In the 1990s, people blamed “violent video games” like Doom for school shootings. Then it was Prozac.

Were those assumptions entirely wrong? Probably not. They were a piece of a larger puzzle.

(The leading cause of school shootings is still the media turning school shooters into celebrities beginning with the Columbine duo. But that’s just a vector, it’s not necessarily the motive. Some school shooters might have instead become serial killers or committed other violent crimes.)

We’ve had a rash of violence by mentally disturbed people convinced that they were transgender. The most notorious of these was Covenant School shooter Audrey Hale who had convinced herself she was a boy.

After keeping her manifesto secret to avoid “spreading conspiracy theories”, more of it has leaked and the portions published by the Tennessee Star make it abundantly clear that she was obsessed with her delusions.

“A terrible feeling to know I am nothing of the gender I was born of,” Hale wrote in the entry. She continued, “I am the most unhappy boy alive. I wish to be dead.”

She also wrote an entry titled “My Imaginary Penis,” in which Hale wrote about her gender struggles and detailed sexual fantasies she expressed using stuffed animals.

“I finally found the answer – that changing one’s gender is possible,” wrote Hale in the March 11, 2023, entry. She later described simulating intercourse between a “stuffed boy doll” she named Tony and another stuffed animal over the course of hours.

At the top of the entry, Hale also seemed to question whether her alleged autism diagnosis was a result of her “male brain.”

On the first page of the notebook, Hale questioned, “why does my brain not work right?” Then wrote, “Cause I was born wrong.” She then wrote, “Nothing on earth can save me… never ending pain. Religion won’t save.”

In an undated, two-sentence entry approximately 60 pages later, Hale wrote, “The [cocoon] of my old self will die when I leave my body behind and the boy in me will be free; in the butterfly transformation; the real me.”

Like a lot of violent teens, Audrey Hale was obsessively self-involved, was living in a fantasy world and had been diagnosed with assorted psychological problems. And was on meds for them.

While the source of Hale’s purported discomfort is unclear, musculoskeletal pain is a possible side effect of a medication The Star learned was prescribed to Hale by staff at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC).

In addition to musculoskeletal pain, the National Institutes of Health explains side effects for that medication, the anti-anxiety drug Buspirone, include abnormal dreams, outbursts of anger, tremors, and physical weakness.

Hale was additionally prescribed Escitalopram, better known as Lexapro, and Medical News Today explains that using the depression drug with Buspirone could “increase the risk of side effects” for both medications.

One of the dirty secrets of the transgender movement is that the new ‘recruits’ are often depressed teens prone to obsessive fantasies who often oscillate between manic and depressive states.

In other words the population likeliest to be school shooters anyway.

Transgenderism is just the latest mania, a delusion around which some build an identity, enabled by a corrupt woke political and medical class eager for a new ‘identity’ to affirm.

Did Audrey Hale kill a bunch of kids because she was in the depths of a transgender delusion or was she in the depths of a transgender delusion because she was a disturbed person who would go on to pursue a plot for a horrific murder-suicide sure to make her mark on society? Likely the latter.

But would Hale have killed a bunch of kids if we were in the 1980s in which there were no social media rabbit holes, the transgender movement was an obscure fringe (and medical experimentation on gender shifting had been discredited a decade earlier) and doctors were also less likely to shove cocktails of brand name drugs at every depressed teen? Hard to know, but the statistics speak for themselves.

Audrey Hale was a monster, but she was a monster woke culture and its allied medical establishment helped create.