It did not take long for the crazy person who shot up The Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a woman who killed three children and three adults, to be identified as transgender, a woman who decided that she was a man. Yet that news was primarily confined to Twitter and conservative sites; the professional media seemed reticent to acknowledge that part.
Finally, there was this, at 1:39 AM EDT this morning, in The New York Times:
There was confusion about the gender identity of the assailant in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Chief Drake said the shooter identified as transgender. Officials used “she” and “her” to refer to the shooter, but, according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, the shooter appeared to identify as male in recent months.
This was the sixth paragraph down. In what is even more amusing is that the article used some stilted prose, to refer to Miss Hale as “the shooter” or “the assailant,” and managed to not once refer to her with a gendered pronoun.
Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Nashville Shooter Left ‘Manifesto,’ Was ‘High-Functioning’ Autistic
In the aftermath of the shooting, there was confusion about the shooter’s gender identity. Chief Drake said the shooter identified as transgender, and officials used “she” and “her” to refer to the attacker. But according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, the shooter appeared to identify as male in recent months.
Not quite identical, but very close. The author of the second article, Adeel Hassan, was not one of the four listed authors, Emily Cochrane, Ben Shpigel, Michael Levenson and
The Washington Post, which does not use honorifics, gave slightly more information:
(John)Drake (chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department) said Hale was transgender. Asked if that had played a role in what he described as a “targeted attack,” Drake said it was part of the police investigation.
“There is some theory to that,” Drake said. But, he added, “We’re investigating all the leads, and once we know exactly, we will let you know.”
Don Aaron, a police spokesman, later clarified the chief’s remarks. “Audrey Hale is a biological woman who, on a social media profile, used male pronouns,” Aaron said in an email.
Not restrained by editorial policy specifying honorifics, the Post story frequently referred to the killer as “Hale”, so there were fewer references to “the shooter” or “the assailant.” Neither the Times nor the Post referred to “the killer.” But there was this highly amusing sentence as a stand-alone paragraph:
Police initially described Hale as appearing to be a teenager before revising the age upward to 28.
In any normal composition in English, that would be “revising her age” or “revising his age”. “(R)evising the age” is incredibly stilted.
The Philadelphia Inquirer simply had an Associated Press story by John Matisse, time stamped 2:34 PM EDT on Monday, which, starting on the fifth paragraph down, included:
Police gave unclear information on the gender of the shooter. For hours, police identified the shooter as a 28-year-old woman and eventually identified the person as Audrey Hale. Then at a late afternoon press conference, the police chief said that Hale was transgender. After the news conference, police spokesperson Don Aaron declined to elaborate on how Hale currently identified.
Drake did not give a specific motive when asked by reporters but gave chilling examples of the shooter’s prior planning for the targeted attack.
“We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” he said. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”
He said in an interview with NBC News that investigators believe Hale had “some resentment for having to go to that school.”
Like the other stories listed, the AP avoided any gendered pronouns in reference to Miss Hale. An updated version, this one in the Lexington Herald-Leader, time stamped at 7:19 AM on Tuesday, had the same paragraphs, and did the same as the Times, referring to “the shooter.”
The Wall Street Journal, which does use honorifics, had a somewhat briefer story, noted that the killer was transgender, but avoided any language which required honorifics or gendered pronouns, referring to “the shooter” and “the suspect.” The suspect? She’s stone-cold graveyard dead now, so unless there’s some chance that the police shot the wrong person, I believe we can avoid calling her “the suspect.”
These are the hoops through which the credentialed media are jumping to avoid “misgendering” someone. Our Stylebook, which specifies that, “Those who claim to be transgender will be referred to with the honorific and pronouns appropriate to the sex of their birth,” avoids that kind of confusion or stupid prose. Isn’t simply telling the truth much, much simpler?
Finally, my compliments to the police! Unlike the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, where the School Resource Officer, Scot Peterson, earned the epithet the “Coward of Broward“, by hiding outside while Nikolas Cruz was inside killing people, or the Uvalde school shooting, where armed responders waited for an hour while the carnage continued, because they were scared [insert vulgarity for feces here]less, Nashville Metropolitan Police received the call of an active shooter at 10:13 AM CST, and by 10:27 AM Miss Hale was dead.
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