I am old, I know I am old; I spend more time thinking about the roads I could have taken and much less time on the roads I can take today. By the roads I could have taken, I made a choice that set a course for my lifetime.
However, I do believe that my ability to adapt or even notice changes has become limited, or my mind has become set in a way that prevents me from seeing certain things. The gender of the shooter at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis never crossed my mind. However, I knew that the person had changed their name from a male’s to a female’s name. That in itself did not click any buttons for me that the person was transgender, as I had not read that he had done anything to his body to change from male to female. Maybe he had, and I have not read about it, but I was reading an article from Mother Jones when the writer kept referring to the shooter as a female.
Predictably, voices on the far right have immediately seized on that tidbit, blaming the suspect’s gender identity for the shooting. “Today’s evil church school shooter was a trans who was likely groomed and transitioned as a teenager,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted on X. “Congress MUST PASS my bill Protecting Children’s Innocence Act to make it a FELONY to perform sex change surgeries and all forms of medications on minors!!!”
“One thing is VERY clear: the trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder,” wrote conservative YouTube host Benny Johnson. “The pattern is undeniable.”
Just one day after the horrific event, it isn’t yet possible to conclude why the suspected killer choose to do what she did. But what we can say is that, despite the probable identity of yesterday’s attacker, there is no evidence that transgender people are any more likely to commit mass shootings.
I asked myself if the meaning of transgender had changed, and I didn’t know. Like them changing the word homosexual to gay, I did know that happened, but I also think it took some time for it to sink in.
Had the shooter had a sex change?
I researched him and could not find any information that would indicate that, other than he identified as a female and had a name change, that any other changes to his body were made. According to the article, those who knew him believed that Robin was troubled from an early age. Source
I have known several transgender people during my life, one of them was Leslie Perez, whom I considered a friend. She and her mother were wonderful people. Leslie had operations that would make her look like a female, whatever that means, as I never asked her to show me her body.
Leslie Perez – Houston
Leslie Perez
formerly Leslie Douglas Ashley
“Killer Transsexual” or Controversial Activist
To say the life of Leslie Perez was colorful is doing the word a tremendous injustice…
it was more like a made-for-TV movie, with seedy overtones. I’ll over-simplify:
In 1961 with a partner, Carolyn Lima, they dabbled in a bit of prostitution and he shot a
man after a sexual encounter went bad, and then they burned his body.
They were caught on the run, and convicted and sentenced to death by electric chair.
A new legal team learned that information had been hid by the prosecution, among
other things, psychiatric reports supporting an insantity plea. Four hours before
execution there was a reprieve, leading to a new trial (media circus) and Leslie was
sent to a mental institution….one apparently with loose security, as he escaped…
big manhunt and headlines, FBI Ten Most Wanted List…after six months he was
captured, working as a clown in a carnival. He was again sentenced, this time to
fifteen years, on a Texas prison farm, chopping cotton. He served five and was released.
Once out of prison his thoughts were on having surgery to become a woman, which
happened in 1981. Now a she (switching pronouns) Leslie gradually got active in Houston
politics. And she became a controversial figure. Ray Hill, one who should know, was quoted as
saying “Leslie is a lightning rod for hostility within the gay community…a lot of people in the
community just can’t tolerate her.”
Leslie became quite active in local “gay politics,” rising to the position of Secretary of the Gay &
Lesbian Political Caucus in 1988 (the group would add the “BT” to its name in 2005). Then
came the involvement, and essential take-over of the local political action group ACT-UP, by
Leslie and her mother Sylvia Ayres. They registered DBA’s for the group, therefore being able to
prove they were in charge of the it, all done without knowledge of the membership.
To sidestep that maneuvering a new group was formed, GUTS, Gay Urban Truth Squad.
At any rate, ACT-UP got a lot of attention, and it was a group quite good at doing that. In a broader
city-wide spectrum, she ran twice for Democratic Party Chair, surprising most by coming in second,
in 1990 to Ken Bentsen Jr and in 1994 to David Minceberg, losing in run-off elections. At least for the
first election there was criticism that she did so well by shrewdly choosing a Hispanic last name,
with voters picking that with little knowledge of the race. Later that decade, at the end of 1999
both Perez and her mother resigned from the Democratic Party, leaving few to miss them.
The media trail faded away after that, and she died on July 31, 2005. Her mother also died
that year, on January 29, 2005.
I lump mass murderers into two groups: white males and non-white males. Before I retired, every time there was a mass shooting, I would bet a coworker that it was a white male. I give him three to one odds. He was white. I almost always won.
How Many Mass Shootings by White Men
White men, who make up 31% of the U.S. population, have committed 51% (101) of all mass shootings since 1966, with a rate of 0.09 per 100,000 people.
During this period, only one White female and one confirmed White transgender individual were reported to have committed a mass shooting.
America has always been a violent country; it was founded with violence and expanded its borders with violence. Perhaps one day, the God of Peace that we worship will reveal a different path to us.
