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The heartbreaking mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church on Wednesday has brought the issue of transgenderism once again to the forefront of American conversations.
Robert Westman was an unwell boy who, in 2019, decided he was a girl and officially changed his name to Robin.
Westman was a minor at the time so his mother, Mary Grace Weston, signed the application.
This is the second such attack by a transgender person on a Christian school.
In March 2023, Audrey Hale killed six people, including three children, at the Covenant School in Nashville.
Killer ‘brainwashed’
If any other mental condition produced a pattern of murder, we would collectively discuss and decide on strategies to help those ailing.
But there’s no discussion allowed about what to do when a child declares themselves transgender. No one may point out that gender dysphoria is often a symptom of a much larger mental health problem.
The American Medical Association, a professional group of physicians that has become a wholly political entity in the last few years, only suggests one path, that of “gender-affirming care” — and urges that “forgoing gender-affirming care can have tragic health consequences, both mental and physical.”
A CNN special from 2015 had a parent of one trans kid ask, “Do I want a living son or a dead daughter?”
That formulation — either accept your child’s gender transition or they’ll die — has coerced parents into pursuing the hormone blockers and surgeries that are banned in most western countries, but not in the USA.
There’s an incredible amount of pressure on parents to take the only path considered acceptable and to lean into their child’s gender dysphoria.
Parents have lost custody of kids if they chose not to “affirm” their gender delusion.
It’s madness.
We don’t know yet what kind of “gender-affirming care” Westman was receiving, or whether brain-altering hormones were involved, but we do know he was having regrets.
In a YouTube video, Westman shared a journal entry: “I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brainwashed myself.”
But no doctor will be held accountable for this.
No therapist who encouraged an impossible “transition” will lose their license because their mentally unstable patient killed himself and took two children with him.
The rest of us are left to piece the story together, and pick up the pieces.
Did the doctors who helped Westman transition know he would walk around saying “heil Hitler” in middle school, rattling the other students?
Was the underlying depression ever treated?
Or did everyone assume that letting Westman pretend to be a girl would be enough?
The numbers keep showing that the AMA-approved path of “affirmation” is producing ever more children who believe they are not their birth sex.
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In the years between 2017 and 2021, the number of kids receiving a diagnosis of gender dysphoria tripled.
In 2024, 3.3% of American high schoolers referred to themselves as trans, and another 2.2% questioned whether they might be.
When nearly 6% of kids suddenly struggle with their gender, it’s clear we’re in the throes of a social contagion — one that is encouraged by the grown-ups around them.
Nobody wants to be unkind toward someone suffering mental anguish.
But indulging delusions isn’t the solution to any other mental-health issue.
When someone has a “hysterical pregnancy” and believes themselves to be with child when they actually are not, we don’t ready a nursery and start thinking of baby names.
Yet this kind of pretending is exactly what we’re all expected to do when someone believes they were born in the wrong body.
People suffering from gender dysphoria don’t get the treatment and counseling they need to help them get better — but are “affirmed” every step of the way and encouraged to hold tightly to their mistaken belief about who they are.
‘Common humanity’
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who is in danger of being ousted in November from his position by someone even further to the left, declared no one should be mentioning that the shooter was trans.
“Anybody using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity,” he railed Wednesday.
But what Frey, like so many others on the left, has lost is his sense of truth and reality.
The truth is important, whether it’s telling children they can’t actually change their gender or admitting we’ve seen an uptick in trans people committing terrible crimes.
Compassion should go hand in hand with honesty — not pretense.
Karol Markowicz is the host of the “Karol Markowicz Show” and “Normally” podcasts.