CW: Discussions of murder, gun violence, transphobia

At this point most of us probably know that there was a shooting in Nashville, Tennessee. That several children were killed, alongside a couple of adults. And it's fucking tragic. Whatever motivated the shooter, it didn't justify taking the lives of these human beings. I'm not in any way defending those actions (and it's fucking sad that I'd have to say this, but it seems to be the world we're currently living in, so...).

I'm also seeing the shooter, Aiden Hale, misgendered so pervasively I actually had trouble figuring out his gender at first. He's being misgendered by news outlets in the same fucking breath that they identify him as transgender. And this is not okay. It speaks of some really troubling societal attitudes and clouds on the horizon. It's obviously not being done in good faith - if it were, it wouldn't be coming out of the mouths of people who are well aware that he was a trans man. If you're not willing to use Hale's proper pronouns for Hale, then do it for the bigger picture.

But Alex, isn't using someone's proper pronouns a sign of respect? I shouldn't need to show respect to a child killer!
Hot take, here, but using a trans person's proper/preferred pronouns isn't a matter of respect, not in that way. It's not merely disrespectful to deliberately misgender someone; it's dehumanizing, cruel, and abusive. By framing it as a matter of respect, you're reinforcing the idea that transgender people need to somehow "earn" the right to be treated the same way everyone else is. That it's okay to make their humanity, their person, conditional on their respectability.

And let's be clear, here, we're talking about deliberately and knowingly misgendering a person. A person who did very awful things, but that doesn't mean misgendering them can't have wider ramifications (more about that later).

But Aleeex, Hale was a monster!
So call him that. You're clearly perfectly capable of thinking of names to call him without resorting to misgendering him. If you feel the need to call him a shitbag, a monster, a bloodthirsty villain, go ahead and do so. I personally draw a line at denying someone's humanity, as I think that's a dangerous road to head down. (In my book "I can't understand how a human being could do something like that" is fine; "Someone who does that isn't human" is not.) Hell, if "he" tastes too vile in your mouth, at least use singular "they." It's still infinitely better than "she."

Why are you defending Hale?
I'm not. I do believe there is a base line of acceptable treatment of a person, living or dead, but even if you don't, there's ample reason to not misgender Aiden Hale.

So why shouldn't we misgender the perpetrators of egregious crimes?
The TL;DR here is "because it's transphobic." You can try to justify it any way you want, but at the end of the day all you've done is say "transphobia is sometimes okay." And, like... I don't think that's a defensible position. Full stop.

Let's explore this a bit further, shall we?

I don't believe it's a coincidence that it's a trans man that's getting this thoroughly misgendered. Like, obviously part of the reason is that Aiden Hale was the person who shot up a school, so it was a trans man that was at hand. But stop and think about the wider context, here. TERFs and far-right agitators are hand-wringing about trans women in women's bathrooms and changing rooms. Drag queens reading books to children are being demonized. Parents bringing their kids to drag events are being accused of enabling "groomers." The transgender Big Bad that's being created by the wider anti-trans rhetoric being pushed is an AMAB individual, usually with male pattern baldness (because not meeting mainstream beauty standards is such a reliable predictor of criminal/violent behavior, amirite?), who uses "I identify as a woman" as a means of accessing vulnerable women and children to victimize. So it plays right into this rhetoric that the transgender shooter who hurt innocent children must be identified as a woman, regardless of their actual identity. If Hale had been a trans woman, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if more media outlets had gotten his gender right, because too many of them have bought into and/or been feeding the hostile social climate towards transgender people. Enough so that a whole slew of people (including some NYT journalists) wrote/signed an open letter calling the New York Times out on their coverage of transgender topics.

It's also something that's being done because the offender is transgender. We need to acknowledge this, and recognize that treating an offender differently (in a negative way) because they are transgender is transphobic. Ain't nobody misgendering Beverly Allitt, who killed at least four literal babies and attempted to kill or grievously harmed a further nine babies and young children. Ain't nobody misgendering Brenda Spencer, who killed two employees and injured eight children and a police officer when she shot at an elementary school. And nobody's misgendering, IDK, freaking Jeffrey Dahmer. These people shouldn't be misgendered, mind, but it goes to show that using the wrong pronouns for a killer isn't exactly standard operating procedure (and it shouldn't be).

Misgendering Hale normalizes the idea that it's "sometimes okay" to act transphobic, as long as it's towards people who have committed egregious enough offenses. But even if that were an otherwise defensible position, there's never going to be agreement on where that line should be drawn. I was told it was inappropriate of me to snark in my own space about being widely misgendered, back when I was "just" being vilified for not being harsh enough on nazi-related artwork (at the time not against the rules) as a member of FA's staff. (Now, I'm AFAB and still use she/her pronouns, so maybe misgendering me isn't strictly transphobic, IDK, but it's an example of "egregious enough to excuse misgendering" in some cases being a much lower bar than "killed multiple children.") If we decide that it's "sometimes okay" to misgender people, that "sometimes" is going to shift. It's going to be used to create plausible deniability for more extremist transphobes who don't actually give much of a flying fuck whether the person they want to dehumanize actually did anything particularly bad.

Transphobia is never fucking okay. Not even a little.
And I don't think I'm setting the bar very high when I say this: I don't expect anyone to always get things right. But I do hope you try to be a better person than getting things wrong on purpose.

Don't be so petty about whatever "respect" you feel it affords Hale to at least not call him "she," that you lose sight of whose hands you're playing into by doing it. Because they aren't going to stop at school shooters, and they're going to point at you to justify their behavior when called on it.

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EDIT: Apparently I need to make this extra special super clear for the kids in the back: This issue isn't about the Nashville shooter. He's dead and isn't going to directly suffer for being misgendered. It's about the wider repercussions of the way the case has been treated in both mainstream and social media. It's about the treatment of Hale as part of a larger picture, and about where I believe it will take us if nothing is done. It's about how fucking gross it is to give yourself and/or others permission to be transphobic when circumstances are ugly, and how such allowances tend to open doors for worse, over less.

Media doesn't only misgender perpetrators, either. A nonbinary 16-year-old stepped forward just the other day after The Free Press published an article about their mother's experience with Washington University's Transgender Center. The article was published against the wishes of Alex ("Casey" in the article), and used he/his pronouns for Alex throughout, while explicitly noting that those are not the ones Alex uses. Simply because those were the pronouns their mother was using. This is reporting that should have stopped at the editor's desk, and it's revolting that they instead went ahead and published it. I would probably have mentioned this case in the journal, too, if I'd known about it, but the article wasn't even published yet, from what I can tell, much less Alex's rebuttal.

The problem is that when these patterns of conditional standards of treatment are established and perpetuated, they reinforce bigotry. They embolden people who at the very best wish for transgender and gender non-conforming individuals to cease to be visible in public. They create an atmosphere where it might seem okay to pressure transgender individuals to perform in order to see even a tiny bit of acceptance. That culture already exists - transphobic people frequently present arguments that are centered around the appearance of particular transgender or assumed-to-be-trans individuals - but it doesn't need boosts from shitty reporting.

So yeah. This journal is about transphobia, and how it's not okay to knowingly make the choice to misgender someone, any more than it would be okay to use pejorative language referring to someone's race or sexuality or whatever other minority they might be a member of.