Last week, Robin Westman shot up the Annunciation Catholic school in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killing two children and injuring eighteen more people, including fourteen children. As details of the case emerged, it became clear that the circumstances of the shooting were more complex. Robin Westman was, in fact, Robert Westman and had legally changed his name in 2020, while still a minor, to reflect his decision to identify as female. By the time of the shooting, he had already been living for several years as a trans woman.
There have been four mass shootings by trans people since 2018. Whether this represents a pattern or a higher incidence of transgender shooters relative to the general population is still up for debate, but at least one aspect of trans shootings distinguishes them from others: the relative mental health of the shooter. 58 percent of trans people, according to statistics from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have some type of mental health diagnosis, compared to just 13 percent of the general population.
Furthermore, and in line with the tortured feelings that Westman had about his own transition and identity as a trans person, KFF’s, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Washington Post’s transgender survey reports that 43 percent of trans adults have had suicidal thoughts in the past twelve months, which is higher than LGBTQ population (34 percent) and much higher than that of the cisgender population (16 percent). As if that weren’t sufficient risk factors for someone to spiral out of control and descend to killing children, an analysis building off of the survey found trans adults to be more likely to live on an income below $50,000 a year, to have a lower level of education, to be unemployed, and to have greater number of days of poor physical health in the past month compared to the general population.
Clearly, these people are not well. Westman, in particular, showed severe mental health issues and the all-too-common signs of instability—he was unemployed, having been fired from his job at Rise Cannabis dispensary for chronic tardiness and absenteeism. The mind of a shooter is always elusive, but if we could glimpse Westman’s, we would likely find the same features evident in other transgender individuals: deep psychological distress, compounded by the hyper-prevalent societal trans ideology that, alongside other dark influences, fueled his desire to kill children.
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While drawing a direct connection between these two phenomena may appear unsubstantiated, a closer examination of a couple of telltale details from the shooting makes such a pronouncement evident.
For one, Westman’s choice of school was far from arbitrary—it was a school he himself had attended and his mother had worked at. Furthermore, according to his former art teacher, Westman had a history of self-harm, showing signs of it on his arm while sitting in her class. Lastly, the entire incident ended with Westman’s suicide by self-shooting, a public act of intense dramatic performance, but also one that affords perspective on the event, all factors pointing to it being an expression of extreme self-loathing.
Dr. Farr Curlin provides insight into the way that trans people can be confirmed in their displeasure, perhaps even hatred, of their own body through gender affirmation surgery. Curlin traces the traditional methodology that medicine abided by until the 1960s and 1970s as such: the purpose of medicine was to align the body with an objective standard of health—giving the body what it needs, even if it wasn’t what the patient wants. In the 1960s and 1970s, medicine transitioned to the provider model, whereby doctors were now performing a service for patients at a raised fiscal incentive. In trans patients, what this means is that doctors now listen to the patient even if this is not what is best for the body.
In cases of gender dysphoria, this means that the entire clinical process becomes flipped on its head. Even though gender dysphoria is a mental illness, the ideology of gender affirmation demands that what the patient desires must be the correct perception of their own gender and, by extension, their own body. So even though the body is actually perfectly healthy and the mind is where the illness lies, the body is the one that is viewed as diseased, and the mind is the one that is healthy.
It is easy to see where and how this can go terribly wrong.
According to the Cass Review, a wide-ranging report released in 2024 on gender affirmation in the U.K. medical system, gender-affirmation surgery does not actually cure gender dysphoria; in fact, it appears to make no difference at all. This fact—and the Cass Review itself—was buried by the American medical establishment, possibly not only because of the left’s influence over medical institutions but also because of the tremendous financial incentive for doctors to continue performing these operations—another point suggested by Curlin.
Nevertheless, if Curlin’s theory is correct, it makes perfect sense that such surgery wouldn’t have an effect. Gender-reassignment surgery fixes something, the body, that didn’t need to be fixed in the first place. Meanwhile, the problem in the brain remains untreated.
Imagine the ramifications of getting such a surgery in this context, or even receiving any of the other therapies like beta-blockers or cross-hormone therapy. Or even imagine receiving less invasive, but no less mind-warping, treatments as young as age 10, such as prescriptions for the opposite gender’s clothing. The entire medical establishment provides its endorsement of the treatment, yet once you receive it, you don’t feel any better. What would you think about yourself, your body, your existence? Might this lead to self-loathing or fuel self-hate?
Curlin goes further than his previous classification of body and mind, which is diseased in a transgender person. In another talk, he argues that gender affirmation is pursuing a fundamental impossibility: gender cannot be changed. Hormones can be added, plastic surgery performed, or other interventions attempted, but the original body remains essentially the same—except for the tragic consequence that it becomes sterile, deprived of one of its most essential functions: propagating the human species.
While Westman may not have gone to college, gender ideology and trans affirmation have become mandatory in many medical schools, with future doctors forced to acknowledge pronouns, encourage ambiguity in their approach to gender, and buy into every form of possible surgery that might push someone down the path to becoming transgender. No room or possibility is suggested to affirm the body the person they encounter already has, nor is there a screen for other mental health issues that might be compounding the problem. In this, they are trained to become just as delusional as the patients they seek to affirm.
In this, the administrators at these medical schools reflect a general trend of leftist radicalization in higher education: convincing their acolytes to pursue unattainable goals that seem to hold promise for social justice, but in reality cannot be brought to fruition. Often this leads to violent, frustrated action, as was the case with the Black Lives Matter riots, the Pro-Palestinian encampments, and the protests against the Presidency of Donald Trump.
However, compared to the leftist violence of the 1960s and 1970s, wide-ranging violence among the masses on the left has largely abated. What has not abated is the violent and potentially dangerous radicalizing effect that the impossible dreams of the left have on individuals. This can be seen with Zohran Mamdani, who went to the far-left-leaning Bowdoin College and promises not only to liberate Palestinians but unite the many different competing South-East Asian New York factions, though they have long-standing enmities. Mamdani’s candidacy, were it to be realized, despite the promises of unity, would likely instead divide the city even further, as his platform has very little resonance with conservatives.
More pertinently to our case, the shooter, Luigi Mangione, shot and killed a health care magnate after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, and was lauded by many on the left for his violent anti-capitalist actions. Mangione, like Westman, undoubtedly had unique features to his psychopathy, but both were ideologically motivated by impossible promises made by the left, whether that promise was the possibility of a body with a different gender or the promise of being lauded a hero by taking down a corrupt capitalist health care industry.
The sad irony of Westman’s case, at least, is that were the medical system working properly, he might have not only gotten the help he needed in curing his gender dysphoria, but been prevented from getting a gun to shoot children in the first place. This is because federal law prevents people with documented mental illness from acquiring firearms. If gender dysphoria or being trans were considered a mental illness instead of a deeper understanding of one’s own gender, what happened with Westman might have been prevented.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen as long as gender-positivity, the destruction of the gender binary, denigration of traditional families, and gender-affirmation have such a strong and coercive place in higher education and the medical establishment. The climate is so defamatory that I feel compelled to write this piece under a pseudonym, as I know that so many institutions that I might consider working at in the future are thoroughly entrenched in trans ideology. Not only that, similarly, many of my closest friends could never abide by the position I take in this article, even if it is a logical argument in support of helping the ill and preventing the killing of children.
My only hope is that people will recognize the science behind this issue and not be swayed by public perception or their own personal preferences, so that in the future, the lives of the perpetrator and the victims can both be saved. Then maybe we can be open with our own identities, as well as know the true identities of others.
Image: “Annunciation Catholic School Shooting in Minneapolis” by Chad Davis on Wikimedia Commons
