After the horrific shooting at a school in Nashville on Monday, a group of prominent conservative lawmakers and commentators have released statements using the shooter’s purported trans identity to reinvigorate their ongoing efforts to erode trans rights.
The comments follow a statement from Nashville police that the shooter identified as transgender. “We’re still in the initial investigation into all of that and if it actually played a role into this incident,” Nashville Police Chief John Drake told reporters.
The Republicans who have spoken out on this subject have used reports of the shooter’s identity to call for bans on medical services like gender-affirming care, which GOP bills have already barred for youth in states like Tennessee, Mississippi, and Utah, and to make transphobic statements aimed at animating their base. Their comments have served to simultaneously reinforce their support among Christian conservatives and other anti-trans constituencies, and to try to shift conversation away from discussion of gun reform.
Far-right lawmaker Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), for example, questioned whether hormone therapy and “medications for mental illness” were tied to the attack, despite there being no information that the shooter was using either. Right-wing commentator and founder of Turning Points USA Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump Jr. both also claimed that access to gender-affirming care is a bigger problem than firearms.
How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking?
Everyone can stop blaming guns now.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (@RepMTG) March 27, 2023
Those Republicans’ quick pivot to anti-trans attacks gave them a hook to elevate and reaffirm the anti-trans policies that the GOP has pushed in the last year, academic and political experts tell Vox. Those policies — and continued access to firearms — are priorities for the party’s…
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