OPINION:
On Wednesday, a mentally deranged individual, confused about his identity and sexuality, slaughtered two children and wounded 17 others as he shot through a stained-glass window while standing outside a Catholic church in Minneapolis. The children were praying in the sanctuary. It was their first week back at school.
Robin Westman, the 23-year-old killer, was born Robert Westman and underwent a legal name change at age 17 in 2020, with his mother’s assistance. The name change application said the “minor child … identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.” In a manifesto posted online before he killed himself and others, Westman confessed he was “tired of being trans” and wished he had “never brain-washed” himself.
“I only keep [the long hair] because it pretty much my last shred of being trans,” he wrote, according to a translation of his journal by the New York Post. “I’m tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself.
“I can’t cut my hair now as it would be embarrassing defeat, and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported. It just always gets in my way. I will probably chop it on the day of the attack,” he wrote, according to the Post.
Transgenderism should be treated for what it is: a mental health disorder. Instead, Westman’s choice to transition was supported by his community and his family as “gender-affirming care.” Unlike someone who cuts themselves, who would be institutionalized and not allowed to purchase a gun in Minnesota, Westman was able to obtain his rifle, shotgun and pistol, all used in the heinous attack, legally.
This, even though 46% of transgender and nonbinary young people seriously considered suicide in the past year, according to The Trevor Project’s 2024 National Survey on LGBTQ+ Youth Mental Health. A 2023 meta-analysis published in the Annals of General Psychiatry found the prevalence of suicidal thoughts in the transgender population was 45% over the past year and 50% during a lifetime.
A quick search through The Washington Post’s school shooting database (removing accidental discharges, gang violence and police shootings) shows five mass school shootings since 2023. Two of the five were committed by transgender people, targeting Christian students.
Eighty-five percent of minors who suffer from gender dysphoria, if left untreated by transition methods such as hormones or surgery, stop expressing behaviors or feelings that seem at odds with their sex assigned at birth as they age.
Yet the left wants to celebrate their mental illness. It encourages minors to use hormones, antidepressants in the form of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and surgically alter their physical appearance to amplify their sickness.
Democrats refuse to acknowledge that there are two biological sexes. They cannot define what a woman is. They go out of their way to obfuscate and moralize transgenderism instead of teaching children that they are perfect just the way they are in God’s eyes.
Two days before the Minnesota shooting, state Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, spoke at the Democratic National Convention’s summer meeting, explaining how the state is suing the Trump administration to protect “gender-affirming care.” The state’s governor, Tim Walz, signed a bill two years ago making Minnesota a “trans refuge.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey warned in a press conference Thursday that people are using the massacre to “direct hate” at the “trans community.” He said that “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.” He was seemingly defending the murderer so he wouldn’t be labeled a transphobe by his leftist peers.
During its live coverage, CNN refused to identify the shooter as transgender, even as the man’s identity became known. USA Today and The New York Times’ day-after coverage made no mention that Westman was trans. Transgender leftist accounts across social media were celebrating the shooting as revenge against Christianity and the Trump administration for not allowing children to mutilate or castrate themselves voluntarily and for defining sex as biological.
This is evil. This is ungodly. It’s not political; it’s moral. It’s cruel to affirm a child’s confusion.
The LGBTQ movement is a cult, amplified by the left under the guise of tolerance.
How many more of our brothers and sisters have to suffer before we as a society can acknowledge this simple truth?
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
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