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Audrey Hale might not be transgender at all

NBC News reports on Audrey Hale, the shooter in the Nashville school shooting earlier this week:

Even before authorities said Hale was transgender, users on extremist websites spent hours sharing their hopes that the shooter was trans or nonbinary, the primary targets of hate and harassment campaigns by the infamous extremist site 4chan over the last year.

When police said the shooter was transgender, the site immediately began posting threats against the LGBTQ community, vowing “revenge” and sleuthing for hints of ties to larger LGBTQ organizations in social media profiles online, though no such ties have been reported so far.

Fox News dived right in, of course. It was catnip for Tucker and Laura. As it turns out, though, it's not even clear that Hale was transgender.

Samira Hardcastle, who attended high school with Hale, said that “people just assumed that she was gay.” After high school, Hardcastle didn’t talk to Hale but did follow Hale on social media

“She didn’t come out saying she was transgender or that she identified as a male,” Hardcastle said of Hale’s social media posts. She added that Hale began using a different name on social media “in the last year or two maybe.”

In response to a request from NBC News regarding how police know Hale is transgender, among other questions, Nashville officials said their leadership will use the most available information when identifying a person by gender, and that they are consistently referring to Hale as a woman who has also used male pronouns and went by a different name as well.

Might be worth waiting a bit on this one, folks.

61 thoughts on “Audrey Hale might not be transgender at all

  1. museumatt

    My rule of thumb is that everything said in the first 72 hours of an event like this is more about narrative setting. Ignore all of it. Especially official press releases. For a natural disaster, wait a week.

    "The bag may have contained heroine, or it may have contained a pork pie."
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iAecAtJVdE

  2. KawSunflower

    It's not as if that rightwing mob has ever been outraged about all of the gays & transgender people who have been not only reviled & harrassed publicly, but murdered. Can anyone remember when Christians didn't have "pastors" actually calling for rhe execution of others? The commandments obviously mean nothing to them, just as the law-and-order folks don't really, truly believe in laws for themselves.

    Used to have Arthur Hugh Clough's "The Latest Decalogue "memorized but am not certain now that I'm even spelling his name correctly. Guess it's time to look it up. Thought I was past my cynical yourh.

    1. Joseph Harbin

      Maybe there's two separate points:
      1. Assumptions about the shooter's transgender status may be wrong.
      2. The shooter's gender is irrelevant.

      Roughly 98% of mass shooters are male. That tells you males are somewhat more likely to be mass shooters than non-males. But it doesn't tell you much about any individual. As a male, I'd feel someone was a dumb jerk if they suspected me of being a mass shooter or hyper-violent just because I'm a male. I'd feel angry if my rights were curtailed because I'm a member of a group whose gender matches that of most mass shooters.

      But that's exactly what's happening to transgender people. They are being painted as terrorists and dangerous because possibly one or a few mass shooters identify as nonbinary.

      There is a dangerous campaign underway to demonize trans and other members of the LGBTQ community and to deny them the rights they deserve as citizens. We ought to call out the bigots for what they are. We've seen this show before. We know where it leads.

      BTW, I take "marginal people" as typo. We know what you mean.

    2. realrobmac

      Thank you. It does not matter in the slightest if this person was male/female, gay/straight, trans/not, from Germany, Mexico, Pennsylvania, or Toronto, was into video games, collecting baseball cards, voted Republican, or Democrat. We are talking about a mass murderer who had easy access to firearms because USA! Let's keep our eye on the ball here.

        1. Solar

          Who the perpetrator is doesn't matter because what matter is the motive, and that is a personal matter, not a group one.

          If a man shoots multiple women because he hates women is not relevant or applicable to every other men.

          Who the vicitim was matters because who they were is often the motive.

          If women are being shot for being women, that matters because that makes all of them a target, not any one in particular.

        2. Anandakos

          It does, and it doesn't. ("matter").

          It does, because sometimes race is a motivation, and it doesn't because a human life is a human life. Like so much in discussing a social problem, "it depends". It depends on the scope one is discussing -- the "big picture" or a particular episode involving a/some particular individual(s). It depends on what the context is -- is it a behavioral problem or an impersonal "economic forces" thing.

          There are lots of perspectives in which race does not or at least ideally should not matter. Those often involve (a) "perpetrator(s)" and (a) "victim(s)". But there are plenty of perspectives in which it does and ought to matter, particularly when considering broad population-wide trends.

          This is not rocket science.

        3. Austin

          "It takes two to murder. One to murder and one to die from being murdered." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qoqmmIY1dQ

          Of course someone obtuse on the Internet would question why the victim's race/gender/whatever matters when presented with the view that the victim's race/gender/whatever matters more than the killer's. Ugh, another day in the cesspool that is the Internet, where nuance and understanding go to die.

    3. kahner

      it's relevant because of rightwing attacks based on the alleged gender of the shooter. in the context of those attacks, i think it's pretty important to point out they may not even have been transgender at all. and of course we should also pushback on the scapegoating.

  3. CaliforniaDreaming

    This is an issue I just don't get. I can get illegal immigration, I can get racism, I can get austerity, war in Iraq, but this is just something that is so unimaginably dumb that I can't get there.

    Literally, who cares. No one is forcing boys to wear dresses and become girls, or vice-versa. The number of athletes who benefit from surgery is close to none, almost all of them are just people trying to get through the day.

    Other than Psycho, and a small handful of other movies, this like never happens. It barely even happens in movies.

    FFS, just leave people alone for once.

    1. drickard1967

      Reactionaries need everyone to fit into simple, static categories. This allows them to know whether to kiss up or kick down without having to think. Boys who are girls and girls who are boys throw all their simple categories out of whack.

    2. ScentOfViolets

      'FFS, just leave people alone for once.'

      HAHAHAHAHAHA! You know, that is _eactly_ what liberterianism is supposedly -- supposedly -- all about. Did I mention 'supposedly'?

    3. kahner

      it's about hating people they see as different. that's a core republican value. whether it be trans people, gay people, black people, etc etc. hate and blame the out group.

    4. James B. Shearer

      "This is an issue I just don't get. I can get illegal immigration, I can get racism, I can get austerity, war in Iraq, but this is just something that is so unimaginably dumb that I can't get there."

      It's simple enough, you just have to believe gender reassignment surgery is a destructive medical fad like lobotomies were. See here for example.

  4. D_Ohrk_E1

    In gaming, people regularly use opposite genders, guided by the belief that doing so creates a strategic advantage over opponents.

    1. weirdnoise

      It's the classic "on the internet no one knows you're a dog" or sock puppet phenomenon. It's not just gaming -- people toy with made-up online identities for a variety of reasons. This has been going on since USENET (and BBSing before that). Whether it is to gain power by playing with other people's expectations or exploring different identities out of curiosity, it's always been pretty common.

      Given that mass murderers are often sociopaths and thus likely to engage in this sort of deception anyway, I'd almost expect it in this case.

    2. Crissa

      No.

      The #1 reason past aesthetically liking an avatar people use a different gender in their gamer tag is to 'avoid harassment'.

      I have never seen an advantage ever cited.

      And I have been a paid games design analyst reporting for a now unknown mmo gaming mag for a decade.

      1. D_Ohrk_E1

        My apologies. I used the term, "strategic advantage" loosely, meaning, something beneficial over their gender brethren. Avoidance of harassment was meant to be part of that, but perhaps it shouldn't?

        I have asked many men who use female avatars why they do so. They frequently cite an advantage of being misperceived as weaker or less competitive.

  5. KawSunflower

    Some of the people insisting on a person's biological identity at births the right one cannot imagine the quandary of parents & doctors who have seen babies delivered with both male & female sex characteristics. When these fanatics scream about children being too young to know what they feel or are, do they also object that physicians & parents have had no right to arbitrarily decide for that infant with immediate surgery?

    1. Salamander

      I have been told in this forum that ambiguous genitalia at birth doesn't constitute "transgenderism." So I still don't understand it.

        1. KawSunflower

          I was avoiding the word in that context, not wasn't intending that it should be viewed as equivalent, just that the haste with which lsuch infants may sometimes be operated on to perform a different, but arbitrary, gender-confirming operation - one which may not be consonant with the child's own perception of self as that individual matures. Haven't read anything lately on the subject or of any efforts to stop or delay surgery.

    2. Crissa

      No, of course not. The same people attacking trans people approve cosmetic, unnecessary surgeries to confirm an imagined cis status as well as conversion therapy aka torture.

      1. Solar

        Yes, same for their cries against genital mutilation when talking about transgender issues yet not caring about it when it comes to circumcision.

  6. mistykatz

    Perhaps it's a mistake to make assumptions about anything based on someone's social media posts. My social media is primarily under the personna of one or another of my cats, both male and female, living and dead.

  7. HalfAlu

    When the press reported (or recited the police report) that the shooter was trans, I thought, wow the US has so many mass murders that some are from rare groups.

    With 500+ mass shootings a year, every couple of years the US will see a tap-dancing killer grandmother.

  8. morrospy

    lol, the same website that says every shooting is a false flag just to get reactions like this and mess with the media and they say the shooter is trans and people go with it?
    the media is being trolled. still. in 2023. Trump has a chance next year after all.

  9. navamske

    "When police said the shooter was transgender, the site immediately began posting threats against the LGBTQ community, vowing 'revenge' and sleuthing for hints of ties to larger LGBTQ organizations in social media profiles online, though no such ties have been reported so far."

    This reminds me of what supposedly happened after Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray. Apparently some people decided to kill random stingrays as "revenge." This is unbelievably asinine. First, stingrays are not usually aggressive and attack humans only when provoked. Second, a stingray would not understand the concept of retribution. Third and perhaps most significant, it seems highly unlikely that the stingray these people are targeting would be the one that killed Irwin. Idiots.

    1. Anandakos

      Hey, that stingray did Steve Irwin a favor. The dude is immortal now, as he's one of a handful of non-pearl diving people killed by a stingray (not the automobile....)

  10. Salamander

    Okay, I confess. This is how my prejudice/bigotry ran:

    * Day One announced that the murderer was a female. Wow! I thought. They're almost always white males. This is really different!

    * Next, that the murderer was a "transwoman." Okay, I assumed that meant a man who had gotten an upgrade; once again, your stereotypical male.

    * Then the word was that the murderer was female and "trans", which to me meant a woman getting dosed with mind-altering quantities of testosterone, which is known to cause violence and rage. So I get to "blame" the dudes again!

    * Now it's formally stated that nobody knows anything about anybody. Sigh.

    It's okay if my thought processes offend you. Like I said, just standard bigotry. Be lucky that you have none yourselves.

      1. Salamander

        A good point. However, women who take steroids to bulk up, for bodybuilding, weight lifting, or other reasons, have shown more violent and antisocial behavior. So we ought to continue to collect data, whether or not it's currently politically correct.

    1. name99

      Uhh, how soon the forget...

      Although there is a LONG history of school shootings (and not just in the US) the one that pretty much set the template for the modern way of doing things was NOT Columbine, it was the 1979 San Diego shooting by, tah dah, **Brenda** Spencer.

      As immortalized in the song "I don't like Mondays" which could be argued as unwittingly publicizing the fact that this was a viable life option and so kick-starting the modern age.

      The whole Brenda Spencer story is pretty damn depressing. No obvious political points to latch onto, just the facts (which few want to make political) that
      - alcohol ruins vast numbers of lives, and
      - some people just shouldn't be allowed to have children.

      As for whether there have been earlier trans shooters, well, who knows? Someone with far too much free time may want to go through the list and see what they find:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000)
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000–present)

  11. cld

    I will bet Hale was trans. Her family sent her to this Christian madrassa so they are probably pushing back hard against any suggestion she might have been transgendered.

  12. bebopman

    The moment I heard the cop say the shooter was trans, it all proceeded almost exactly the way I expected it would. What the Post headline ? Transgender Shooter Targets Christian School. For the Post and all the people like it, the deaths are not that important. Certainly not the most important detail.

  13. D_Ohrk_E1

    OT. Are you going to chime in, eventually, on Musk and others calling for a halt on the development of AI?

    An interesting thing I've discovered, is that GPT-3.5 has access to data that is paywalled, such as ASTM and other industry standards. If you have a very specific target, you can get ChatGPT to answer correctly using data that is normally paywalled.

  14. ruralhobo

    I wanted to make a joke about using the opportunity to pass background checks legislation, then realized this affair can go very badly wrong. Bigotry is not necessarily physically dangerous, even if it is socially so, but people do become physically endangered when others claim victim status or feel threatened.

  15. steve22

    Estimate vary a lot but lets use 1% for percentage of people in US who are trans. This is the first trans mass shooter I remember. Given the hundreds of mass shootings it appears trans folk are way behind. They need to buy more guns and go out and shot people like everyone else.

    Steve

  16. MattBallAZ

    Why does it matter?
    We should be defending trans people regardless. How many have to get beaten up and killed before we stop running from the issue?
    (I see Sam Harris is making JK Rowling into a martyr. Typical.)

  17. name99

    Ah, yes, the Rachel Dolezal defense - she was not trans enough?
    Or maybe the No True Trans defense?

    "Hale as a woman who has also used male pronouns" would surely be considered trans in any other context, including, eg, the infamous Canadian Hate Crime Law.

    But of course this is what you expect from the cis majority...
    Against their hatred, I say trans people can indeed do anything. Trans people can be mass murderers or serial killers, just like men, just like women!

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