By Scott Ventureyra
Crisis Magazine
September 10, 2025
Philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas remind us to begin with first principles: to see things as they really are. Even Marcus Aurelius counseled, "Of each particular thing, ask, what is it in itself?" Strikingly, this same wisdom is expressed in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), albeit through the words of a villain.
In the context of assisting a student detective in tracking down a serial killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter-both psychiatrist and serial killer-taunts Clarice Starling: "First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius." The line is frightening because it exposes a perennial truth: evil begins when we refuse to acknowledge the true nature of things. Gender ideology does just this, denying the most basic truth of our humanity: that we are male and female. And as recent school shootings tragically show, such denial does not remain abstract; it can culminate in violence against the most innocent.
Ironically, the film goes further still. In one exchange, Clarice protests, "Dr. Lecter, there's no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive." To which Lecter replies, "Clever girl. You're so close to the way you're going to catch him-do you realize that?" Even here, Hollywood conditioned audiences to disconnect transgenderism from violence, even while viewers watched the film's antagonist, Buffalo Bill, murder women in order to construct a grotesque "woman suit" as a substitute for sex reassignment. The message was clear: gender confusion could be exploited for shock but never acknowledged as having any real-world consequences.
What Hollywood once exploited for shock, society now refuses to confront in reality. And the cost has been devastating. On August 27, 2025, 23-year-old Robert Westman, who'd been wrestling with gender dysphoria, carried out a horrific attack at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. During the back-to-school Mass, Westman, who had his name legally changed to Robin, fired through the church windows with multiple guns, killing two kids and injuring 17 others before ending his own life. The FBI labelled it a hate crime targeting the Catholic community.
Sean Fitzpatrick recently wrote an essay in Crisis Magazine titled " Transmurderer," highlighting how our culture fosters gender dysphoria and ignores its deadly consequences. Fr. Nick Ward has also reflected on the Annunciation shooting in Crisis Magazine (" Transgenderism and the Ruin of Souls"), offering a primarily pastoral and theological response that emphasizes the demonic roots of transgender ideology. My essay approaches the issue differently: by tracing the recent cultural and psychological dynamics of gender ideology before turning to its theological culmination, showing how in this case the shooter's own writings explicitly testify to the demonic. The Annunciation atrocity cannot be explained solely by social disintegration; it must be considered an assault on truth itself, rooted in relativism, biological denial, and, ultimately, the demonic.
Cultural Conditioning and Denial
For decades, Hollywood has portrayed sexually ambiguous characters, often linking distorted gender identity to chaos, perversity, horror, or violence. Films like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980), Robert Hiltzik's Sleepaway Camp (1983), Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992), and Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (2011) all returned to these discomforting themes. The Skin I Live In presents a bizarre story where a father kidnaps his daughter's rapist, subjects him to forced sex-reassignment surgery, and later assaults him, illustrating how gender manipulation can be weaponized, even outside the trope of a deranged killer.
Gene Simmons even played a flamboyant, psychotic hermaphroditic villain in Never Too Young to Die (1986), showing how far pop culture was willing to exploit gender confusion for shock value. At times, the transgender element is explicit, as in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1953) or William Castle's Homicidal (1961). Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975) took a different angle: Al Pacino's character robs a bank to fund his partner's sex-reassignment surgery, motivated by his desire to marry him.
It is worth noting that both Psycho's Norman Bates and The Silence of the Lambs' Buffalo Bill were inspired by real-life murderer Ed Gein, who committed gruesome acts such as unearthing corpses, killing two women, and crafting a human skin suit to embody his deceased mother. These themes have captivated and horrified the public. Gein's crimes will soon be depicted in Netflix's Monster: The Ed Gein Story (2025).
Across both mainstream and obscure cinema, the message has been clear: distorted gender identity does not represent true liberation but is a source of danger, ambiguity, and mental instability. Contrast this scenario with modern cinema, television, educational systems, government policies, and mainstream media, where now, all too often, transgender identity is depicted as empowering and heroic. This narrative has become so pervasive that it has led to a cultural contagion, with unprecedented numbers of children and adolescents questioning their identities.
Nevertheless, for years, the cultural imagination was shaped by images of violent men attempting to erase or redefine their sexual identity. Yet when real-world cases emerge, society's leaders insist there is no connection.
School Shootings and the Trans Identity
In 2023, there was the case of the Nashville Covenant School shooter, a 28-year-old woman, Audrey Hale, who identified as male. She left behind a manifesto seething with rage against Christians. When parts of it leaked, showing targeted hatred of children, the media quickly buried the story. Gun control and mental health became the talking points.
Similarly, media coverage of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting followed the same evasive script as Nashville. Despite Westman's own videos and manifesto, where he praised Hitler, glorified past shooters, and explicitly targeted Catholic children, The New York Times claimed the "motive is a mystery." The reality could not have been clearer: a hatred of the Church, a fixation on satanic imagery, and a willful desecration of innocence.
Such an assault extends beyond human life into the spiritual domain of a deep rebellion against God and the image of His likeness most purely reflected in children. Christ's words are sobering: "If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea" (Matthew 18:6). Even if the shooter did not seek to mislead the children who died, the violence against them and the trauma left to survivors stand as a direct offense against the Creator.
Whenever a shooter fits the progressive narrative, the white, male, conservative identity is magnified. When the shooter is transgender, it is minimized or erased. As political commentator Charlie Kirk observed in response to the Annunciation Catholic School shooting, "First Nashville, now this. How many times makes a trend?" These tragedies echoed not only Nashville but also the 2019 STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting in Colorado, where Maya McKinney, a transgender student, opened fire on classmates. While such cases remain relatively rare, their recurrence is disturbing. And yet mainstream media and cultural elites continue to downplay or ignore them, even as they celebrate transgenderism as liberating and heroic.
Beyond school shootings, other cases across the past six decades also reveal that violence has, in some instances, intersected with transgender identity. Leslie Elaine Perez was convicted of a Houston murder in 1965. CeCe McDonald pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2012 after a fatal altercation in Minnesota. Amber McLaughlin, executed in 2023, had been convicted of the rape and murder of her ex-girlfriend in Missouri.
In 2022, Dana Rivers, who used to be a trans activist and teacher, was convicted of a horrific triple murder in California. Then there's Alex Ray Scott, who received life in prison back in 2020 for crimes in Oklahoma, including child molestation, murder, and even decapitation. These cases, though statistically uncommon, underscore the danger of pretending that no such pattern exists. To deny them outright, while simultaneously magnifying the identity of non-transgender perpetrators, reveals an ideological double standard.
This broader context sets the stage for understanding why gender ideology is not only psychologically destabilizing but also spiritually dangerous.
Psychological and Cultural Dynamics
Catholic philosopher Pablo Muñoz Iturrieta has documented these links in his book about gender ideology: Atrapado en el cuerpo equivocado (Trapped in the Wrong Body). He shows how rates of depression, suicidality, violence, and instability are significantly higher among those with gender dysphoria—and how affirmation often worsens these wounds.
The numbers shatter the culture of denial. Transgender-identified shooters remain statistical outliers, accounting for under 1% of mass incidents. Yet their presence in multiple high-profile school attacks, such as in the case of Hale in Nashvilleand most recently Westman in Minneapolis, is startling for a group comprising only about 1% of U.S. adults. Given their tiny share of the population, transgender shooters should be nonexistent. Yet their recurring role in school massacres exposes the instability bred by gender ideology—a reality our culture refuses to confront.
Beyond Psychology: The Demonic Dimension
Iturrieta's recent dialogue with Capuchin exorcist Fray Claudio Calderón shows the roots of this violence go deeper than psychology. They touch the theological and enter the demonic.
Iturrieta noted that the Annunciation shooter's diary described looking in the mirror and seeing not himself but Satan, who urged him to kill, telling him who, when, and how. Satan commanded him to take his own life afterward, sealing the act as a ritual sacrifice. In his writings, the shooter even confessed that killing Trump or Musk would be less satisfying than killing innocent Catholic children, whose purity gave him "more pleasure." As Iturrieta commented, only the demonic could delight in desecrating innocence as such.
Calderón confirmed what many in the Church fear to say: gender ideology is demonic. The devil is the father of lies and of ideologies that subvert life, truth, and beauty. Calderón called the situation an "epistemological evil," an assault on both will and mind. As Calderón noted, demons thrive on confusion, distortion, and inversion.
In his work as an exorcist, Calderón has encountered cases where gender dysphoria vanished after deliverance. Demons, he explained, often exploit sexuality, inducing dysphoria, vexations, and obsessions. Sexuality is a favorite weapon because it reflects the image of God in both males and females. Such a distortion is a direct affront to God Himself.
The Christian Broadcasting Network recently underscored this same truth in their coverage. In discussing the Minneapolis shooter's manifesto, which included anti-Christian and anti-Semitic messages, CBN's Raj Nair and Billy Hallowell called the act "the most clear-cut demonic thing possible," noting with Ephesians 6 that hatred of Jews, Catholics, and Christians is ultimately hatred of God Himself. (In fact, Westman had an image of Christ he would use as a shooting target.) Shooting children through the windows of a Catholic church is not just a crime or an illness; it is a manifestation of diabolical evil.
The Lie We Dare Not Name
The mainstream media calls the motive a "mystery." Health professionals and institutions that profit from and support gender ideology, whether they sincerely believe it or not, continue to insist that dysphoria has no connection with violence. Politicians tiptoe around identity categories, terrified of offending powerful lobbies. All the while, children are sacrificed in classrooms and houses of worship.
The overlooked connection, I argue, lies not in assuming all transgender individuals are violent—that would be unjust and unwarranted—but in how the societal denial of biological reality can intensify personal despair and rage, potentially leading to tragic outcomes as in the aforementioned cases.
A Christian Response
As Christians, we cannot remain silent. To expose falsehood is not an act of hatred but of love, for only by recognizing the true nature of a thing can we prevent further tragedies and call souls back to the truth. The Catechism reminds us that "the dignity of the human person is rooted in his creation in the image and likeness of God" (CCC 1700). From the fictional horror of Buffalo Bill to the real tragedies in Nashville and Minneapolis, we see the same pattern emerge: gender confusion joined to hatred of innocence and the profanation of what is sacred. We are called to confront not only the cultural and psychological dimensions of this crisis but also the deeper spiritual battle, while entrusting to Christ the souls of Harper Moyski, Fletcher Merkel, and all victims of such violence.