Lessons from the Tragedy in Minneapolis
Pseudoscience, medical lies, and apocalyptic messaging around transgender identity provide a script for justifying violence.
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About the Author
Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biology PhD, Manhattan Institute Fellow, and CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.
The horror in Minneapolis this week has left many of us shaken. A 23-year-old former student opened fire during a back-to-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic School, murdering two children and wounding many more before taking his own life. The shooter, Robin Westman, a male who identified as a woman, left behind a manifesto laced with violent fantasies, political rage, and admiration for other mass murderers. It would be easy, especially on the political right, to reduce this tragedy to “transgenderism.” But that misses the point. What we are dealing with is primarily a mental health crisis—yet one that has been dramatically intensified by ideological distortions of reality that have captured activists, policymakers, and our medical institutions.
Westman was not just “trans.” He was profoundly disturbed. But mental illness usually precedes the adoption of a trans identity. Transgender identification is a coping mechanism for underlying distress rather than the root cause of it. But we also cannot ignore the way apocalyptic messaging around transgender identity now provides a script for vulnerable minds. Activists and advocacy groups have popularized the claim that a “trans genocide” is underway, even though no such thing is occurring. This narrative is reinforced every time LGBT organizations declare—against their own media guidelines on suicide reporting—that a bill restricting “gender-affirming care” will have deadly consequences.
Just last week, a leaked video showed the president of the American Medical Association claiming that the suicide rate among trans-identifying people might be as high as 70 percent. This is not only a vast exaggeration, but inflated figures like this are routinely invoked to justify extreme procedures for which every systematic review has found no clear evidence of benefit. Yet activists and institutions continue to parrot the lie that such treatments are “life-saving care.” Wild, unfounded numbers and unfounded promises are treated as fact and weaponized in public debate. And when vulnerable, unstable people are told relentlessly that they are on the verge of extermination, some will begin to believe it. And a few might decide to strike first.
This danger is not theoretical. Journalists like Andy Ngo have documented the rise of groups such as “Trantifa,” which openly promote armed resistance. Flyers for a “Trans Day of Vengeance” declared “Stop Trans Genocide.” The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a sympathetic feature about queer gun owners preparing for Trump’s America, with one activist stating they feared being put in “concentration camps.” At the California State Capitol, I personally witnessed a Democrat legislator compare critics of gender ideology to Nazis. These are not isolated moments of overheated rhetoric. They are mainstream talking points that convinces young, unstable people that they’re being targeted for extermination in a manner comparable to Jews in 1930s Germany.
Westman’s life illustrates what happens when this ideology intersects with mental illness. As a minor, he socially transitioned, and his mother enabled a legal name change to a female identity. It is not yet known whether he took cross-sex hormones or underwent surgeries. What matters is that adults around him—family and medical professionals—encouraged him to lean into his confusion and embrace a delusion about who he was, promising that doing so would cure his distress. But it didn’t. Instead, he became more alienated, more consumed by rage, and more obsessed with violence. His own writings reveal the crushing effect of adhering to a reality-denying ideology:
I am sick of my hair, I want to chop it off! I am tired of being trans. I wish I had never brainwashed myself. I can’t cut my hair off now, as that would be an embarrassing defeat, and it might be a concerning change of character that could get me reported.
Instead of healing him, the ideology that guided him only deepened his misery and accelerated his descent.
It may be tempting for people on the right to blame “transgenderism” itself for this tragedy. But most youth swept up in this ideology are not violent. They are themselves victims, turned into pawns by powerful institutions that exploit their suffering. The medical establishment feeds them pseudoscience about being “born in the wrong body” and profits from irreversible interventions that do nothing to resolve their deeper problems. The political establishment elevates them as a victim class to be used in a new civil rights crusade. Their immiseration is not seen as something to be alleviated, but as something to maintain for leverage.
The lesson from Minneapolis is that ideologies which separate people from reality—about sex, about suicide, about cures for their misery, and about the outside threats they face—are profoundly dangerous. When you take a generation of mentally distressed youth and tell them they are trapped in the wrong body, that suicide is imminent if denied access to experimental drugs and surgeries, and that society is conspiring to wipe them out, you create a powder keg. Westman’s rampage shows what happens when that powder keg ignites.
People on the political right must also avoid rhetoric that feeds into the apocalyptic mindset plaguing many youth who identify as transgender. When commentators like Michael Knowles declare that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” as he once did in 2023 and then repeated this week in response to the shooting, it only entrenches the sense of existential threat that unwell and alienated youth already feel.
The only humane path forward is to tell the truth. That means affirming the biological reality of sex, rejecting inflated and manipulative claims about suicide, being honest about the evidence for “gender-affirming care,” and resisting the use of suffering people as political pawns. If we fail to do this, we will see more tragedies like Minneapolis.
A version of this essay first appeared in City Journal on August 29, 2025.
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Very measured and focused article, and accurate.
Compulsive sex mimicry can no more be “eradicated” than a compulsion to starve or wash hands. The effects can be managed through education (“these men are not women”), and doctors who affirm the emotions but not the delusion (“let’s find behaviors to cope”).
Affirming a delusion increases the break with reality and magnify negative consequences.
Your steady sanity on this polarized topic is most welcome.