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Two children were shot and killed last week at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, both students of Annunciation Catholic School, a pre-K–8 school about 20 minutes from my home. Within hours, the nation learned the killer was a biological male who identified as a woman.
Standing outside the church mere hours later, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey quickly dismissed the significance of the shooter’s so-called gender identity in the shooting.
“Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity,” Frey said during a press conference.
We must never villainize groups of people, but we must also recognize a tragedy of this scale is the consequence of leaving the mentally ill untreated.
It’s not as simple as “transgenderism leads to school shootings.” In fact, transgender individuals make up a very small percentage of mass shooters. However, it is widely known that mass shooters tend to be socially isolated, depressed, and bitter people. The mental and social effects of gender transitioning, then, should sound alarm bells. Had the shooter been properly treated, Annunciation’s shooting would likely never have happened. Psychology “experts” have not only normalized but glorified gender confusion such that our society has widely accepted it. The shooter was not only untreated but encouraged.
Only two years ago, a disturbingly similar story emerged when transgender-identifying shooter Audrey Hale killed six people, including three children, at the Covenant School, a pre-K–6 Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2022, a non-binary-identifying individual named Anderson Lee Aldrich shot and killed five people at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs.
This new trend is extremely alarming. But it is not surprising. Gender ideology is designed to isolate young people and make them angry. Rather than learning to embrace their biological sexes, young people are taught to reject their own bodies and anyone who acknowledges reality.
Promoting gender transitions also encourages a wide range of secondary mental illnesses. In 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that between 56.4–63.9% of transgender individuals expressed feelings of loneliness. Moreover, they are six times more likely to develop mood or anxiety disorders, three times more likely to take antidepressants and anti-anxiety medicine, and six times more likely to be hospitalized for suicide attempts, according to the 2019 study published by the American Journal of Psychiatry.
These issues persist post-transition. Even after receiving so-called gender-affirming care, individuals with gender incongruence “showed no advantage of surgery in relation to subsequent mood or anxiety disorder-related health care or prescriptions or hospitalizations following suicide attempts in that comparison,” according to a 2020 correction to the aforementioned 2019 study.
The vast majority of transgender individuals and those suffering from other mental illnesses are not dangerous people. However, nearly 9 in 10 surviving mass shooters have had misdiagnosed, undiagnosed, or incorrectly treated mental illnesses. Many “experts” no longer view gender dysphoria or gender incongruence as mental illness. Instead, they normalize it and leave people to become even more sick, physically and mentally. And when people don’t receive appropriate psychological care, these warning signs fly under the radar. Vulnerable people are left to harm themselves, and, in the case of last week’s shooting, to harm others.
Suddenly, 2.8% of Gen Z identifies as transgender, compared with 0.9% of all U.S. adults, according to 2024 Gallup findings. With gender transitioning on the rise, these devastating side effects are guaranteed to come with it. It’s time to accept the fact that this lifestyle causes immense harm to vulnerable people.
So, actually, no, Mayor Frey. When two children are dead, refusing to face reality reflects a whole culture’s lost sense of humanity.
Adriana Azarian is a senior studying politics.
