When Trans People Do Bad Things
On scapegoats and broken clocks
Leaders on the political right have shown an unabashed hunger to blame transgender people, as a collective or as individuals, for all nature of calamities and societal troubles, be it inflation, bank collapses, or World War III. It’s a marriage between an old instinct in reactionary movements to tie societal disasters to a moral downfall (Jerry Falwell famously blamed feminists and gay people for 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina) and a cultural trope that still frequently portrays trans people as deceptive villains. This has historically been true even when it’s the heathens themselves paying the price—as it was with AIDS which Pat Robertson memorably described as “God weeding his garden.”
So when a transgender person—any one of 1.6 million across the country—does something horrendous themselves, the right is rarely hesitant to connect their vile actions to the villain’s trans identity. Often, this drives them to find trans people where there are none—blaming a 2021 sexual assault in a Virginia public school on trans-inclusive policies that didn’t exist, for example, or wrongly guessing at the gender identity of the shooters in Uvalde, Highland Park, or the headquarters of YouTube in San Bruno, CA.
Each instance is meant to create overlap between the right’s obsessive and unpopular focus on the rights and health care of 0.6% of the population and more broadly-shared priorities. The routine denial of trans people’s subjectivity is the central enabler of this cynical game; Trans people are perceived by the far-right—and liberal center—not as people but as eidolons of an ideology. And the right in particular is in desperate need of disasters to point to that appear to justify their effort to eradicate “transgenderism” from public life.
Broken clocks being what they are, they’ll eventually be right. This week, the right-wing’s fever dreams came true when Aiden Hale, a 28-year-old who reportedly identified as a transgender man, brought two AR-15s and a handgun into a private Christian school outside Nashville and opened fire, killing six people including three children. There’s no evidence Hale’s transgender status had anything to do with the shooting, which targeted a school where he was once a student and followed the loss of a romantic partner. This hasn’t stopped pundits and politicians, including Senators J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton, from swiftly leaping on Hale’s transgender status as a novel aspect of the atrocity, calling out leftists, gender-affirming hormones, and anything not shaped like a gun as potential scapegoats.
In response to this cynical rhetoric, one could note that mass shootings are most often carried out by young white men—making Hale, a young white man, one of many. One could also note, according to the Anti-Defamation League, all of the 25 murders tied to political or ideological extremism in the US in 2022 were connected to far-right politics and ideology. But both white cis men and conservatism are not and have never been subjected to the kinds of widespread objectification trans people are and have been for most of the history of mass media. This is why a transgender killer is a “transgender killer” but cisgender killer is just a “killer.”
A similar campaign follows acts of violence by someone who’s undocumented or Muslim. The denial of someone’s subjectivity—our self-determination, our individualism, our ability to transcend a constructed aspect of our identity—results in them being discussed less as a kind of person and more as a proposition, and the actions of any one trans person are offered up as the consequences of our proposed equality. Discussions of our rights, our health care, and our perspectives are still frequently regarded as the pretext for an up-or-down vote on trans people’s existence overall. So when a trans person commits an atrocity, it’s not assigned to their identity as a person but instead assigned to their identity as trans.
When and how this instinct is applied is more revealing, however, of the anti-trans forces applying it than the trans rights movement they hope to weaponize such instances against. When a trans person takes part in an act most would find morally reprehensible but the right finds quite sympathetic, the answer is often silence. Take, for example, Jessica Watkins.
Watkins, a veteran of the United States’ initial invasion of Afghanistan and member of the Oathkeepers, was one of nine members of the far-right militia recently charged with seditious conspiracy for her role in the January 6, 2021 riots at the U.S. Capitol that would leave five people dead and over 100 injured. She is the only known transgender person charged in connection with the insurrection and faces decades in prison following her conviction and a failed attempt to plead not guilty; She claimed in court filings to have met with Secret Service agents weeks before the attack and to have received a “VIP” pass to work as security for speakers at the rally preceding the riot. “We were in the thick of it. Stormed the Capitol,” she wrote in messages sent to her co-insurrectionists on that day. “Got tear-gassed and muscled the cops back like Spartans.”
Her status as a transgender woman has, in comparison to the Nashville shooting, rarely merited a mention in media coverage of her trial and the broader prosecution of the Oath Keepers. A Google search reveals a handful of references from mainstream media outlets including the Associated Press, NPR, and BuzzFeed News—but few from right-wing outlets like Fox News or the Daily Wire (neither mentioned her trans status in their coverage of the conspiracy trial). This absence is particularly notable because, during her trial last fall, she specifically (and somewhat quixotically) invoked her trans status in her own defense.
When taken in the context of hundreds of prosecutions connected with January 6—the largest investigation ever conducted by the Department of Justice—that one of the insurrectionists is transgender should not really merit more than the cursory mentions it received in the mainstream press. Yet the chasm between her mentions in right-wing media versus the trans identity of any other villain seems quite notable given those same media outlets work to obscure the actors and incentives at play on January 6—including failed attempts to blame the riot on leftists and “Antifa.”
Or consider Taylor Parker-Dipeppe, a transgender man and former member of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division. In September 2021, Parker-Dipeppe pleaded guilty after he and two other members of the white supremacist group were charged with stalking and threatening journalists, including leaving “Swastika-laden” messages at the homes of journalists across three states. Parker-Dipeppe faced no prison time for the charges because, as the federal judge said at his sentencing hearing, “None of us have suffered the difficult situation this defendant has endured as a result of his gender identity confusion.”
A transgender neo-Nazi relieved of any jail time explicitly because of his trans status might, one would think, be greeted with all of the outrage and transphobia the right-wing media can muster. Yet Parker-Dipeppe has been named just once by the Daily Wire and never by Fox News. This is a surprising disparity in favor of a self-avowed white supremacist when compared to, say, Sam Brinton, a nonbinary person and former Biden administration official charged with stealing luggage from airports not once but twice. Fox News has mentioned Sam Brinton in at least 22 reports and The Daily Wire has covered Brinton in at least 21 articles just since last July, prominently noting their nonbinary status in each instance (as if something inherent to trans people curses us with an insatiable appetite for luxury goods). If Brinton’s trans identity was so relevant to their crimes to deserve constant mention, then why choose to avoid the trans identity of people engaging in far worst behavior? Unless, of course, they simply don’t find that behavior abhorrent in the first place.
We tell ourselves stories about moral monsters to alleviate the anxiety we feel knowing that evil lives in deeds, not people, and thus is capable of being acted upon or enabled by any person—including ourselves. When greeted with someone doing something as horrendous as killing schoolchildren, it’s tempting to otherize them and thereby distance ourselves from their atrocities. In response to mass shootings in the US, this instinct has resulted in a cynical and desperate gamification of shooters based on their identity or their political leanings, with bad-faith actors rushing to blame our societal failure to prevent these nightmares and regulate the tools used to create them on someone, anyone, other than ourselves.
In that darkest and most hideous of political media games, the right is losing—badly. It’s why they’ve long been so desperate to find trans people hiding behind every shooting and why they’re damn near gleeful to finally have one. They’ve told their audiences trans people are morally corrupt and outright dangerous in order to justify a nonstop legal project aimed at our erasure that no sizable portion of the population is actually asking for. The constant scapegoating of trans people—whose very existence threatens the heart of right-wing dogma—is just another way of delivering the message “wouldn’t your life be so much easier if we got rid of all the trans people?”
But they do so selectively, consciously avoiding examples of trans people doing bad things when those bad things are actually “good” things in the minds of their key audiences or themselves—actions that maintain or defend patriarchal white supremacy. To cover people like Watkins or Parker-Dippepe would be providing trans people more subjectivity than they would ever allow, creating a vision of trans people that is more nuanced in the minds of an audience they need to perceive trans people as a threat to their way of life—a way of life often defended by insurrectionists and neo-Nazis.
Aiden Hale committed these heinous murders a few days before Trans Day of Visibility, a mirror of Transgender Day of Remembrance that has become the pinnacle of naive politics that believes material progress and social equality can be won solely through symbolic gestures of liberal identitarianism. It’s precisely the shortcomings of that project—which seeks to put forth virtuous, acceptable trans people as icons of social progress—that have left us so exposed to the right’s project to stereotype and scapegoat us. Both deny trans people the moral complexity afforded to cisgender people, forcing us into a binary where others are allowed fluidity, individuality, and mercy.
On their podcast Bad Gays, writers Ben Miller and Huw Lemmey seek to address that in regards to gay people by profiling a parade of horribles with homosexual proclivities, from the Brownshirt leader Ernst Rhom to the aspiring phrenologist Andrew Sullivan. One can and should confront the complicated reality of who queer people are; doing otherwise invites the kind of opportunistic political games now being played with Hale that seek to differentiate queer people as uniquely terrifying and malicious. The most frightening story isn’t that trans people are the monstrosity of Tucker Carlson’s nightmares. The most frightening story is the true one—that we are neither inherently villainous nor heroic because, ultimately, we’re people just like you.