Nashville school shooting evokes anti-transgender sentiments

When Nashville police announced that the shooter who killed three children and three adults at a school this week was transgender, trans-Tennesseans braced themselves for renewed vitriol in a state that has recently proposed a raft of anti-trans laws.

Soon enough, some prominent Republicans, including JD Vance, a US senator from Ohio, and US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, suggested in social media posts that the shooter’s gender identity may have been a factor in the murders.

Police later said they did not know the shooter’s gender identity.

Even before the shooting, many transgender Tennesseans felt villainized by their state’s efforts to regulate the lives of gay and trans people and were increasingly fearful for their safety.

“This isn’t a trans issue, this is a gun issue,” said Mykul Coscia, a drag king at Nashville’s Play Dance Bar, an LGTBQ nightclub. “But they’re gonna make it a trans issue.”

Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature recently banned gender-affirming medical care, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for anyone under 18, despite US medical associations saying such treatment can save lives.

It also restricted drag shows in public in an ambiguously worded law taking effect this weekend that includes “male or female impersonators” in the same X-rated category as strippers. As that bill progressed, armed neo-Nazis and other far-right groups protested outside drag shows in the state.

The Tennessee bills are part of a broader anti-trans push by Republicans in conservative states who argue they are protecting children.

Coscia has a 7-year-old daughter going to a Nashville-area school and said he was never worried about doctors or drag queens harming children. But he does live in fear of school shootings, which have become commonplace in the US, where guns are easily obtained.

Last year, the Supreme Court declared for the first time that the US Constitution protects an individual’s right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense.

Even as a gun owner himself, he wants lawmakers to make it harder to get hold of guns and to ban the kind of semi-automatic rifle used in many school shootings, including Mondays at the Covenant School.

Police identified the Nashville shooter as Audrey Elizabeth Hale, and initially referred to Hale as female. Later on Monday, police said Hale was transgender. By Wednesday, the police department was less sure.

“We do not know the shooter’s personal gender identity,” Kristin Mumford, a police spokesperson, wrote in an email. “We are aware that she used male pronouns in a social media profile.”

The vast majority of mass shootings in the US are committed by non-trans men, according to Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a non-profit group advocating for stricter gun regulation.

Grayson Collins, a trans man raising a 3-year-old daughter with his wife in a Nashville suburb, said the gender identity of a mass shooter was irrelevant.

“It’s evil,” he said. “I could care less who they are or what they are. You still took someone’s life and that’s horrible.”

Dawn Bennett is the pastor of The Table, an LGBTQ congregation at a Lutheran church in downtown Nashville, and spent Wednesday helping organize a vigil. Congregants lit candles and another pastor rang a bell as the name of each of the Covenant School victims was read aloud in prayer.

“You can also pray by writing to your state legislator,” Bennett said from the pulpit. Some later left the pews to head to a laptop set up in the church’s hallway, where they could send a petition to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, to enact “commonsense gun safety measures.”

After the service, Bennett, who has a trans son, said one of her congregants had been confronted and “told they were the cause, that this was God’s repudiation of gay people, and that ‘you and your people are going to hell for eternity,’” she said. “The trans community is going to pay dearly for this.”

Two other congregants were similarly targeted, Bennett said.

Nashville police did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for information about attacks or threats on the LGTBQ community since the shooting.

Every time there is a school shooting, Story VanNess said she has sleepless nights: she was a special education teacher in a Knoxville school for several years before becoming the director of trans and non-binary programs at Knox Pride.

VanNess, who in recent months has heard from the parents of several trans youths asking her advice on how to flee Tennessee, went through drills and lockdowns in her classroom. She had nightmares about ever having to deploy the pair of sharp scissors she had stashed near the classroom door to confront an attacker.

“It’s all just disgusting and heartbreaking,” she said. “We’ve had another school shooting but, because this shooter was trans, that’s taken a back seat so politicians can demonize trans people. Now we’re even more of a target than ever before.”

Protestor demand action on gun access

 Protesters flooded Tennessee’s statehouse on Thursday to demand lawmakers stiffen gun laws following a school shooting in Nashville that left six people dead, three of them 9-year-old children.

More than a thousand people joined the protest organized by local mothers, packing the building’s rotunda and forcing highway patrol troopers to clear paths in the crowd for lawmakers to walk through.

Demonstrators held aloft placards reading “No More Silence” and “We have to do better” while chanting “Do you even care?” and “No more violence!”

S’Kaila Colbert, holding her infant daughter, told MSNBC that her love of Christ called her to protest. “To be a voice for the children, to prioritize their safety, I felt a duty to be here,” she said.

U.S. school shootings, defined as any incident in which a gun is discharged on school property, number 90 so far this year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database website founded by researcher David Riedman. The 303 incidents last year were the most of any year in the database, which began in 1970.

In the latest, the shooter killed three pupils and three staff members at Nashville’s Covenant School. Police responded and killed the assailant, a 28-year-old former student at the school. A motive for the shooting was as yet unclear.

Nashville’s Department of Emergency Communications released 911 calls related to the shooting on Thursday, which showed calls flooding into the dispatch center starting at 10:12 a.m. local time.

In one, a woman tells a dispatcher she’s hiding with children in the art room closet on the second floor and can hear shooting, as heavy booms are heard on the recording.

A child is heard saying “I want to go home!” at one point on the call. The woman then hushes the children and tells them to be quiet so they can stay safe.

In another, a woman says she is hiding beneath a desk in a nursery. Loud booms and two types of emergency alarms can be heard.

The city also released recordings of communications between dispatchers and officers headed to the scene.

At 10:15 and 8 seconds, a dispatcher says police have received multiple calls of shots fired at the school.

“They’re advising they’re still hearing more shots fired,” she says at 10:17. “Got workers locked in the nursery and in the office.”

By 10:25 comes the hope the shooting may be over: “Suspect down.”

Call for reforms

Republican lawmakers in Tennessee this week delayed hearings on gun legislation that would expand access to firearms. The state in recent years has made it easier to acquire firearms and done away with the need for permits to carry concealed handguns.

Protesters flooded Tennessee's statehouse to demand lawmakers stiffen gun laws following the school shooting in Nashville that left six people dead, three of them 9-year-old children https://t.co/5oiYoQ7TSb pic.twitter.com/iGwDb80Enq

— Reuters (@Reuters) March 31, 2023

State Representative Bob Freeman, a Democrat representing Nashville, on Thursday addressed lawmakers in the House chambers, calling for “common-sense” gun reforms, including background checks and red-flag laws to prevent individuals from possessing firearms who show signs of being a threat to themselves or others.

Freeman told his colleagues they had to respond to demonstrators whose chants could be heard outside the chambers.

“They’re out there right now. They’re begging for us to do something,” he said, according to The Tennessean newspaper.

John Drake, the Nashville police chief, said the shooter’s writings suggested plans to carry out shootings at other locations. Police said the shooter left behind a manifesto related to the attack.

Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News, India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.