The Simplest Explanation Almost Never Tells the Whole Story
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UPDATE (September 5, 2025): The US Department of Justice is weighing banning ownership of guns by transgender people. It is stunning to me…
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It’s been less than a week (six days, as I’m writing this) since 23-year-old Robin Westman, a trans woman, opened fire from outside a church in Minnesota during a Mass, killing two children, and wounding 18 other people, including two churchgoers in their 80s, and then turning the gun on herself. In the first couple of days after this horrific incident, there was wall to wall press coverage. By today, virtually nothing. We’ve become so inured, or more accurately, numbed, to violence that the shock of the moment quickly fades away, because it’s happened so many times that it's become just one more terrible thing in a long line of terrible things...
There are many things about this event that have troubled me, deeply. First, of course, is the sheer horror of what happened. As the father of three children, I cannot begin to comprehend the sheer devastation of losing a child, much less in such a violent and horrific way. I hope I never have to...
Today is the 241st day of 2025, and the Minnesota shooting was the 262nd of the year. And, if that weren’t bad enough, since 6 days ago, there have been five more mass shootings in the US, bringing the total to 267, more than one mass shooting each day...so far...there are still 121 days left in 2025.
But this isn’t a post about politics or gun violence or crime or mass shooters or anything like that. What troubled me in the aftermath of the shooting was how it and the shooter were characterized – by the sheriff, by federal government officials, and in posts I’ve seen online.
The sheriff called it a cowardly act, and called the shooter a coward. The shooter was many things, but a coward was not one of them. The American Heritage dictionary defines “coward” as “One who shows ignoble fear in the face of danger or pain.” Nothing that has come out about the shooter points to cowardice...quite the opposite in fact. The shooter showed no signs of being afraid. Rather, she had a fierce determination to carry out the shooting. That doesn’t make it honorable or good or anything like that, so don’t misinterpret what I’m saying. But it’s definitely not the act of a coward.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Westman a "deranged monster." This is the person who shot Cricket, a 14-month-old dog she had intended to train for hunting pheasant, dead, after the canine ruined a hunt, killed another family’s chickens, and moved to bite her. She didn’t discipline the dog, didn’t seek a professional trainer, didn’t shoot it on the spot. Rather, she lured the dog to a gravel pit, and shot it there, cold-bloodedly. I’ve owned several dogs in my life, never found one that couldn’t be trained. I guess it takes a deranged monster to know one.
Even though Westman was identified from the start as transgender, the sheriff continuously referred to her as “him,” even though she had transitioned and legally changed her name in 2020. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of South Carolina claimed: "Today's evil church school shooter was a trans [what the actual fuck is that supposed to mean?] who was likely groomed and transitioned as a teenager." Groomed? By whom? How do you know?
FBI head Kash Patel wrote on X: "The shooter has been identified as Robin Westman, a male born as Robert Westman." Right wing commentators seized on Westman’s gender as an explanation for the shooting. Several postings on Facebook purported to show that transgender shooters are responsible for a number of recent mass shootings. They (viciously) made that up. In fact, from 2013 to 2025, only five out of 5,729 mass shootings involved transgender perpetrators—representing just 0.087% of all incidents. Similarly, The Violence Project found only one confirmed transgender mass shooter in its database from 1966 to 2024. Rather, most mass shooters are cisgender white men. But nobody in the media (at least what I heard and read) pointed that out...nobody.
To his credit, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded to what quickly grew into an online outburst of transphobia: "Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity."
The point of this is that we fear that which we don’t understand, and, more often than not, rather than seeking to understand, we make the easy, far too convenient call to vilify those whom we don’t understand. Immigrants, trans people, brown and black people, Asian people, and on, and on, and on. It added absolutely nothing to understanding Westman’s motivation to highlight that she was transgender. It only gave scared people a far too convenient “reason” they could latch on to, and confirmed their belief that transgenderism is evil, aberrant, sinful, and whatever other negative things they believe.
The often acrimonious conversation about sex and gender in our society today is a historically recent phenomenon, challenging the long-held idea that sex and gender are one and the same, and binary – you’re either male or female. These are beliefs that arose in Western culture and religion.[1] In fact, in the cultures of the ancient world, there was no difference noted between what we now call “homosexual” and “heterosexual” relationships. Distinctions concerning sexual identity, and prohibitions on same-sex relationships, only began to appear with the rise of Christianity, which rejected those earlier “pagan” religious beliefs. And it was not same-sex relationships that were being condemned, but rather any activity that non-Christians participated in.
In ancient Mesopotamia, the so-called "cradle of civilization," priests and priestesses of the goddess Ishtar, goddess of war and sexual love, were bisexual or transgender. In fact, one of Ishtar’s powers that was most awe-inspiring to her followers was her ability to turn men into women and women into men. Her father, Enki, was associated with semen and amniotic fluid, and therefore with fertility. Enki created a third gender, "neither male nor female" who became Ishtar’s servants. So, what is today referred to as "non-binary" gender was recognized over three thousand years ago as a third gender created by divine will.
There are many more such examples, most pre-dating Christianity, from many different cultures, such as nonbinary Vikings, Native American “two-spirits,” Indian Hijras, Japanese Kabuki theater (where men play female roles), and the Muxas in the Zapotec culture of southern Mexico.[2]
In indigenous cultures in North America (Native Americans and Alaskan Natives), people who embody both feminine and masculine gender traits are known as “two-spirits.” There is a long history of two-spirits in indigenous cultures, which have recognized that people have masculine and feminine spirits that can live in harmony with their male or female beings. In some of these cultures, two-spirits are revered as healers, spiritual leaders, or other exalted roles.
The irony of all this, given present-day divisions over gender identity and the call for a "return to traditional values" is that same-sex relationships were quite clearly traditionally accepted, respected, and even revered for over 2,000 years. And if this historical record weren’t enough, science reveals no clear basis in biology or physiology, and no anthropological evidence to support the idea of sex and gender being fixed and binary. In fact, there’s plenty of data that demonstrate exactly the opposite.
This is not intended to persuade you to change your beliefs, religious or otherwise, about transgenderism. Rather, it’s intended to get you to think, to realize that what you believe may or may not be grounded in biology or physiology or any other kind of science, but may in fact be a set of beliefs that are just that – beliefs – and, as such, can be informed by facts, as opposed to societal or cultural “norms.”
So, what else did we learn about Robin Westman? Numerous news outlets reported that the opinions and grievances stated in the videos and written materials attributed to Westman were wide-ranging, chaotic and often self-contradictory. The videos reportedly conveyed a fascination with guns and school shootings, racist and antisemitic views, a death threat targeting U.S. President Donald Trump, and suicidal thoughts. The footage showed notebooks written in English and other languages, according to ABC News. One notebook reportedly had a sticker stating "defend equality" with an LGBTQ+ flag overlaid with an image of a gun. Being transgender, it seems, really had nothing much to do with what she did. Instead, she was a troubled human being, and was for many years. Were there signs? Yes. Did anybody act on those signs, did her family seek counseling for her? Unknown, but apparently not. It turns out that this was an individual suffering from undiagnosed and untreated mental illness, and perhaps that explains much more about her than anything else. And yet, the coverage of that was very limited, compared to all of the other things that were talked about.
The net of all of this, I think, is that as humans, we are not binary. We’re not one thing or its opposite. Rather, we are complex, multi-faceted creatures, and when trying to understand another, or, frankly, to understand ourselves, it is the totality of who we are and what has shaped us that we need to understand and reckon with. Sadly, we’re a long way as a society from understanding that. It’s difficult, and so we seek the simplest, often wrong, explanations for our behavior.
[1] On April 8, 2024, the Vatican released a statement that gender-affirming surgery and surrogacy are violations of human dignity. Let that sink in for a minute.
[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/claratsacwang/historical-examples-of-lgbtq-culture-around-the-world