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March 28th, 2023.
In Nashville, Tennessee a heavily armed 28-year-old killed six people at a Nashville elementary school in a devastating mass shooting on Monday morning.
Police initially described the suspect as a woman in the aftermath of the shooting. Nashville police said on Monday that the shooter was 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale.
Police have identified the suspected shooter by their name at birth. Hale reportedly was a transgender man who used he/him pronouns.
Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake said in a press conference on Monday that Hale once attended the school.
An illustrator and graphic designer who attended Nossi College of Art, Hale does not appear to have had any criminal record prior to Monday’s massacre.
His history seems to have been free from incident or controversy and apart from the transition to identifying as a male called Aiden there appears to have been nothing away from the mainstream.
Source Independent 28th March 2023
Audrey Elizabeth Hale was born on March 24, 1995. The shooter’s LinkedIn account also mentioned that Hale preferred to use he/him pronouns. The police are still investigating Hale’s gender identity.
A source close to the family told The Daily Beast that Hale was autistic, but high-functioning. “And relatively recently announced she was transgender, identifying as he/him,” the source revealed.
I had read about the recent incident in Albert Park (in Stuff I’m afraid) and saw the portrayal of the trans supporters as peace-loving, kind people demonstrating calmly and with compassion. I also read their report of the Nashville shootings and they reported the shooter as being a woman. Nowhere did they mention the possibility of the perpetrator having gender identity issues.
Meanwhile, I have dutifully completed my University survey about the way forward for Otago university and I have also completed various surveys in the UK. One from the NHS enquiring about the performance of GPs was 64+ questions long and sent to me at random. One questions the value of a survey of that size – survey fatigue comes into play about halfway through.
Increasing I am being asked for my preferred pronoun/identity. I now respond with my preferred pronoun being Dgas. (Pronounced Deegas). This has always been accepted without question and no one has ever asked me what it is. It is quite simple, it’s “Don’t Give A S**T”.
This then got me thinking about issues when I was a youngster. I was brought up in a very left leaning home, with my father being a trade union activist. In a declining coal mining village surrounded by coalmines and steel works there seemed to be issues that were much more important than the ones faced by society today. It was a time when women were paid a lower rate for doing the same job as a man. When a man got married he often got a pay rise or regrade because he now had a wife to support. Disagreements over safety were an everyday event and there was the ever present thought of danger from the pits.
As kids we used to take a shortcut over the local river on a rickety bridge. We were instructed not to do so, as the threat of severe injury (and poisoning) was guaranteed if we fell into the river. Pollution was commonplace and accepted as normal. The river was often seen bubbling away and smelling of Sulphur and Hydrogen Sulphide.
Over the years I saw the struggles my late wife had as a Chartered Accountant as she was regularly mistaken for the office dogsbody/tea lady. This situation slowly changed, but it took perseverance.
It seems that the big battles have been won, and what nations we (both NZ and the UK) have become when all we can find to argue about, violently to boot, is what pronoun one should use.
Talking of gender battles, Humza Yousaf was confirmed as the new leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland. He takes over the post with an unprecedented record of failure in every post he has held. For instance, when he was Transport Minister he was found to be driving without insurance. He has pledged to continue a High Court fight to get Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill into law, immediately incurring the opposition of J K Rowling. As this was the issue that finally saw off Nicola Sturgeon it makes one wonder who is pulling the strings. One would have thought that as 70% to 80% of the electorate are against the bill he would have quietly dropped it. Watch this space as the SNP falls into internecine struggles as it becomes factionalised.
