Originally posted on Crisis Magazine.com, August 28, 2025. Reprinted by permission.

There is something unspeakably shocking about any mass shooting. There is, sadly, something less shocking about a transgender mass shooter.

[On August 27], 23-year-old Robin (formerly Robert) Westman, ambushed the back-to-school Mass at Annunciation preK-8 School in Minneapolis. He was armed with an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol, and he brought two-by-fours to barricade the door to prevent escape by his intended victims. He (called “she” or “they” on the Left-lunging news outlets) opened fire through the windows using all three weapons during the celebration of Holy Mass, murdering an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, and injuring at least 17 others before taking his own life.

Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, was quick to offer his “heartfelt condolences and the assurance of spiritual closeness to all those affected by this terrible tragedy, especially the families now grieving the loss of a child.”

At the time of this writing, Robin Westman’s transgenderism is not a focal point of this horrific story—and it may never be. Maybe it shouldn’t be. But if these murders were a result of a sickness that had been coddled by family, friends, or popular or political culture, there is a reckoning to be had.

We can expect the cry for gun control to sound soon, but will there ever be a cry to control the way the basic elements of reality are regarded or disregarded? Since transgenderism is passed off as a healthy and wholesome embrace of identity, rather than a denial of reality, what is stopping the sick from going to the extremities of their sicknesses? Can anything but madness be expected in a society that openly condones madness?

People will object and say that the world has always had its struggles with backward or wayward behaviors, but our day and age has raised the crazy bar beyond where it ever has been. In denying self, in denying truth, nature itself is denied—and if nature is not upheld, the unnatural can arise unchecked. But the slaughter of these innocents will almost assuredly not result in any critique of the transgender movement which sanctions the disconnected impulses of ill people. That would be transphobic—but maybe there is something to fear about transgender volatility that, apparently, can result in transmurderers.

It’s striking enough that the FBI has classified the shooting as a “hate crime against Catholics.” President Trump has asked for the nation to pray for all involved in the tragedy and ordered flags at half-staff. It may be that the news cycle will turn their attention to the detail of a Catholic church being the site of this horrific attack instead of focusing on the condition of the man who perpetrated the horror—perpetrating it against an institution that is staunch in its teachings about the evils and dangers of transgenderism.

It has come out that Westman was once a student at Annunciation School before his mother, a former employee at the school, permitted his name change and accepted his preferred gender identity in 2020. A manifesto allegedly left behind by the shooter in a 20-minute YouTube video of his notebook included the slogans “kill Donald Trump” and “for the children” written over pages of gun magazines. The video also has him lionizing the Sandy Hook killer, Adam Lanza, imagining what it felt like “being that scary horrible monster standing over those powerless kids.”

In recent years, judging from his notebook and social media accounts, Westman seemed to back away from his dysphoria, writing, “I don’t want to dress girly all the time but I guess sometimes I really like it. I know I am not a woman but I definitely don’t feel like a man... I really like my outfit. I look pretty, smart and modest. I think I want to wear something like this for my shooting.”

This is the type of confusion that is celebrated, allowing people with mental disease—mental disease that can pose a danger to others—to be defined and driven by their disease. In the case of Westman, his disturbances were tolerated and accepted to the point where he gave into the darkest regions of his disease. Westman’s planning for and dwelling over the Annunciation attack was apparently extensive, according to the scrawling in his notebook. “I am feeling good about Annunciation. It seems like a good combo of easy attack form and devastating tragedy and I want to do more research. I have concerns about finding a large enough group... Maybe I could attack an event at the on-site church.”

[Christians] shouldn’t be surprised at the travesties and tragedies in a trans-truth society. Resistance is necessary, but with calm courage that doesn’t throw the sinner out with the sin or the patient with the malady. But part of the process of defending truth is acknowledging that truth is not a tenet in our national debate and deliberation. The Minneapolis massacre is one of many terrifying results that must be expected when, instead of helping young people work through discordant feelings, the transgender ideology, together with all its progressive backers, “affirms” them, calling what is out of tune in tune. With smiling pressure, it praises and encourages children as they make their own diagnoses for surgeons in a matter that is not rooted in biology. It blesses a mental disorder, and it was only a matter of time before the fruit of such abuse manifested in a violent outburst like [that of August 27].

Whether or not transgenderism becomes a subject in this calamity will be telling as to how deeply the world is committed to this brainwashing, mutilating, upheaval of the truth of who we are as human beings. But a society wishing to save face on all the horses they have let out of the barn, like pornography, will be very devoted to a doctrine that denies truth itself. Pornography in particular is a primary toxin that leads on to the more advanced disorder of transgenderism. The average age of encountering hardcore porn is nine years old, and given the debasing and often violent nature of this readily accessible and rampant content, is it a surprise that girls would rather be boys than be subject to what they conclude sex is all about? Or might boys wish to be girls, cowering before the pressure to be what they have no natural inclination to be or never could be? Wild and wicked distortion about sacred things leads to fear, and young people are the victims. And now, there are bloody victims as well as emotional victims.

The blood spilled in the Catholic church of Annunciation School should cry out with the truth that transgenderism is a cult that urges vulnerable young people—whether due to autism, neglect, loneliness, sexual abuse, or porn trauma—into radical reality-denial and the lie that medical intervention is necessary for happiness and to prevent suicide. But should anyone resist or change their mind, they are shunned or lambasted. The one-way street of those enmeshed in the ever-expanding alphabet of sexual subjectivism, even for those who struggle, is a telltale sign of a group that doesn’t really have people’s best interests at heart. Robin Westman certainly didn’t, and he was left to his own devices and his own demons. And now heartbroken parents mourn for murdered babes under a scourge that has been laid upon an America that no longer trusts in God.

The ironies of this terrible story run as deep as mortal wounds. Besides the violent rampage by one who was permitted to go on an emotive rampage, we have the murder of children in a Catholic church named for the Annunciation. No mystery of the Faith is as poignant in the celebration of human life, redemption, openness to the will of God, and joy. The atrocity of that day was an anti-Annunciation, proclaiming an end of life in an embrace with fallen nature, being our own servants and handmaids instead of the servants and handmaids of the Lord, doing unto ourselves as we will instead of as God wills. That is the transgender creed, and it is the creed of murder.

...We pray for an end to the cruel insanity of transgenderism, which can only sow seeds of insanity, and whose unholy and unwholesome denial of identity and nature leads to the senseless denial, and even the senseless destruction, of life itself.

Sean Fitzpatrick is a senior contributor to Crisis and serves on the faculty of Gregory the Great Academy, a Catholic boarding school for boys in Pennsylvania.

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