I will admit to being confused by this post at the New York Times, which seems to assume that, despite “identifying” as a man, the shooter in Nashville was not actually, in any meaningful sense, a man.
Yesterday evening, the Times was almost comically worried that the media was misgendering the killer. “There was confusion later on Monday about the gender identity of the assailant in the Nashville shooting,” the paper tweeted. “Officials had used ‘she’ and ‘her’ to refer to the suspect, who, according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, appeared to identify as a man in recent months.”
And, as we all know, if you identify as a man, you are a man.
Unless you’re writing a piece about the differences between men and women, of course — in which case, how you identify is apparently irrelevant. The post I’m writing about is titled “Most mass shooting suspects are male.” (Last night, it was titled, “How Rare Is It for a Woman to Commit a Mass Shooting?,” but that was apparently too offensive to stay up.) The subheading is: “In a database of 172 U.S. shootings involving at least four victims over the last five and a half decades, all but 4 of the perpetrators were male.” The thesis is clear: men, not women, commit most mass shootings.
There’s even a graph to make the point:
Presumably, you’ll notice two things about this graph. The first is that “Nashville, 2023” is in the “Female” column. The second is that the title of the graph refers to “Gender,” rather than to “Sex.” As a rule, transgender activists draw a distinction between sex and gender, as such:
There are two core concepts that help in understanding transgender people and their experiences.
First, gender and sex are distinct in this context: sex = biology, ie sex assigned at birth; gender = one’s innate sense of self. Thus, transgender (where the Latin trans means “on the other side of”) signifies someone whose gender differs from their assigned sex.
Second, while transgender refers in the broadest sense to someone whose sex and gender do not match, cisgender (from the Latin “on this side of”, ie the antonym of trans) refers to those whose sex and gender do match. In other words, anyone not trans is cis.
The Times, though, says that the shooter it described on Twitter as having “appeared to identify as a man in recent months” was, in fact, of the “Female” “Gender.”
Why? Could it be, as my former colleague, David Harsanyi asks, that you have “your gender identification nullified if you do something terrible”? A mystery.