the mind of Audrey Hale, Covenant killer

I can see why the authorities, who have all gone woke, were at pains not to reveal the writings of Audrey Hale, the biological female and trans male who shot up the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. They say they were afraid of "false narratives," but what they really feared was that, if Hale's writings were revealed, they would confirm what people already suspected about her. The stereotypical mass shooter, these days, is somewhere on the autism spectrum and very likely to be trans. (Remember the un-PC Hollywood trope—still prevalent today in some films—of the murderous homosexual? Think: "No Way Out," "The Jackal," or "This Is the End" among other films. Outside-of-the-norm sexuality has long been associated with fatally violent tendencies.) Hale's writings also bring up a Freudian concept long considered debunked: penis envy. I can imagine a bunch of psychologists rushing to Hale's defense and saying that whatever she was experiencing wasn't true penis envy, but they'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to make that case, which is basically a No True Scotsman fallacy. Here's a definition of the relevant concept:

Penis envy is a theory from early psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He believed that when female children realize they lack a penis, they feel “castrated” in comparison to males. Freud believed this was a pivotal moment in female sexual development and a source of mental illness.

Since coining the term “penis envy” in 1908, psychologists have questioned and criticized it. Freud based the idea on his own beliefs about sex and gender rather than on data. To date, no research has ever proven that penis envy exists.

Many also argue that the theory is sexist, as it assumes that being male is inherently more desirable than being female. Despite this criticism, penis envy was a popular concept in Freudian psychoanalysis during the 20th century.

Now that Hale's writings have more fully come to light (with some released last year and some this year), see what she wrote in a piece titled "My Imaginary Penis":

The remainder of the four pages, however, revolves around the shooter’s fixation on being a man, and suggests a serious case of gender dysphoria. She fantasized about what it would be like to have a penis.

“I want to know what that’s like, but I never will because I was damned to be born this way,” she wrote in the journal. “I swear to fuck I hate it so goddamned much. It’s a fucking curse.”

[ ... ]

Elsewhere in the journal entry she describes at length graphic sexual games she would play with her stuffed animals, fantasizing that she was the boy performing sex acts on a girl doll. The margins of her journal entries are filled with immature sexual drawings.

“I can pretend to be them and do the things boys do and experience my boy self as Tony — my stuffed boy doll is like the boy I am in another form since childhood,” she writes in the journal. “I constructed him a penis, then got out my girl doll named Ashley (who is Tony’s life-long boyfriend) to have sex w/ Tony. Ashley was represented as my dream girl I wished to have in real life.”

Sounds a lot like classic penis envy. I'm not saying that Audrey Hale's journal is enough evidence to bring penis envy back into currency, but her writing sure does give one pause.

Hale hated her parents (whom she reportedly wanted to kill) and their conservative religious attitudes. She blames her folks for refusing to allow her puberty blockers and other measures to become the male she felt herself to be. It goes without saying that plenty of kids before her have rebelled against religion; few of those rebels went on to become mass murderers. But it's turning out that more and more mass shooters are indeed "on the spectrum," as they say. What the woke authorities fear is that this problem is more than a mere stereotype created by bigots; quite the opposite, facing this reality could be key to preventing more such shootings.

None of this is to say that being outside of the sexual norm should automatically brand one as a potential mass killer. The same is true of being on the autism spectrum. But as data for this correlation continue to mount, it's important explore the implications. Correlation isn't causation, but it's not nothing, either. Don't close off discussion by screaming, "Bigot!"