It doesn’t get much cable news coverage, but toxic masculinity lurks behind both of last weekend’s mass shootings, and now (well, two days ago, actually, although the mainstream press doesn’t seem to have picked up on it) we learn that the Dayton shooter’s first victim was not, as reported by the press, his sister, but in fact his trans brother. That a young man who’d once assembled rape and kill lists first shot his trans brother only reinforces that the underlying problem here is America’s problematic and damaging sense of what a man is “supposed” to be, made lethal by the easy access to guns.
Addenda
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Splinter first reported this on Wednesday. I didn’t see it come across my Twitter feed until today. To my knowledge it’s yet to be picked up by mainstream outlets. Are they not looking into it, or are they simply letting the parents dictate the terms in which the murder of their trans child is being reported? There can be no full accounting of the Dayton shooting without this fact.
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New York Post, of all things, picked up the story today, and BuzzFeed updated their story from last Sunday to reflect the fact of Jordan Cofer.