On Monday, a 28-year-old transgender man dressed in a bulletproof vest and armed with two rifles killed six people before being shot dead by police in Nashville, Tennessee. He chose his former elementary school as the site of the carnage, where he massacred three school employees and three children under the age of nine.

Although the shooter went by the name Aiden and used the pronoun "he/him" to identify himself as male, the American mainstream media continues to refer to him as Audrey Hale, which identifies him as female at birth.

labeling the murderer as a "former student" in the title of its report on the murder , and then only described in the article that

"Initial reports say a teenage girl opened fire at a private Christian school in Nashville on Monday, but new information from police says the shooter was 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who identifies as transgender."

The Telex went even further when it didn't even consider it necessary to mention that the assailant was a member of the LGBTQ community, calling it the "Nashville school shooter" in its headlines, and calling it by her birth name, Audrey Hale, in the article.

Just to clarify, writes Tamás Orbán on the European Conservative , when we are talking about such terrible tragedies as school shootings, worrying about the right pronouns so as not to offend the gender identity of the late perpetrator is, to put it mildly, absurd.

Still, USA Today took time to correct errors in its initial reporting of the attack, saying officials erred in misnaming the shooter, who was biologically female but identified as transgender.

However, it is striking that not all mainstream media were so sensitive. It is enough to take a quick look at reports from CNN, NBC and The New York Times, and we see that they all admitted that the shooter was a female-to-male transgender person, yet they more often used the old name of the shooter, the (used among trans people) her "dead" name, Audrey Hale; he was given this at birth, so by definition this is the name corresponding to his biological sex.

We all know perfectly well - continues Tamás Orbán - how serious a crime , precisely because the mainstream media constantly reminds us of this.

So how is it that in this tragic situation the media has suddenly failed as an ally of transgender people? Suspect, the answer has something to do with this particular person being a mass murderer.

All of this perfectly demonstrates the victim hierarchy of the distorted woke worldview. By choosing to use the shooter's real name, the mainstream media acknowledged that

it is better to paint a woman in a bad light than to name a transgender person as the perpetrator of a violent crime.

But the possible reasons behind the attack also justify the deliberate degradation of the transgender aspect of the story.

Think about it: an LGBT-identified person shoots up a Christian school; there could hardly be a worse narrative for the left.

Presumably,

if it wasn't a Christian institution and the attack was perpetrated by a straight man, the definition of "hate crime" would be on the news feed.

But we can also be sure that if the police find evidence that the attack was ideologically motivated, it will hardly make headlines.

However, we still don't know what made Audrey/Aiden Hale do this horrible thing. However, dismissing the possibility of the most obvious assumption (that the attack was ideologically motivated) is a grave disrespect to the memory of the victims, including three children, as their lives were taken by a mentally unstable individual whose condition was only exacerbated by today's toxic cultural environment.

Portraying Christians as the direct enemies of LGBTQ people—and vice versa—can have harmful effects. And there are. And when tragedies happen, glossing over them and looking the other way cannot change them. It is high time that all media understood this, without exception.

Featured image: AFP