We just saw another tragic shooting in Rhode Island, this time at a high school hockey game. What people want to know in the immediate aftermath of such tragedies is who did it, where, and why – and how many people were injured or died. We instinctively want to know how close it was to us, if it could have happened to us, and if we could avoid a similar fate.
Flying in the face of this human need for truth is the woke legacy media, which puts ideology ahead of facts.
The Daily Mail, a British paper, reported early on that the Pawtucket perpetrator was a trans-identifying man in his 50s, the chief victims his wife and children, and the motive likely connected with his gender identification and family conflict about it. Their photos supported this.
U.S. legacy media, meanwhile, tried to avoid the above facts. Their reason? The woke dogma the media adhere to is that “trans” people are an oppressed minority and always victims. Thus, the growing instances of mass shootings from people suffering from gender-related mental troubles must be given as little coverage and detail as possible.
The Washington Post headline was “Shooting at Rhode Island youth hockey game leaves 3 dead, including shooter, and 3 more wounded.” They quoted the police chief as saying “it may be a family dispute” and that the shooter was “Robert Dorgan, who she [the police chief] said also went by the name Roberta Esposito.”
The story from the Associated Press was almost the same.
The New York Times also danced around the motive, quickly pivoting to “the painful regularity of gun violence in America.”
The Federalist demonstrated in one graphic how the legacy media approached this story. They produced headlines from CBS, CNN, NBC, ESPN, AP, and The New York Times. Not one has the word “transgender.” They all reference a “shooting,” which one said was by a “shooter.”
Legacy outlets are so predictable on this that one can infer truth from what they leave out. Initial reports on a (barely) previous mass shooting on Feb. 10 in Canada spoke of a “female in a dress,” or a “gunperson,” leading astute readers correctly to guess the shooter was male.
The legacy media do this because they don’t want to violate the Fifth Woke Commandment: You Shall Not Know “What Is a Woman.” In The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey), I explain how the progressive Left, which dominates American media, demands we ignore obvious truth to defend their ideology.
Anything that does not fit the woke model must be refuted or, better still, ignored. That is the agenda the legacy media serves.
Gender ideology claims that identity is subjective. You are what you say you are. Hence the mantra “trans women are women,” repeated by everyone from actor Rupert Grint of the Harry Potter movies to British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (in 2022–he later changed his mind).
Why does it matter if news outlets report the truth about crimes committed by trans-identifying individuals, or any other identity group?
It matters because the gender ideology agenda is to give men who identify as women full, unchallengeable access to women’s spaces, and to label anyone fighting for women’s rights a bigot, transphobe, or worse.
Ideologues are also still pushing–against mounting evidence that it does not improve outcomes—what they call “gender affirming care.” That means accepting at their word any individual–even a child–who self-identifies as the opposite sex, and using social acceptance, hormones, and surgery to make the person look more like how they feel.
It matters because parents have been bullied and shamed into letting their children go so far down this path they can’t go back.
Fox Varian is the first successful “detransitioner” to sue her providers for negligence, winning $2 million. Many others, like Prisha Mosley and Chloe Cole, are bravely countering the narrative that everything works out fine once you “affirm” a child’s fleeting sense of gender.
And it matters because we see more and more cases of men who are frustrated at their inability to change reality and force the world to accept it that they hurt themselves or others.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Ray Blanchard coined the term autogynephilia–“the love of oneself as a woman”–to describe adult men, often in middle age, who enjoy dressing and acting as women and are sexually aroused by the idea of themselves as women.
Men fitting this description are often the most aggressive in insisting on their “right” to women’s sports and spaces from spas to prisons. Their families, co-workers, and friends must decide how to help them, and they are best served by the truth, not obfuscation for the sake of ideology.
Accurately describing the perpetrators of violence and their motives is a journalistic duty.
Hiding the role of gender-confusion in individuals who commit crimes serves only to propagate myths that sustain gender ideology’s crumbling house of cards and will result in more violence.
The post The Media Lies About Trans Shooters appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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