Gender Nihilism and the Revolutionary Impulse
Why the breakdown of meaning and an embodied identity fuels extremist violence.
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About the Author
Brooke Laufer, Psy.D. is an independent scholar, writer, and clinician with a group practice in Evanston, Illinois. She works from a Jungian orientation and applies depth psychological perspectives to contemporary sociopolitical issues.
The nature of political violence has changed. What once looked like moral struggle—however misguided—has increasingly given way to something more chaotic and disturbing. Among many young adults, a powerful “revolutionary impulse” has taken hold: not just the urge to protest, but the belief that one is personally called to carry out sweeping, often violent acts in the name of social change. In a growing number of cases, individuals drawn toward extremist violence also identify as transgender. This is a pattern that warrants careful examination rather than reflexive dismissal.
To be clear, identifying as transgender or exploring the concept of “gender identity” does not cause violence or criminal behavior. But the pattern raises important psychological questions about identity and instability. For some individuals, a fragile or fractured sense of self—often shaped by a felt conflict between biological sex and gender identity, and reinforced by narratives of constant threat or victimhood—may intensify alienation, urgency, and emotional volatility. When a person’s identity becomes detached from embodied reality, personal history, and stable relationships, it can drift toward nihilism: the belief that life itself has no inherent meaning or value. In that state, ideology can rush in to fill the void. For a small but notable subset of radicalized individuals, the combination of identity instability, existential fear, and moral absolutism can make violence feel not only permissible, but purposeful.
Friedrich Nietzsche described nihilism as the collapse of a society’s highest values—its moral frameworks, religious beliefs, and metaphysical assumptions—once they no longer command trust or authority. When those structures dissolve, what replaces them is not liberation but disorientation. The familiar landmarks that once anchored meaning disappear, leaving behind anxiety, emptiness, and a deep uncertainty about how to live or who to be. It is within this vacuum that destructive ideologies—and destructive acts—can take root.
This internal collapse is starkly visible in the manifesto left by Robert Westman, the shooter who opened fire at a Catholic school and identified as a transgender woman named Robin. “The message is that there is no message,” Westman wrote—a line that captures the nihilistic void Nietzsche warned about. In this worldview, meaning itself has evaporated. Violence becomes a grotesque substitute for communication: a way to project inner emptiness outward, replacing empathy, faith, and human connection with destruction and chaos.
For violence to override moral restraint and the sanctity of life, something must first give way internally. Meaning must collapse. Despair must set in. The world must come to feel irredeemably corrupt. For some individuals, gender ideology may deepen this void by undermining psychological grounding, weakening trust in reality, and fragmenting the self. Over the past five years, the emergence of violent actors who identify as transgender has formed a troubling and complex pattern—one that remains largely unexplored in mainstream discourse, in part because of the understandable discomfort around acknowledging it. But when patterns appear, especially in matters of violence, they demand examination. From a psychological perspective, these acts are best understood as symptoms signaling deeper disturbances that require careful interpretation.
Public awareness of this pattern first emerged through a series of school shootings beginning in 2019. That year, Alec McKinney—a boy who identified as a girl named Maya—carried out an attack at a Colorado high school. In 2022, Lee Aldrich, who identified as nonbinary, opened fire at a Colorado Springs nightclub. The following year, Audrey Hale—who identified as a boy named Aiden—killed six people at a Christian school in Nashville. Additional cases followed in 2024, including Dylan Butler, who identified as “gender-fluid,” and Natalie Rupnow, who used they/she pronouns, both of whom targeted their schools.
The pattern is not limited to school violence. In 2020, Ronald Watson firebombed an ICE facility in Atlanta before later legally transitioning and changing his name to Emily Smith. Nicholas Roske, who transitioned while in custody and now goes by Sophie, became fixated on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, believing that assassinating him might preserve abortion rights. In 2024, a small extremist group known as the Zizians—led by Jack LaSota, who transitioned and adopted the name Ziz—coalesced around apocalyptic fears of an AI-driven collapse, drawing a mostly young and largely transgender following into violent plots. The trajectory culminates, at least for now, in the 2025 case of Robert Westman.
The emergence of the Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF) further complicates this picture. The network—composed largely of transgender-identifying activists—combines anti-capitalist and pro-Palestinian ideology and has been accused of plotting attacks on ICE facilities. Although these cases do not constitute statistical evidence, the concentration of transgender-identified perpetrators within a small cluster of recent extremist attacks appears disproportionate to their share of the population. At minimum, it’s a pattern that merits further scholarly attention.
Gender Identity
Over the past decade, transgender identification in the United States has risen sharply. By 2025, an estimated 2.8 million Americans—roughly 1 percent of the population aged 13 and older—identified as transgender, nearly double the share reported in 2016. In clinical settings, this surge was obvious. Adolescents and young adults seeking help for issues related to their “gender identity” arrived in growing numbers, often presenting alongside acute anxiety, depression, and psychological distress.
The trend spiked during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. At the same time, educational, psychological, and medical institutions rapidly embraced a “gender-affirming” model of care. This framework rests on the premise that young people can “become who they truly are” through social transition, hormones, or surgery. A key linguistic shift accompanied this approach: the widespread adoption of the phrase “sex assigned at birth,” which subtly recast biological sex as a subjective label rather than an objective and immutable physical reality. Under this model, self-identification became paramount, while traditional forms of psychological evaluation and caution—often derided as “gatekeeping”—were sidelined.
What was initially framed as a compassionate advance in care was quickly turbocharged by social media. Platforms turned personal transition into public performance. Influencers documented their journeys in real time—“Day 1 on testosterone,” “Day 35: no menstruation”—transforming what had once been a clinical intervention into a contagious cultural script. Identity formation became not just affirmed, but celebrated and broadcast, with powerful institutional backing from medicine and academia.
Yet the promise underlying this movement—limitless self-reinvention—rested on a fragile logic of act first, think later. As detransitioners began to emerge, many described a collision with biological reality. Gender expression, they discovered, may be flexible, but biological sex is not. The friction between those two truths became impossible for them to ignore.
During these years, a familiar pattern began to surface in our therapy practice. Anxious mothers came in seeking help for withdrawn, depressed, or increasingly oppositional teenagers and young adults. They described children who spent most of their time alone in their bedrooms, glued to their phones, with few friends and growing irritability. Lying was common. So was emotional volatility. In many cases, these same children later told their parents they identified as a different gender.
In an era of boundary-less, “gentle” parenting, many parents—especially mothers—took their children at their word, even when something felt deeply wrong. This can’t be happening, they thought. This is my son. But saying so out loud felt risky. Parents worried about being labeled transphobic, damaging their relationship with their child, alienating friends, or betraying their self-image as open-minded, compassionate people.
It gradually became clear that therapy was not just about a child’s behavior. It was also about maternal anxiety, paternal passivity, and family dynamics shaped by contemporary parenting trends where the word “no” quietly disappeared and had been replaced by endless conversations about emotions, identity, and affirmation.
Gender Nihilism
Many young people seeking to change their gender arrive at therapy in a state of psychological impasse. Their lives feel empty, fractured, and unlivable. What often presents as a search for liberation is, at its core, an attempt to escape despair. Rejecting the former self—often symbolized by the discarding of a “dead name”—becomes a way to survive a reality that feels intolerable. This crisis is frequently accompanied by suicidality. In 2021, more than half of transgender-identified youth reported seriously considering suicide, a sobering statistic that points to the depth of the distress involved.
Within this context, “gender affirmation” is often presented as a curative for nihilism: a way to kill off the old identity and replace it with a new, supposedly more authentic one. Some queer and psychoanalytic theorists explicitly frame this process as a kind of symbolic death—the killing off of an unlivable self in order to go on living.
But this promise often goes unfulfilled. Affirmation attempts to solve an existential and spiritual crisis with material and external changes. By encouraging the severing of one’s past identity, it breaks the thread of personal continuity—disconnecting individuals from their own biological and biographical reality. When the “new self” is finally achieved but the emptiness remains, the result can be a destabilizing sense that nothing is solid or real. Rather than resolving nihilism, radical self-reinvention can deepen it.
When this constructed identity fails—when it does not deliver the meaning, peace, or wholeness it was meant to provide—the collapse can be devastating. Robert Westman, captured this despair in a manifesto written before his attack:
“I only keep [the long hair] because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brainwashed myself.”
Again, it bears repeating: exploring one’s “gender” does not inherently lead to violence or nihilism. But gender ideology—as it has been promoted by Western institutions over the past decade—has played a significant role in amplifying nihilistic thinking. From schools and medical authorities to social media platforms, the message has often been the same: your body is wrong as it is; you would be better, more complete, in a different form. When people are taught to see their own bodies as mistakes—or the world as hostile to their “true” selves—nihilism doesn’t arrive from the top down. It grows from the ground up.
Internalized this way, gender ideology encourages a rejection of objective reality, beginning with the biological body itself. Once existence is framed as fundamentally inadequate, it becomes easier to conclude that nothing is fixed, nothing is given, and nothing carries inherent value. Moral and social meaning begin to erode. The foundations of reality feel negotiable. The implicit question becomes unavoidable: If my sex isn’t real, then what is?
The trajectory of Jack LaSota, who later adopted the name “Ziz,” illustrates how this collapse can unfold. LaSota, a 34-year-old man who identified as a woman, described puberty as “evil” and wrote online about fearing he would be “killed—overwritten” by a new self. On his blog, Sinceriously, he wrote that he had begun to feel as though “the world was a hypothetical”—language drawn straight from the gender ideology playbook.
Friends once described LaSota as bright, idealistic, and deeply earnest—a rationalist and “geeky optimist hoping to save the world.” But that idealism gradually turned into obsession. His writings grew increasingly detached from reality and increasingly apocalyptic in tone. He became consumed by fears of an imminent AI-driven extinction event and began to frame violence as a regrettable but necessary tool in service of a higher moral end. For years, friends and acquaintances warned about his increasingly erratic and menacing behavior.
Now, six people are dead. LaSota and several followers—calling themselves the Zizians—are in jail awaiting trial. What remains is a grim lesson. Severed from an integrated sense of self, untethered from shared reality, and animated by moral certainty stripped of empathy, reason became detached from restraint. Idealism gave way to annihilation. And once meaning collapses completely, there is nothing left to stop it.
For Robert Westman, whose family supported his transgender identification and who had no serious criminal record, the warning signs were largely internal. Manifestos, videos, and journal entries revealed long-standing fixations on violence, depression, and suicide. Friends described him as quiet and socially isolated, prone to what they called “odd obsessions.” He had recently gone through a breakup with a live-in partner active in the furry subculture—an online world that figured prominently in Westman’s writings and digital life.
Westman’s final posts oscillated between remorse and detachment.
I don’t expect forgiveness. … I have to hold much weight. … I care for all of you so much, and it pains me to bring this storm of chaos into your lives.
His words echo that of a young boy—earnest, lost, and apologetic:
I have wanted this for so long. I am not well. I am not right. I am a sad person, haunted by these thoughts that do not go away. I know this is wrong, but I can’t seem to stop myself. I am severely depressed and have been suicidal for years. Only recently have I lost all hope and decided to perform my final action against this world.
Friedrich Nietzsche warned that when a culture’s highest values lose their authority, the result is not freedom but a terrifying disorientation. In the context of gender ideology, this collapse begins at the level of the body itself. When the most basic binary of human existence—male and female—is treated as a linguistic choice rather than a biological reality, the individual is left with total responsibility for defining reality.
Once the self is no longer anchored in the body or in inherited meaning, identity becomes a project of pure will. For a vulnerable young adult, that burden can be crushing. As Nietzsche put it in The Will to Power:
Nihilism is... that the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why?’ finds no answer. (Nietzsche, 1968, p. 9)
When the promised liberation of a new identity fails to materialize, the revolutionary impulse can offers a final, desperate escape. The emptiness is filled with political absolutism. By identifying as a soldier for a righteous cause—whether radical anti-capitalism, anti-ICE activism, or another absolutist ideology—internal fragmentation is projected outward as a kind of moral war. Violence becomes a way to feel real, powerful, and purposeful in a world that has come to feel like a simulation.
Revolutionary Impulse
The moral outlook of many young adults has been shaped less by lived experience than by a constant stream of ideological messaging delivered through their phones. Daily exposure to images of police brutality, online harassment, and claims of systemic injustice can make oppression feel everywhere and inescapable. Over time, this erodes faith that democratic institutions can correct themselves or that history bends toward justice at all. High-profile events—such as the reversal of Roe v. Wade or state-level restrictions on transgender medical care—are often framed in apocalyptic terms, with comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale blurring the line between constitutional democracy and dystopia. The result is cynicism, mistrust, and the growing belief that morality itself is merely performative.
This outlook is reinforced in classrooms as well as online. Many students are taught that the central story of American history is one of unbroken oppression—colonization, slavery, genocide—carried out by the same institutions that govern today. If the system itself is irredeemable, then moral restraint starts to feel like complicity.
For transgender individuals in particular, this atmosphere is intensified by the way their identities have been placed at the center of a highly charged political spectacle. During Trump’s reelection campaign, claims of an ongoing “trans genocide” circulated widely online. The term was used not to describe mass violence, but restrictions on access to medical transition. Yet it was framed as an existential threat, implying that transgender lives were under direct and imminent attack. While no genocide was occurring, the rhetoric was effective. Repeated often enough, it fostered fear, hyper-vigilance, and the sense of living in permanent danger.
When mainstream institutions lose moral credibility and young people stop trusting the law, the media, or the government, a moral inversion often follows. The system itself is recast as the villain, while those who stand outside it—even criminals—are seen as more authentic, courageous, or “real.” In this climate, a revolutionary impulse takes hold. It shows up in the surge of mass protests across the Western world, as people search for meaning amid disorder and, in some cases, drift toward violence as a way of striking back at a perceived oppressor.
By the fall of 2025, protests had reached a fever pitch, with figures and institutions like Trump, the IDF, and ICE serving as central symbols of grievance. Beneath the anger lies something real: a genuine longing for justice and a shared insistence that the world can and should be better. In that sense, today’s demonstrations echo earlier movements—against the Vietnam War, against the Iraq War—that were rooted in moral outrage. But contemporary protests have become increasingly tangled in confusion and moral ambiguity. Is all of Israel truly responsible for the crisis in Gaza? Are all immigration arrests acts of cruelty, or are some aimed at disrupting drug trafficking and violent crime? As disparate grievances collapse into a single, undifferentiated scream of rebellion, nuance gives way to intensity, and intensity is mistaken for moral clarity.
That confusion was on full display during the hostage negotiations, when a ceasefire was under discussion and Israeli hostages held by Hamas were, after two years, finally being released. At that very moment, “Free Palestine” protests reached their loudest and most volatile point. In Boston, thousands filled the streets and refused to disperse even as emergency vehicles tried to get through. The situation escalated quickly into violence. Protesters surrounded police cruisers, kicked in doors, and ripped radios and body cameras from officers. Four officers were hospitalized, suffering injuries ranging from broken bones to a severe back strain sustained while carrying a suspect. In the days leading up to the protest, organizers had circulated a flyer depicting a burning police car, foreshadowing the intensity that followed.
Similar scenes unfolded across Europe. There was vandalism in Milan, clashes with police in Barcelona, and mass arrests in London, where more than 800 people were detained after a protest organized by Palestine Action turned violent. Police later said “the violence we encountered was coordinated and carried out by a group […] intent on creating as much disorder as possible.”
In this psychic climate, Gaza functions less as a concrete geopolitical conflict and more as a specter—something onto which largely middle-class Western protesters project rage, moral absolutism, and a hunger for meaning.
New Years 2026
In December 2025, federal authorities disrupted what they described as a potentially catastrophic terror plot linked to the Turtle Island Liberation Front (TILF). The group had allegedly planned coordinated bombings across the Los Angeles metropolitan area, targeting logistics hubs and technology centers with improvised explosive devices. The attacks were timed for midnight on New Year’s Eve—chosen, prosecutors said, to blend mass violence into the cover of holiday celebrations.
Investigators identified TILF as a far-left, anti-capitalist network organized around a doctrine of “liberation through decolonization.” At the center of the group were two figures: Audrey Illeene Carroll, who went by the alias “Black Moon,” and Zachary Aaron Page. In the group’s view, the United States was an “illegal empire,” and violence was a legitimate and necessary response. Members circulated slogans like “Death to America” and “Long live Palestine.”
The group’s drift from activism to militancy had been visible well before the arrests. Months earlier, TILF members participated in a volatile protest outside the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, where speakers allegedly called for “direct action” and declared that “peaceful protest will never be enough.” Online manifestos urged followers to be “ready” for “Revolution.” They were not calling for policy change or reform, but the total annihilation of the existing order.
Page, a 32-year-old who identified as a transgender woman, lived in an upscale home in Oak Park, California. Prosecutors allege that Page helped disseminate explicit calls for violence, including posts reading: “death to Israel death to the USA death to colonizers death to settler-colonialism [sic].” After authorities dismantled the Los Angeles plot, Page formally requested transfer to a women’s correctional facility, mirroring the high-profile legal requests made by Nicholas/Sophia Roske.¹
The network extended further. Among those linked to TILF was Micah James Legnon, a 29-year-old transgender Marine veteran who used the alias “Ketari.” Former classmates and neighbors described Legnon as an “outcast.” Unlike many others in these circles, he brought something distinctive: a background in the United States military, and with it a base of tactical knowledge. In the period following the death of Charlie Kirk, Legnon—who also identified as “Black Witch” and was deeply involved in pro-Palestinian activism—underwent a sharp pivot toward anti-government militancy. His social media presence became a conduit for radicalization, blending identity-based grievance with an increasingly explicit commitment to dismantling federal authority.
It is possible to understand the prominence of several transgender-identified individuals within TILF’s leadership as a response to intense feelings of marginalization and perceived oppression. By tying gender identity to anti-capitalist and anti-government ideology, personal struggle is reframed as part of a sweeping revolutionary narrative. Within that framework, extreme or violent actions can begin to feel justified—not merely as political resistance, but as a fight for survival and liberation.
More troubling, however, is the broader cultural backdrop against which this radicalization is unfolding. Contemporary gender ideology increasingly treats the physical body as incidental and something to be overridden by internal identity rather than integrated and accepted. This shift is not just philosophical. It is reflected in concrete practices such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries such as double mastectomies, now framed as forms of “gender-affirming” medical care for both minors and adults. When focus moves away from the body as a given fact of human life and toward an abstract idea or project of identity, people can become psychologically untethered from biological reality.
This is not simply a matter of private belief. It is a systemic change, reinforced by medicine, education, and public policy. Over time, detachment from embodied reality can weaken a person’s connection to the natural world and to the fundamental fact of human vulnerability that underlies limits, empathy, and respect for the lives of others.
No Guiding Authority
We are operating in a cultural and emotional environment that increasingly produces the politically violent nihilist—a figure for whom no authority exists beyond their own personal will. Religious belief and practice have fallen to historic lows, and traditional structures of guidance—from parents and families to civic institutions and the state—are widely treated as illegitimate or actively oppressive.
This collapse is measurable. A recent Gallup poll shows that trust in major American institutions has dropped to its lowest level in nearly half a century. That collective loss of faith closely mirrors the more personal loss of trust in the biological body itself. In both cases, something once understood as given, stabilizing, and real is reinterpreted as arbitrary or imposed. Both losses are psychologically destabilizing. When people cannot trust either their embodied reality or the institutions meant to order social life, sanity and social trust weaken together, deepening the experience of nihilism.
What follows nihilistic violence is often a visible and desperate longing for transcendence—a desire to escape the limits of the human condition altogether. This appears in the rejection of the physical body, biological sex, birth name, and even family lineage, as evidenced in record-high rates of family estrangement. When no guiding authority is trusted, whether it be biological, moral, or social, the impulse to transcend humanness manifests as a primal impulse to act upon the world through destruction, seeking to force a sense of meaning out of the ashes of the existing order.
Restoring Meaning
For many of the transgender extremists discussed here, early “adventures” unfolded not in the real world but in digital ones—video games, online subcultures, and ideological spaces—while their paths were often softened by well-intentioned parental intervention. Many struggled deeply with identity, but few were required to confront the kinds of challenges that traditionally test endurance and character: independent living, physical labor, sustained responsibility, or service to others. When these rites of passage are bypassed, society risks denying young people something essential—the chance to undertake a true hero’s journey.
A purposeful life requires confrontation with limits. It demands a personal journey marked by challenge, failure, responsibility, and eventual self-knowledge. Without these experiences, identity remains fragile, easily captured by ideology or reshaped by despair.
Today, the overlapping forces of social disconnection, identity confusion, ideological fixation, and an overreliance on psychiatric labels, have left many young people disoriented and spiritually unanchored. It falls to us—teachers, therapists, parents, writers—to restore a sense of moral orientation and expectation, to help the next generation face the inevitable trials that give rise to maturity and meaning.
Only by reconnecting young people to embodied reality, responsibility, and shared moral limits can we begin to renew a sense of purpose—and, ultimately, a shared understanding of the sacredness of human life itself.
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Incredibly, another event that fits directly into this tragic pattern occurred yesterday: https://www.ktsa.com/10-dead-in-canadian-school-massacre-and-police-are-calling-the-killer-a-gunperson/
Thank you for this deep dive.
We’ve just had another suicide in our county of a young person who identified as trans. Heartbreaking. Their trans friend died the same way ( under a train) last year. Devastating pain for these families and communities.