On the morning of 27 August, Robin Westman entered Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis armed with a pistol, a shotgun, and a revolver. He opened fire during the first Mass of the new school year, killing two young children and wounding many others before turning one of the guns on himself.

In the wake of such senseless violence, Americans instinctively perform cultural autopsies, looking for explanations. But Westman’s behaviour didn’t lend itself readily to the usual analyses. Hours before the shooting, he uploaded a video in which he can be seen pacing his room in pixelated shadow, flaunting his arsenal. The slogans scrawled in white marker across his guns and ammunition revealed a disturbed mind, addled by dehumanising online memes plucked from trolling subcultures associated with both sides of the political spectrum. “Burn Israel,” “Sponsored by Blackrock,” and “Kill Donald Trump” appeared alongside right-coded catch phrases such as “We Wuz Kangz,” “Nuke India,” and “Kick a spic.” (In a grotesque illustration of horseshoe theory, slogans such as “Extra thicc Jew gas” and “6 million wasn’t enough” could be shoehorned into either category of extremism.) Like the murder of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, which took place two weeks later, the crime became a Rorschach test for America’s competing cultural projections.

While Westman’s political ideology (insofar as he had one) is unknown, one thing we do know is that the killer was a biologically male 23-year-old who identified as transgender. Robert Westman became “Robin Westman” at the age of seventeen—a fact that many media outlets originally chose not to report. In keeping with the taboo against “deadnaming” trans-identified individuals—even murderers—they posthumously honoured Westman’s “gender identity”; and so gave Americans the false impression that the carnage at Annunciation Catholic School had been committed by a woman.

Westman left a notebook full of rueful references to gender dysphoria, such as ‘I don’t know if I am a trans girl’; ‘my face never matches how I feel’; and ‘I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brainwashed myself.’

While today’s mass shooters are more likely than their predecessors to be radicalised online, they also tend to exhibit many of the same risk factors that have always been associated with this kind of crime—including mental instability and an all-consuming fixation on (often imaginary) grievances. Elliott Rodger, the self-styled “Supreme Gentleman” of incel lore who murdered six and injured fourteen in Isla Vista, California eleven years ago, was enraged by the fact that he wasn’t sexually desirable to women (which, of course, he blamed on society). Westman, by contrast, left a notebook full of rueful references to gender dysphoria, such as “I don’t know if I am a trans girl”; “my face never matches how I feel”; and “I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brainwashed myself.”

Gender dysphoria is comorbid with a number of serious mental health conditions. One large 2023 Danish study, for instance, found that trans-identified individuals were five times more likely to exhibit at least one psychiatric comorbidity than were members of a non-trans control group. And recent years have witnessed many horrifying crimes committed by trans-identified individuals. Some examples include:

• In 2018, a biologically female drug-store worker named Snochia Mosley shot and killed three co-workers in Aberdeen, Maryland. Friends shared messages with the media indicating that Mosley felt “the world was against her,” and that she’d begun identifying as a transgender male (and discussing hormone treatments) two years earlier.
• The following year, Maya McKinney—a biologically female student who asserted a male gender identity and had begun calling herself “Alec”—opened fire at a Colorado school, killing one and wounding eight, in retaliation for alleged transphobic bullying.
• Last year, a girl identifying as a boy was expelled from Les Paul Middle School in Wisconsin after she was caught plotting a school shooting. A forensic search of her phone revealed chilling queries such as “trans kill hit list.”
• In 2023, “Audrey” Hale, an emotionally disturbed woman who identified as male, killed three children and three staff members at The Covenant School in Nashville. In the months leading up to the attack, Hale wrote in her journal: “My penis exists in my head. I swear to god I’m male.” Other statements included, “So now in America, it makes one a criminal to have a gun or be transgender or non-binary,” “God I hate those sh*thead politicians,” and “I need a trans doctor… This female gender role makes me want to not exist.”

It goes without saying that the fact a killer—or attempted killer—is trans-identified does not necessarily mean his or her transgender identity is connected to his or her criminal motive. But it is alarming to observe how prevalent mentally unwell trans-identified individuals have become in many extremist movements and sects. This includes the Zizians—a self-described “rationalist” cult linked to at least six homicides. Its imprisoned leader, “Ziz” LaSota, is a biological male (originally named Jack Amadeus LaSota) who identifies as a woman. Most of his followers are also trans-identified (as well as autistic), including the late Ophelia Bauckholt, a biologically male German native originally named Felix.

Two months ago, a day after Westman’s rampage in Minnesota, Snehal Ansh Srivastava (also known as “Sasha Shakur”), a biologically male trans-identified activist who’d boasted online about using women’s changing rooms, shot and killed a neighbour in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts who’d objected to Srivastava’s left-wing political graffiti.

Days after that, Olivia G. Wilkins (also known as Stevie Wilkins), a trans-identified biologically female Maine resident, attempted to run over a Border Patrol agent arresting individuals who’d crashed a box truck on a public highway. Alexia Willie—also known as Jason L. Willie—a trans-identified male previously convicted of threatening a school shooting and the rape of children in Illinois—took to social media to praise Westman’s attack, hinting that similar assaults were imminent.

This was just a few weeks before the murder of Charlie Kirk, an early champion of detransitioners and a prominent critic of the medicalisation of minors. On 10 September, moments after he’d fielded a question about the recent wave of trans-identified mass shooters, a bullet tore through his neck—a crime that was applauded (or at least excused) by a number of prominent trans-rights activists.