Another school shooting. Another community shattered. This week in Minneapolis, a former student walked into Annunciation Catholic School during morning Mass and opened fire—killing two children, wounding seventeen, and leaving families forever altered. Police later confirmed what was already circulating: the shooter identified as transgender.
It wasn’t the first time. In 2023, a former student opened fire at The Covenant School in Nashville, killing three children and three adults. That attacker, too, was identified as transgender.
When individuals who are already vulnerable to mental distress, social alienation, or violent ideation also struggle with questions of identity and radical online communities, the mix can be combustible. That is a fact worth examining soberly—not sensationalizing.
This leads to another uncomfortable but necessary question: what about the medications involved in gender transition—puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones? Do they contribute to instability or violent behavior?
The truth is troubling. Reviews of puberty blockers (GnRH analogs) in adolescents point to significant concerns about bone health, fertility, and psychiatric effects, all in the context of a thin evidence base. These drugs were developed for entirely different uses and remain experimental when applied to gender-questioning youth.
Cross-sex hormones—large, lifelong doses of testosterone or estrogen—are even more destabilizing. Reports link them to mood swings, aggression, mania, and psychiatric breakdowns, particularly in those already struggling with mental illness. Clinical protocols recommend caution precisely because of these risks. The claim that such treatments are “life-saving” or stabilizing is not supported by serious long-term evidence. What we do know is that they carry profound physical consequences and introduce further volatility into already fragile lives.
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There is another reality that makes this discussion urgent: transgender individuals as a population face significantly higher rates of psychiatric conditions, including psychosis, depression, and suicidal ideation. Much of this appears tied to social stressors—rejection, victimization, and isolation—but the introduction of powerful drug regimens into such instability cannot be brushed aside as irrelevant.
Still, when a person at elevated psychiatric risk is handed highly experimental treatments, placed in the middle of heated culture wars, and exposed to the copycat incentives of online fame, the risk for tragic outcomes rises. That doesn’t make every transgender individual a threat. It does demand that policymakers, physicians, and parents exercise vigilance.
The Minneapolis and Nashville killers shared patterns common to many school shooters: detailed planning, fixation on prior massacres, online leakage of their intentions. These are the warning signs that threat-assessment teams, parents, and peers must be equipped to recognize and act upon. If we focus only on identity labels, we will miss the obvious red flags staring us in the face.
Every serious analysis of mass shootings emphasizes prevention over politics: take leakage seriously, empower schools and families to intervene, and cut off the fame-seeking cycle that inspires the next killer.
I do not write these words lightly. There are some who will accuse me of stigmatizing an already stigmatized group. Others will insist I went too soft by refusing to declare transgender identity itself as the culprit. Both groups will miss the point.
My calling is not to make readers comfortable—it is to tell the truth as best as we can discern it. That means recognizing that transgender shooters, though rare, cannot be ignored. It means acknowledging that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones carry serious psychiatric and physical risks that deserve scrutiny, not blind celebration. And it means refusing to let culture wars obscure the urgent work of saving lives.
Uncomfortable facts are still facts. If we are serious about preventing the next school massacre, then we must pursue the whole truth with sober minds and open eyes. Anything less would be a betrayal to the children whose names are now etched in memorials instead of class rosters.
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