this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2025
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United States | News & Politics
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Its not about the shooter.
Intentionally misgendering and using hate speech to refer to them is about creating a permission structure to increase the level of threats and violence that other trans people face.
Using more dehumanizing language to refer to this killer will increase the level of violence this community is subject to and trans people are already one of the most murdered groups in society.
I'm fine with super dehumanizing language for school shooters, but it doesn't need to be offensive to anyone else. How about everyone come together and refer to school shooters as sub human trash? Whatever marginalized group sub human trash belongs to otherwise is/should be far less a part of their identity once they start shooting kids.
You could just say, "she was a piece of shit" and have the same effect. You're going out of your way to specifically not use the gender they identified as. It's less words and effort to just say "she". Whether intentional or not, your intentional omission of this person's gender is an insult to trans people and normalizes this kind of rhetoric as an attack.
So you would whip out all the ethnic slurs if they were not white? What the fuck man. The point is you can call them a piece of shit, just leave out the other stuff that’s painful for others to hear.
You have a blast radius when you use that shit.
I literally said we can attack their humanity and leave gender out of it.
That's just not how dehumanizing language works. It always acts as a call to violence against the whole group. You can wish it weren't so, but it is.
The world runs on a level of nuance that is more complex than that.