One of Us

The absolution of exclusion

A central theme, if not the central theme, of anti-transgender political rhetoric is the exclusion of transgender people from the audience’s conception of themselves. That is, by focusing on all the ways transgender people are different from the straight world, we can more easily be portrayed as fundamentally in conflict with the audience’s own interests. A focus on athletics, for example, could be a story of inclusion and community and teamwork, but through carefully manufactured agitprop, it becomes a story of competition, advantage, and difference. Our specialized health care needs could be connected to the ways the American health care system fails all poor and working people, but is instead turned into a story of frivolous excess, welfare robbery from the pockets of the taxpayer, us vs. they/them.

As with many political bigotries, this process depends on the audience being in a constant state of scarcity, risk, and insecurity. In the discourse about gendered public bathrooms, for example, the strange, bizarre transgender woman—portrayed as grotesque and absurd in her performances of femininity—becomes the scapegoat for patriarchal violence, redirecting fear and outrage that would be more productively focused on the quotidian violence of the spouse, the father, the family itself. We do not expect the familiar to be more dangerous to us than the strange even though it is the family that, statistically speaking, poses the far greater danger to us than the strange. This has a certain allure—it’s uncomfortable to realize the people who pose the greatest danger to us are also those we associate with our upbringing, our daily life, our love and trust. After all, those people are like us. And if people so like us are capable of violence and evil, then so, too must we ourselves be capable of it.

At which point, the invitation to offload that fear of evil done by others and, more fundamentally, by ourselves onto someone else is no mere cognitive bias but an exculpatory act of salvation. It absolves the people in power who fail to keep us safe, but it also absolves us of the anxiety-ridden truth that we are not born good any more than others are born evil, and the destruction of others who we deem evil will not in itself create good. “If all he has to do is remove Evil,” says Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1946 treatise The Antisemite and The Jew, “that means that the Good is already given. He has no need to seek it in anguish, to invent it, to scrutinize it patiently when he has found it, to prove it in action, to verify it by its consequences, or, finally, to shoulder the responsibilities of the moral choice he has made.”

This is particularly appealing in the face of issues that seem intractable or, as is the case with mass shootings in the United States, rendered intractable by the failure of our politicians and systems of governance to do anything about it. In the lifetime of the Millennial, the public mass shooting went from unthinkable to unavoidable, a chronic spectacle of blood and misery and loss and outrage now so ubiquitous it’s become its own nihilistic subculture. It is a problem unique to the United States with a wide array of available solutions, and yet one which we newly debate each time in a Sisyphean blame game, rolling the stone of our collapsing state over the bones of parisioners, shoppers, concertgoers, dancers, and so, so many children.

Tragically and predictably, this process started again in the wake of this week’s shooting at Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis, when 23-year-old Robin Westman shot 20 people, many of whom were children, and killed two. The Trump administration, Republican politicians, and conservative media outlets quickly zeroed in on a legal name change granted to Westman when they were 17, identifying them as a transgender girl, part of what they falsely claim is a pattern of violence committed by transgender people. A similar uproar occurred after Audrey Hale, a transgender man, shot and killed three children and three adults at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee in 2023.

Straight men carry out 98% of mass shootings, and those with any clear political motive are overwhelmingly carrying out their violence in the name of far-right white nationalism—even, importantly, when the shooter is themselves not white and not a man. Those with identities or motives outside the norm—and let’s just sit with the tragedy and absurdity that we have allowed for such a thing as a “normal” mass shooter—receive the most coverage, the most speculation, the most outrage on the right. We focus on what makes those mass shooters who are strange and different in a desperate bid to forget what our politics has forced us to tolerate.

Just as they focus on violence by Muslims, undocumented people, or strangers in dark alleys, this intense focus on the shooter’s identity aims to highlight the exceptional and absolve what we consider to be ordinary. As John Pachankis, a Yale professor in public health and psychiatry, put it this week, “a school shooter who happens to be transgender has more in common with other school shooters than with other transgender people.” Their identities as transgender (or, in Westman’s case, former identity as trans) barely makes a dent in their otherwise by-the-books profile of social isolation, online radicalization, and, with increasing frequency, adherence to a nihilistic, violence-for-violence-sake subculture that operates as a kind of fandom for mass killings. Indeed, the right’s obsession with their transgender identities elides the attribute both Westman and Hale shared with all mass shooters—unfettered access to high-capacity guns. In a deeply perverse and dangerous way, Hale and Westman represent something trans people often try to tell cisgender people—we’re just like you.

When trans activists like myself work towards inclusion and against exclusion, we often fight for acceptance and tolerance within institutions and communities by emphasizing the values and interests we have in common with those institutions and communities. We often find ourselves in a contest to appear more normal than our opposition, rightfully portraying the policing of gender as disruptive to transgender and cisgender people alike. We understandably seek out what the Reverend J Mase III once referred to as “the blessings of mundanity.”

But in a world where mass violence is rendered mundane, I’m increasingly asking myself what good it would do to assimilate ourselves into the backdrop of such a violent, sick, and dysfunctional society. If our politics is so unrepentantly broken, so removed from public demands and needs, as to allow what happened at Annunciation this week to become routine, then what good is an activism that merely seeks inclusion within it?

In her essay “What I Learned from Abu Ghraib,” Barbara Ehrenreich reflects on the limits of a feminism that demands women’s inclusion in a system like the military when it simply offers women like Lyndie England the opportunity to engage in torture and brutality. “To cite an old, and far from naive, feminist saying,” she writes, “‘If you think equality is the goal, your standards are far too low.’ It is not enough to be equal to men, when the men are acting like beasts. It is not enough to assimilate. We need to create a world worth assimilating into.”

As a transgender activist, I frequently find myself demanding inclusion in a society that is clearly in collapse if it would allow such a problem as mass shootings to fester and grow and be normalized in the way the United States has. I am shaken and outraged that anyone would commit this violence, and find it all the more appalling when it is done by someone with whom I share a core aspect of my identity. The mistake, however, was to assume trans people were ever any different, that inclusion alone into a sick society could ever be enough for trans people or that society. As the transphobic politician offers his audience, I, too, sought the absolution of difference. As much as it may sicken me to say so, maybe we are just like you.