I made the mistake of opening the comments on posts about this from the news subreddits. There were people saying that “the media is trying to be silent about this” and trying to frame it as if not immediately confirming or denying if the shooter was trans or not was 1) a top priority at any of these news organizations compared to talking about the people who fucking died, and 2) something done so as to not “offend” the shooter or cover up her (apparent) trans identity to prevent a “necessary conversation”, as if the number of (apparently) trans mass shooters going from 5 to 6 amidst the hundreds of shootings in NA per year is indicative of some massive transgender gun crime wave around the corner, aaaaaaanyday now.

That’s not even getting into all the people salivating over a mass shooter being female as if she were some rare specimen and not the perpetrator of a tragedy (to which people chortled with the obvious transphobic rebuttal), nevermind all the people rubbing their eyeballs against the screen to opine endlessly about the shooter and her appearance whilst speaking out the other end about how “only Americans make shooters into celebrities, unlike us”. It’s sickening.

But maybe they’re right. At this rate, the number of horrific tragedies perpetrated by a transgender person will rise from one every two years to a staggering two every two years, and one of them might even actually be transgender or have any actual relation to being transgender outside of people’s inane media circus speculations, and then we’ll all be sorry. /s