Can We Spare a Moment for the Murdered Children?

On Monday, the recording artist Madonna made an announcement regarding her forthcoming 35-city world tour: She had added Nashville, Tenn., to the roster. The stop was occasioned by the murder of six people, including three children, at a Christian school in that city on March 27. Madonna’s concert is billed as a fundraiser, but not for the victims of this particular attack. The show is pitched as a protest against Tennessee’s allegedly “inhumane” anti-trans legislation, and the concert will donate a portion of the proceeds to unnamed “trans rights organizations.”

Madonna released the following statement:

The oppression of the LGBTQ+ is not only unacceptable and inhumane; it’s creating an unsafe environment; it makes America a dangerous place for our most vulnerable citizens, especially trans women of color.  Also, these so-called laws to protect our children are unfounded and pathetic. Anyone with half a brain knows not to f*** with a drag queen.

It is important to recall, because it is being forgotten, that this event would not be held, nor any statement about the fear experienced by transgender individuals be written, had someone who may have identified as trans not killed six people.

It’s easy to compartmentalize the senseless bloodshed that occasioned the outpouring of support for the “trans community,” because that was the intended effect of tortured efforts in the press to link — however dubiously — the brutal slaying of three school employees and three nine-year-olds to a metaphysical debate in this country over transgenderism and young people’s exposure to it.

Whatever you think of that debate, there is no established link between it and the violence in Nashville. It’s being shoehorned into the national discussion, eclipsing any attention that would otherwise be devoted to the torment endured by the bereaved.

Madonna isn’t alone in capitalizing on the dreadful news out of Nashville. I’ve discussed this impulse in the press, as have Rich and Becket. But it’s still going on. Indeed, from a casual survey of the media landscape just over a week after that mass shooting, you could be forgiven for assuming the victims of this attack were trans rather than the perpetrator.

As Tennessee mourned, the CBC’s Nick Logan chronicled what one gender-studies professor called the “incredible escalation of the fear factor” allegedly experienced by trans-identifying Americans because “speculation about the killer’s gender identity was quickly weaponized in an ongoing battle against transgender and LGBTQ rights.” The Associated Press echoed concerns about “anti-transgender rhetoric and disinformation,” which have “heightened the fears of a community already on edge amid a historic push for more restrictions on trans people’s rights this year.” Citing some genuinely provocative commentary on the right, the Washington Post’s Fenit Nirappil warned that the “attacks against transgender people and gender-affirming care come at a precarious time for trans rights in America.” After all, “Studies show transgender people are disproportionately likely to be victims of violence.”

Okay, but not in this case. In this case — the case that prompted all this reporting — it was the other way around. What these reporters and countless trans-advocacy groups across North America are doing is little distinct from what Madonna is doing: Using this senseless act of bloodshed to advance their own narrow objectives.

Think for a moment about what the people who lost friends, family members, and even children in this attack are experiencing. They have witnessed the national press descend invasively on their town only to watch them pivot on a dime away from them and toward an abstraction. In the process, media appears committed to muting the pain of the bereaved in favor of the apprehension experienced by those who identify, to one degree or another, with the person who shattered the lives of the bereaved and took their loved ones away.

The victims of this crime have been cheated out of the grief and charity that is their due. And only to protect an ideological imperative against criticism. Indeed, it’s an imperative that has taken the form in this case of something resembling sympathy for the killer. Why else raise without evidence the notion that the trans community is uniquely imperiled by Tennessee’s laws if not to establish an at least understandable — if not legitimate — motive?

It’s positively demonic.