’t kill him but it would be understandable if it did.’

‘MAGA is already blaming trans people for Charlie Kirk’s death’, fumes the New Republic. They’re exploiting his killing to ‘advance their transphobic policies’, it said. It goes without saying that trans people should not be made collectively guilty for Kirk’s murder, especially given that the chief suspect does not seem to be trans. And yet if people on the internet are wondering out loud if Kirk might in part have been assassinated for his ‘anti-trans’ blasphemies, can you blame them? After all, his supposedly sacrilegious disdain for the cult of genderfluidity has been put front and centre in the posthumous digital inquisition of his life and beliefs.

Kirk was ‘gleefully’ ‘anti-trans’, says Them magazine. He had a long history of ‘transphobia’, it says, pinning on his corpse that gravest moral error in the era of woke. Socialist Worker, in its now infamous hateful screed headlined ‘Charlie KKKirk’s chickens come home to roost’, said Kirk ‘built his career’ on bigotries like ‘transphobia’. ‘I loathed him’, he was ‘toxic’ and he ‘repeatedly stoked fear about transgender people’, ranted a writer for the Advocate. Staggeringly, the San Francisco Chronicle said trans people and others might experience an ‘alleviation of anxiety’ now that Kirk is ‘no longer able to advance his racist, misogynist, homophobic and transphobic worldview’. You shouldn’t ‘gloat’ over his death though, it generously says. In short, breathe a sigh of relief now the transphobe is dead, but don’t exult in it.

Here’s my question: why would you obsess over Kirk’s trans views so soon after his death if not to hint, wittingly or otherwise, that they provide some kind of moral context for what was done to him? He believed in biological sex. He wanted men out of women’s sports. He opposed the drugging and mutilation of confused young kids. These are normal views shared by millions. Barking ‘He was transphobic!’ even before he’s been buried would be like shouting ‘She was Brexitphobic!’ following the terroristic murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016. That is, it smacks of a horrific implication that there is a logical link between what Kirk believed and what he suffered. That the one follows the other.

Others have gone further and openly cheered the execution of this ‘anti-trans’ heretic. As Jenny Holland has written on spiked, faux-progressive ghouls have gloated over the body of this man who committed the sin of thinking differently to them. This includes the bourgeois eunuchs who clog up TikTok with their trans blather. And trans ‘comedian’ Brandy Bryant, who sneered: ‘Breaking: Charlie Kirk loses gun debate.’ Most strikingly, Jesse James Rose, a hirsute young man who masquerades as a ‘girl’, told his more than 500,000 followers on TikTok that ‘The sympathy for Charlie Kirk is fucking weird’.

‘He was shot’, said Rose, ‘in the middle of saying something transphobic about trans people’. So now it’s transphobic to talk about mass murders carried out by trans people? ‘I’m confused as to how you thought the revolution was going to be magically bloodless’, Rose continued. Boom. There it is. The treatment of Kirk’s killing as a species of activism, as ‘revolutionary’ payback for his ‘transphobic’ views. I don’t know about you but I find it horrifying that hundreds of thousands of youths on TikTok are being indoctrinated with such sick apologism for the slaughter of a 31-year-old father of two.

‘Don’t blame this on the trans ideology’, they say. ‘This was a revolutionary act against transphobia’, they say. Make your minds up. Was this young man shot in the neck and made to bleed to death in public for daring to say you can’t have a cock and be a woman, or was he not? Was this an act of extreme Inquisition-style violence for the sin of understanding biology, or was it not? In a sense, it doesn’t matter if the suspect shot Kirk for his ‘anti-trans’ views, because we now know there are many people in our society who think such a thing would have been fine. The justice system will deal with that act of violence at Utah Valley University – it falls to the rest of us to confront the cult of violent thought that is spreading like a pox in woke circles, and especially in the trans sect.

Kirk’s killing has drawn to the surface of our societies, like scum on water, the violent bent to the trans ideology. He was right that trans violence is a growing scourge. In the US, there have been at least five mass shootings carried about by aggrieved trans agitators. There was the slaughter at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis last month when a trans bloke allegedly fired at tiny kids praying, killing two and injuring many more. The gross taunt, ‘Where is your God?’, was written on one of his guns. There was also the massacre at a Christian school in Nashville in 2023, in which six were slaughtered. And the shooting at a school in Denver in 2019. And a massacre at a warehouse in Maryland in 2018.

The dream of violence seems to permeate trans thinking. The crowing over Charlie Kirk’s death on that libtard hellsite, Bluesky, got so bad that Bluesky’s bosses had to issue a warning to their 38million users to stay within the ‘community guidelines’. And much of the post-Kirk glee touched on the trans question. ‘Can we get JK Rowling next?’, asked one Bluesky lowlife. It would be for ‘the greater good of trans people’. This isn’t the first time an act of violence has got people salivating over the prospect that a similar fate will befall that witch Rowling. When she expressed horror at the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie in 2022, an X user replied: ‘Don’t worry you are next.’

Rowling’s death is feverishly fantasised about in the trans sect. ‘Bring back witch-burning… JK’, said a banner on one of those marches of misogynists that followed the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that men are men and women are women. They literally want to strap her to the stake for the crime of believing women exist. A trans author even wrote a book called Manhunt that gleefully featured Rowling’s death. ‘The only good TERF is a dead TERF’, say the sick placards of these self-regarding cross-dressers. ‘Decapitate TERFs’, said one in Edinburgh. The misogyny of ISIS meets the misogyny of trans in this twisted fantasy of violently removing the heads of women who refuse to bow down to men in dresses.

It’s not just violent rhetoric, either. Gender-critical women have been bombarded with rape threats and death threats. One of the acts that first opened my eyes to the misogynistic horror of trans was the violent assault on the feminist Maria MacLachlan, then 60 years old, in Hyde Park in 2017. She was thrown to the ground by trans activists and ‘repeatedly kicked’. And who can forget that dystopic vision of Kellie-Jay Keen being set upon by a feral mob of misogynists in Auckland in 2023 for her moral offence of believing we should ‘Let Women Speak’

Violence, or the implicit threat of it, swirls around the trans ideology. You see it in those mobs of men in women’s clothing who gather at gender-critical events to howl down the uppity bitches who dare to deny their identitarian delusions. You see it in the gang-like menacing of academics like Kathleen Stock and Selina Todd for their speechcrime of sex belief. You see it in their perverted fantasy of ridding Earth of JK Rowling so that fat fellas in bikinis will never again have to see one of her pithy, piss-taking tweets. And you see it in the dancing on Charlie Kirk’s grave before he’s even in it.

We need to talk about this culture of menace that attends every aspect of trans. Its thought processes, its banners, its ambitions – all are riddled with the savagely anti-social fancy of erasing or at least silencing women and men, but mostly women, who have the gall to demur from the ideological insanity of ‘sex-changing’. Here’s the thing: the violent strain to trans is not accidental. It’s not some unfortunate add-on to an otherwise typical ‘progressive’ cause. No, this unforgiving and sexist militancy is a direct function of the apocalyptic narcissism that underpins trans in particular and identity politics more broadly.

The problem with the trans delusion is that it falls apart in the absence of public assent. The minute someone says ‘This isn’t real’, the whole charade trembles. This is why men who masquerade as women react so furiously when women tell them to get out of their bathrooms: because they instinctively recognise that this is not just a fleeting inconvenience but a calling into question of their entire hallucinatory identity. The narcissist requires constant and uncritical validation, which means that even one expression of doubt is enough to make him feel cornered, undermined, imperilled. And we know how self-regarding men tend to respond in such situations: with threats, even violence.

Christopher Lasch wrote about how the narcissist ‘depends on others to validate his self-esteem’. He cannot live ‘without an admiring audience’. ‘For the narcissist’, said Lasch, ‘the world is a mirror’, whereas for the older ‘rugged individualist’ the world was ‘an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design’. As a result, the narcissist develops a ‘transactional’ relationship with other people, seeing them less as free and equal beings and more as nodding validators of his own sense of personhood and importance. In the cult of narcissism, your fellow citizen is reduced to your moral fluffer, his prime duty being to massage your identity, however unreal it might be.

Transgenderism represents the ultimate institutionalisation of what Lasch called the ‘culture of narcissism’. For in this ideology, the individual’s self-image has no basis in reality whatsoever – it is invented from pure cloth – which makes him even more dependent on the willingness of the public to suspend every one of their critical faculties and obsequiously say: ‘Yes, you are a woman.’ If they don’t, if they dare to shatter the mirror that these men arrogantly expect the world to be, then the deluded story these men tell themselves starts to crumble. They feel existentially threatened, and they lash out.

The danger of identity politics is precisely its creation of a relationship of reliance between the self-regarding identitarian and the broader public. In this real-world dystopia we relate to each other less as equal citizens than as demanders of validation and providers of validation. Our relations become, as Lasch said, wholly ‘transactional’. We are reduced to units on a chessboard in the grand game of ‘recognition’. Add to this mix the fact that trans has been so psychotically indulged by the institutions of society, and the fact that the men lost in this false religion tend to develop a misogynistic disdain for the women who withhold their validation, and you have a truly violence-tinged narcissism: identity politics at its most toxic and unpleasant.

The end result? Even the bloody assassination of a young dad can be cheered because it provides an ‘alleviation of anxiety’. It gives breathing space to the narcissists. It removes from the world someone who committed that gravest sin: he refused to sacrifice the truth of his own eyes to the end of validating the fallacious self-image of ‘women with penises’. When human life itself is seen as a small price to pay for indulging the misogynistic idea that womanhood is an easily acquired identity, you know our societies are in deep shit. It’s not Kirk’s vile killing that was ‘revolutionary’. It’s the determination of women to deny validation to the men who have stolen their sex, and in the process to shatter this lethal ideology once and for all.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy