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Mar 27, 2023 · The shooter, identified as Audrey E. Hale, was killed by police officers who responded to the shooting at the Covenant School, a small, private Christian school that is attached to a church...
- Overview
- A 'disinformation ecosystem'
The gender identity of the suspect in this week’s Nashville school shooting has become one of the central storylines in a horrific tragedy that left six people dead, including three 9-year-old students.
Just hours after the shooting at The Covenant School, authorities disclosed that they believed that the suspect, Audrey Hale, who was fatally shot by police, was transgender.
But there is still, days later, confusion and misinformation about how exactly Hale identified and whether Hale’s gender identity had anything to do with the motivation behind the massacre.
Some on the far right rushed to blame the shooting on the suspect’s gender identity, while some on the left pointed to an already combustible political environment in which transgender people have become a frequent target of right-wing lawmakers and pundits.
Hours after saying on Monday that Hale was transgender, Nashville Police Chief John Drake told NBC’s Lester Holt that police “feel that” Hale “identifies as trans, but we’re still in the initial investigation into all of that and if it actually played a role into this incident.”
Drake did not say why police believe Hale was transgender. As of Thursday afternoon, six people who knew Hale told NBC News that Hale did not directly come out to them as trans or talk about gender identity. It is not uncommon, however, for trans people to come out to only certain people in their lives — or not come out at all: A Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll released this month found that more than 1 in 10, or 12%, of trans or gender-nonconforming people reported that they haven’t told anyone they are trans. And not all people who are trans identify as a trans man or a trans woman; some may identify as nonbinary, meaning they identify as neither exclusively male nor exclusively female.
Imara Jones, the creator of the podcast “The Anti-Trans Hate Machine,” the second season of which focuses largely on how the Christian-Nationalist movement spreads disinformation about transgender people, said the recent legislative focus on trans people combined with the lack of information about Hale’s identity has created a breeding ground for the spread of false information.
She noted that neither Hale’s parents nor the college Hale attended have publicly released any information about Hale’s identity.
“What I do know is that there’s a ready-made disinformation ecosystem that is ready to amplify and distort these particular conversations,” she said.
Even before authorities said Hale was transgender, users on extremist websites spent hours sharing their hopes that the shooter was trans or nonbinary, the primary targets of hate and harassment campaigns by the infamous extremist site 4chan over the last year.
When police said the shooter was transgender, the site immediately began posting threats against the LGBTQ community, vowing “revenge” and sleuthing for hints of ties to larger LGBTQ organizations in social media profiles online, though no such ties have been reported so far.
Speculation and memes about the shooter’s gender identity spread across Facebook and Twitter, with talking points about violence perpetrated by trans people quickly filtering to mainstream voices under the hashtag #transterror.
Mar 28, 2023 · Police have referred to Hale as a “female shooter,” and at an evening news conference added Hale was transgender. Hale used male pronouns on a social media profile, a spokesperson told CNN ...
People also ask
Who is Audrey Hale?
Was Hale a 'female shooter'?
How did Audrey Hale get into Covenant School?
Was Hale a transgender girl?
Mar 28, 2023 · While the shooter’s gender identity is unclear, police told CNN that Hale was assigned female at birth and used “male pronouns” on social media. The shooter sent a message to a former classmate...
Mar 29, 2023 · So some social media accounts have posted claims that Hale was a “TransGender female” or that Hale was “a biological male,” which is not correct.
Mar 28, 2023 · Several outlets seem to have mistakenly identified Hale as a transgender woman. Others continue to describe Hale as female. Kristin Mumford, a police spokeswoman, told The New York Times that the...
Mar 27, 2023 · Hale’s family and friends have not commented on whether Hale was transgender or had transitioned from female to male or just preferred he/him pronouns.
