Erin ReedSep 29
1. A day after the Michigan church shooting, Republicans are silent after learning the shooter was a MAGA extremist. No investigations of Trump supporters as terrorists. No national conversations about the rights of cisgender men. The silence is deafening. Subscribe to support our journalism.

Deafening Silence After Mormon...
Deafening Silence After Mormon Church Shooter Not A "Transgender Leftist" But A Trump Supporter

The event is a case study in how shootings are covered in America.

Erin In The Morning
Show threadErin ReedSep 29
2. On Sunday, news broke out of Michigan that a lone gunman crashed his vehicle into a Mormon church, opened fire, and set the building ablaze. Almost immediately, speculation swirled on Twitter, with far-right voices rushing to blame a Muslim or a “transgender leftist."
Show threadErin ReedSep 29
3. But early images told a different story: the truck flew two large American flags and bore an Iraq War veteran plate. The shooter was no Muslim, no trans person. He was a Trump-supporting combat veteran—a cisgender white man who fit the profile of so many American mass shooters.

Iraq war veteran who opened fi...
Thomas Jacob Sanford who opened fire on hundreds of Mormon worshippers pictured in Donald Trump shirt

Four people were killed and at least eight others were wounded in the shooting

The Independent
Show threadErin Reed
4. I would ask you to imagine that this shooter had been transgender—but you don’t have to. Just last month, a similar tragedy unfolded in Minneapolis with a transgender shooter. It was a massive statistical outlier: transgender people account for only 0.087 percent of mass shootings in America.

Heritage Foundation Uses Bogus...
Heritage Foundation Uses Bogus Stat to Push a Trans Terrorism Classification

By inflating numbers and narrowing definitions, Heritage promotes a false link between transgender identity and violence in its push for the FBI to create a new terrorism category.

WIRED
Sep 29 at 4:07pmWeb
Show threadErin ReedSep 29
5. Yet in the wake of that rare event, the floodgates opened against transgender people. Libs of TikTok and Matt Walsh called for treatment of transgender people as a mental illness and ending transgender healthcare at any age.
Show threadErin ReedSep 29
6. The Trump admin floated the idea of stripping guns from trans Americans. Charlie Kirk—ironically shot by a white male gunman a month later—tweeted, “If you are crazy enough to want to hormonally and surgically change your sex… you have a mental disorder, and you are too crazy to own a firearm.”
Show threadErin ReedSep 29
7. The silence over a male shooter decked out in Trump gear and camo, paired with the media frenzy that erupts when a shooter is falsely linked to trans people, is a pattern. For years, the right has refused to reckon with the consequences of its own policies on guns, violence, and mental health.
Show threadErin ReedSep 29
8. Everything bad that happens is filtered through the lens of who they hate: Muslims, immigrants, trans people. But when the shooter fits the most common profile—cis men—the script changes. Concern only stretches as far as the color of the shooter’s skin, their religion, their gender identity.
Show threadErin ReedSep 29
9. So as the headlines fade from this shooting, I ask readers to imagine a different world. A world where we treat every mass shooting as a symptom of America’s deeper failures. And where the actions of one person never become an excuse to strip rights from an entire community.
Show threadErin ReedSep 29
10. Lastly, EITM is an award-winning media outlet covering LGBTQ+ issues every day. You can subscribe to support our journalism at www.erininthemorning.com/subscribe.

Subscribe to Erin In The Morni...
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News and discussion on trans legislation and life. Click to read Erin In The Morning, by Erin Reed, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Show threadFal61mav70Sep 29
@erininthemorning.com Aren’t they bogus in many ways?