Who or What Encouraged Audrey Hale’s Transgenderism?

Commentary

The cellphones were buzzing non-stop at our house on March 27. Who was this person? What motivated him or her?

It was a “trans” person but because the police announcement was so cautious—probably correctly—no one was immediately sure, until very late, which way the transition had gone.

Still, there are many unanswered, some undoubtedly buried in the shooter’s “manifesto.”

The tragic shooting that took six lives, three of them children, at Nashville’s Covenant School occurred a four-minute drive from my house. I pass the school regularly to get to the local Walgreens or Whole Foods.

That doesn’t give me any special insight into this horrific event that’s now dominating our television screens; on the other hand, it should be no surprise that I can’t stop thinking about it.

One thing is certain nevertheless: This isn’t a Nashville-specific calamity. It could happen anywhere.

It comes as a recent poll shows a catastrophic decline in traditional values in the United States, with only the desire for money showing a percentage gain in public interest.

Notably, interest in religion is vanishing.

At the same time, there has been an extraordinary rise in transgenderism, as if changing your sex were an answer to life’s inevitable pain and difficulties.

Actually, it most often creates more, by perpetuating an endless psychological and medical cycle.

This rise has been encouraged by our schools, our media, and, perhaps most repellently, because they profit financially from it, our medical community.

This so-called solution has reached near-epidemic proportions among our young, inspiring many forms of treatment from hormone therapy to genital surgery, all of which have unknown chemical and physiological results.

This has gone on even as it’s been common knowledge since time immemorial that male and female sexuality exists on a spectrum.

Only now, in what John Nolte aptly calls in his forthcoming novel “the great all at once,” do we seek to intervene in this natural evolution of our species that, according to recent research, began some 300,000 years ago.

For all those millennia, people found ways of dealing with their feelings and impulses. It obviously wasn’t always perfect, but it sufficed to bring civilization forward. Only in this minute portion of that time is there a serious, government-approved—indeed, often encouraged—attempt to solve people’s problems by medically altering their sex.

Talk about playing with fire.

We have just seen the fruits of that, even though it appears that Audrey Hale, 28, because of the rampage that resulted in her death, came to the decision she was male somewhat later than many.

We don’t know, as of this writing anyway, the extent that she was under medical treatment, taking testosterone, and so forth.

Still, she was a part of the zeitgeist that unconsciously encouraged her to dress, if you look at recently revealed videos, as almost a parody of a macho terrorist in assault gear.

Indeed, the schools (not Covenant, a Christian school, but the general run of public schools throughout the nation and many private as well), the media, and the medical community should start looking in the mirror and examine what they have wrought.

I should add to my list perhaps the most execrable of all—so-called “trans activists.”

This is, as they say, a teaching moment.

Unfortunately, every teaching moment needs a willing audience in order to have value, in order to work. That remains to be seen.

Two essays in March 28’s New York Post should act as a reminder.

Rich Lowry tells us—writing before this catastrophe (was he prescient?): “Social contagion is making teen girls depressed—and trans.”

And how!

As if expanding on Lowry, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy writes “The USA is experiencing a crisis of faith—in itself.”

How true. He explains:

“The woke left preys on this vacuum of identity. The new secular cults of wokeism, gender ideology, COVIDism and climateism prey on this vacuum of purpose and meaning. Blaise Pascal famously said that if you have a hole the size of God in your heart and God doesn’t fill it, then something else will.”

Pascal’s words are indeed the nub of the problem. If, following on his French theme I could say today, in the spirit of Emile Zola, “J’accuse!” I would accuse “woke” ideology that creates “secular cults,” as Ramaswamy says, like this increasingly bizarre “gender ideology” we live with, of murder—not just here in Nashville, but everywhere.

I don’t believe that’s too extreme to say.

That its victims this time were 9-year-old children and the people that took care of and mentored them at a Christian school is a desperately sad tragedy. One can only imagine what their families must be feeling.

ADDENDUM: As of this writing, Nashville police aren’t releasing Hale’s “manifesto,” according to the Daily Caller Foundation. Going forward, let’s hope they do.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.