Guest post by MJ Lisbeth
Yesterday, the 27th of March, was the 86th day of the year. It included the 89th school shooting in the United States of America.
I could write a screed against the “gun culture” of this country, where there are five guns for every four people. I could also rail against the inefficacy and indifference of public officials and, most importantly, the people who elected them. And the same people would sigh and nod; others would go on a rant about “the price of freedom—as if there were some sort of equivalence between the right to own as many guns as one wants and the right of another person to lose his or her life because said gun owner “lost it” after having a bad day.
But, as with every other mass shooting—or mass murder of any kind—the pundits, politicos, and too many ordinary citizens miss another important point. Yes, gun regulations need to be stricter. Even more to the point, though, we need more and better mental health screening and treatment—supported by an actual system that truly supports its practitioners as well as its patients.
Oh, and we need ways to keep schools and other institutions from barring such services, or parents from keeping their kids away from them—or, worse yet, enabling conditions deleterious to kids’ mental health–on “religious” grounds.
I don’t know all of the particulars of Audrey Elizabeth Hale’s experience as a pupil of The Covenant School, a conservative Christian institution in Nashville, Tennessee. (The Covent School is a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian Church, an Evangelical institution.) But I can make a very educated guess about at least one thing because, well, it probably paralleled something I experienced.
At the time Hale stormed the school, he was referring to himself with male pronouns, on his LinkedIn page and in personal interactions. Nashville Police Chief John Drake, on the other hand, referred to Audrey with female pronouns in discussing the incident.
Now, Chief Drake may have made an honest mistake: If I had seen “Audrey Elizabeth Hale” on a piece of paper or screen, with no corroborating information, I would have assumed it to be the name of a girl or woman. And, I am sure that Mr. Hale has been misgendered more than once—what trans person isn’t?
But I can only imagine how many times he had been deliberately misidentified. Worse yet, I know all too well what he must have experienced in a school that, I imagine, some parents send their kids to in order to keep them away from “influences” that include people like me—and him—who knew that we aren’t the gender to which we are assigned at birth.
Even if Mr. Hale didn’t experience the bullying too many kids endure—from adults as well as other kids—for not conforming to the gender he was assigned at birth, he almost surely bore the emotional and, at times, physical burdens of moving through the hallways, the playground, the day and life itself in a body that didn’t align with the ways in which he understood himself—and, worse, having to make that body, and his very being, conform to the expectations his teachers and other adults placed on him in the name of the God they claimed as their guide.
Please understand that I am not trying to excuse or condone a mass shooting by Audrey Elizabeth Hale or anyone else. Nor am I trying to imply that the children or even, for that matter, the staff members he killed “had it coming to them” or were collateral damage. Rather, I want to point out that being bullied for what one is—whether that bullying comes from one’s peers or authority figures—leaves indelible scars. The bullying itself is just part of the emotional violence inflicted on someone like him, or me. Another and, perhaps more pernicious, “prong” of what impales us is the fact that the tormentors justify their actions with a higher authority. Folks who run schools like Covenant believe that their faith—or, more precisely, their interpretation of it—authorizes them to “fix” someone who doesn’t conform, if not to beat the non-conformity out of them. And, even if they can’t articulate it, kids who bully other kids who aren’t like them do so when they know the adults who are supposed to be in charge won’t hold them to account or will even enable them.
Chief Drake said investigators believe the shooting may have stemmed from “some resentment” Hale harbored over having to attend that school as a young person. Anyone who plans such an attack, even if the victims are random, and writes a manifesto as to why he is doing it, is dealing with more than just “resentment.” To me, it’s more like the residue of dried blood from a thousand cuts authorized, in the minds of the cutters, by their belief in a God who doesn’t create trans people or anyone else who doesn’t conform to their ideas about masculinity, femininity or, more importantly, humanity—and who let the peers of the victim inflict still other wounds.
Oh, and it was just too damn easy for someone in Hale’s state of mind to get, not just one weapon, but a mini-arsenal—and too fucking hard to get the support he so desperately needed, not to change who he is, but to move away from a life he couldn’t live into one he could have.
Now I have to wonder how many little versions of Audrey Elizabeth Hale (or the author of this piece) were among the young victims or other kids in that school—or could have grown up to be people who love and accept themselves, and others, as they are. If an educational system, a religious institution or a culture can’t or won’t help young people in that way, it fails them and leaves them vulnerable, not only in an attack on the schools or churches they attend, but to harm they inflict on themselves without understanding why. In short, such institutions, guided by interpretations of mythology and outright fiction, inevitably turn out people like Mr. Hale and his victims.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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