Minneapolis Shooting: Lessons from the Tragedy

The horror in Minneapolis this week has left many of us shaken. A 23-year-old former student opened fire during a back-to-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic School, murdering two children and wounding many more before taking his own life. The shooter, Robin Westman, a male who identified as a woman, left behind a manifesto and notes on his weapons laced with violent fantasies, political rage, and admiration for other mass murderers.

It would be easy, especially on the political right, to reduce the cause of this tragedy to “transgenderism.” That misses the point. In this case and others like it, we are dealing primarily with the product of mental illness, which has been intensified by activists, policymakers, and medical institutions’ distortions of reality.

Westman was not just “trans”; he was profoundly disturbed. His case followed a familiar pattern, in which mental illness precedes the adoption of a transgender identity. Indeed, trans identification is often a coping mechanism for underlying distress rather than its root cause.

For Westman and others like him, apocalyptic messaging around transgender identity has provided a script that justifies violence. Activists and advocacy groups have popularized the false claim that Republicans are committing a trans “genocide.” This narrative is reinforced every time LGBT organizations declare—against their own media guidelines on suicide reporting—that a bill restricting “gender-affirming care” will have deadly consequences.

Just last week, a leaked video showed the president of the American Medical Association claiming that the suicide rate among trans-identifying people might be as high as 70 percent. Such vastly inflated figures are routinely invoked to justify medical procedures that every systematic review to date has found lack clear evidence of benefit. Activists weaponize these distorted numbers in public debate. And when vulnerable, unstable people are told that they are on the verge of annihilation, some will begin to believe it—and a few might decide to strike first.

This danger is not theoretical. Journalist Andy Ngo has documented the rise of pro-trans groups that openly promote armed resistance. An activist group in D.C. posted flyers for a “Trans Day of Vengeance” to “Stop Trans Genocide.” The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a sympathetic feature about “queer” gun owners preparing for Trump’s America, with one unnamed gun owner expressing fear about “concentration camps.” At the California State Capitol, I witnessed a Democratic legislator compare critics of gender ideology to Nazis.

These are not isolated moments of overheated rhetoric, but mainstream talking points that convince young, unstable people that they’re being targeted for extermination like Jews in 1930s Germany.

Westman’s life illustrates what happens when this ideology intersects with mental illness. As a minor, he socially transitioned, and his mother signed off on his legal name change. It is not yet known whether he took cross-sex hormones or underwent surgeries. What matters is that adults around him encouraged him to lean into his confusion and embrace a delusion about his identity.

Not surprisingly, doing so didn’t resolve his distress. Instead, he became more alienated, more consumed by rage, and more obsessed with violence. His own writings reveal the crushing effect of adhering to a reality-denying ideology:

I only keep [my long hair] because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself. I can’t cut my hair now as it would be an embarrassing defeat, and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported.

Instead of healing him, gender ideology only deepened his misery and accelerated his descent.

It may be tempting for people on the right to blame “transgenderism” itself for this tragedy. But most youth swept up in this ideology are not violent. Rather, they are victims, turned into pawns by powerful institutions that exploit their suffering. The medical establishment feeds them pseudoscience about being “born in the wrong body” and profits from irreversible interventions that do nothing to resolve their deeper problems. The political establishment elevates them as a victim class to be used in a new civil rights crusade, seeing their immiseration not as something to be cured but as something to be maintained for leverage.

The lesson from Minneapolis is that ideologies that deny reality—about sex, about suicide, about medical treatment, and about threats to people’s safety—are profoundly dangerous. When you take a generation of distressed youth and suggest that they might be trapped in the wrong body, that suicide is imminent if they are denied access to experimental drugs and surgeries, and that society is conspiring to wipe them out, you create a powder keg. Westman’s rampage shows what happens when it ignites.

People on the political right must avoid rhetoric that feeds into the apocalyptic mindset. This kind of discourse only entrenches the sense of an impending existential threat that this population has been thoroughly propagandized to believe.

The only humane path forward is to tell the truth. That means affirming the biological reality of sex, rejecting inflated and manipulative claims about suicide, being honest about the evidence for “gender-affirming care,” and resisting the use of suffering people as political pawns. If we fail to do this, we will see more tragedies like Minneapolis.

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images