From Transition to Transgression
how trans ideology is leaving a bloody trail through American life
The Charlie Kirk assassination is an ongoing news story and part of an active criminal investigation, so the narrative is still evolving. What follows is accurate to the best of my knowledge as of early morning on Wednesday, September 17, 2025.
The most recent news dump in the Charlie Kirk assassination investigation released text messages between the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, and his roommate. The roommate is his romantic partner, a male transitioning to female, who I will refer to as Robinson’s boyfriend, for accuracy and clarity.
Here are screenshots of the released text messages:
These texts strongly suggest that Robinson’s boyfriend had no idea what he was planning.
They also, in my view, show that Robinson was not a psychopath. He framed the killing as a way to end Kirk’s “hate,” writing that “some hate can’t be negotiated out.” In his own mind, the assassination was an act of defense—both for the man he loved, whom he expresses genuine concern for throughout the exchange, and for the broader world.
Think about it in movie terms. If you were watching a thriller and a character facing the death penalty in a state that still uses firing squads, for a crime of worldwide notoriety, under a law-and-order president, turned to his lover and said: “You are all I worry about love”—wouldn’t you roll your eyes? Wouldn’t you nudge your date in the theater and laugh at the melodrama?
But that’s what Robinson actually wrote. That was the sentiment of a 22-year-old in love, carried along and justified by a powerful ideology.
In recent years we’ve seen multiple trans-identified mass shooters. We’ve also seen the emergence of the Zizians, a fringe vegan cult linked to six deaths, whose worldview is entangled with trans-ideological currents.
And now, a major political assassination has been carried out by a young man whose life revolved around Discord chats—the breeding grounds where ideological subcultures metastasize—and who believed he was defending both his boyfriend and the world itself from Charlie Kirk’s supposed “hate.”
In the face of mass shooters and this latest example — to say nothing of the way that trans ideology and activism has taken over the whole culture in the last decade — we have to ask: why is trans ideology so uniquely radicalizing?
I see five aspects of this movement that work together to make it so profoundly radicalizing. Running through all five is a dynamic I call APBPD: American Political Borderline Personality Disorder.
By APBPD, I mean the way Americans veer from one extreme to another, unable to hold a steady middle. We elect Obama, then Trump. We let crime run rampant, then prosecute drug users so harshly we built a multi-billion-dollar private-prison industry. We deregulate the banks, then nearly nationalize them when the bubble bursts. We defund police in one breath, then demand draconian sentencing laws the next. We swing from Woodstock to the Moral Majority, from “my body my choice” to forced vaccination mandates, from open borders rhetoric to calls for mass deportation.
This pendulum impulse—this national mood disorder—makes us vulnerable to movements that promise moral clarity, especially when they present themselves as defending the most endangered and marginalized of all.
That thread of volatility and overcorrection runs through all five aspects I will examine.
Victimhood as Authority
The first and most obvious dynamic is the way victimhood now functions as a source of moral authority. In Western culture, to be a victim is no longer simply to deserve compassion—it is to claim righteousness.
And in today’s hierarchy of suffering, trans people are cast as the ultimate victims. They are imagined as perpetually endangered, fragile, and embattled, surrounded on all sides by “hate.”
That positioning confers instant authority. Arguments that would otherwise require evidence or persuasion are accepted without question if they come framed as protecting trans lives. Dissent isn’t just disagreement; it’s recoded as cruelty, or even violence. To question the ideology is to be accused of harming “the most vulnerable.”
Once moral standing is fused with victimhood, escalation becomes easy to justify. If your cause is nothing less than the defense of the most oppressed people on earth, then almost any tactic—shouting down opponents, silencing critics, even physical violence—can be reframed as necessary protection. For the young and impressionable, that framing is intoxicating.
It elevates them instantly from ordinary participants in a pluralistic culture to defenders of a sacred class.
This is why victimhood, when valorized to the degree it is in trans ideology, can radicalize. It hands out moral badges for identity and then demands that anyone who questions those badges be treated not as fellow citizens but as existential threats.
Belief vs Treatment
The second radicalizing element is the demand not only for treatment, but for belief. Historically, liberal societies were built around pluralism: you could disagree in private thought as long as you treated people with a baseline of dignity and fairness in public life. You didn’t have to believe your neighbor’s religion was true, or their politics were wise—you just had to respect their rights.
The trans demand is different. It insists not just “treat me as,” but “believe me to be.” It is not enough to extend courtesy or use preferred terms; you must align your internal map of reality with theirs.
The radicalizing edge comes when compliance is measured not by outward behavior but by inward conviction. People who accede to this demand aren’t just practicing tolerance; they are practicing mental self-surveillance. They monitor their own thoughts, words, even jokes or private reactions, to be sure they conform.
Over time, this produces a split: those who enforce belief in themselves become “the enlightened,” while those who resist are cast as heretics—TERFs, fascists, enemies.
This is where the logic of “words as violence” comes in. Words are treated as violence not because they directly wound, but because they expose unapproved thoughts.
If thoughts must be policed, then speech becomes dangerous, and those who voice dissent are seen as perpetrators of harm. In that climate, radicalization follows naturally: when mere words are framed as violence, actual violence can come to feel like justified defense.
And once dissent is defined as violence, it becomes easy to harness something deeper still: the primal caretaking instincts of women and the protective instincts of men.
Hijacked Instincts
The third radicalizing element is the way trans ideology hijacks primal instincts—women’s caretaking impulse and men’s protective impulse. These are among the deepest reflexes in human social life: to nurture the fragile and shield the vulnerable. They don’t require argument; they operate at the level of instinct and duty.
Trans ideology exploits both. It portrays transwomen as uniquely endangered—fragile, innocent, forever at risk of “hate.” Women are enlisted to soothe, comfort, and tend; men are enlisted to defend. The cultural script is simple: if you are decent, you will care, and if you are strong, you will protect.
The meme “protect the dolls” distills this perfectly.
Transwomen are symbolically reduced to dolls—objects both delicate and infantilized—and the call is for everyone else to act as guardians. Dolls, long used to train the caretaking instincts of little girls, are here reframed as beings so fragile they also demand the protective vigilance of men.
It’s a clever inversion: take the most basic human instincts, recode them in the service of an ideology, and moralize them as obligations.
Once those instincts are captured, resistance feels like betrayal of one’s deepest duties. A woman who refuses to affirm is made to feel cold and cruel. A man who refuses to defend is made to feel cowardly or dishonorable. In this way, natural reflexes of care and protection are rerouted into ideological compliance.
And when people are told their honor, decency, or love depends on defending the “dolls,” escalation—including violence—can come to feel not only justified but noble.
The Totalizing Promise: Deliverance
The fourth radicalizing element is the totalizing nature of trans ideology. It does not offer a modest adjustment to life; it promises a complete reboot.
Detransitioners often describe this as one of the main ways they were first pulled in—the allure of a fresh start, a way to wipe clean the pain or trauma of the past and step into an entirely new self.
That promise is not merely therapeutic; it is magical. It tells a man he can become a woman, or a woman she can become a man—something flatly impossible in the material world. And yet it is precisely that impossible promise that gives the movement its force.
If this transformation can be achieved, then what can’t be? Every other claim—about identity, justice, society, even the nature of truth—seems plausible by comparison.
This is where the online world—especially Discord subcultures—supercharges the effect. Discord offers an always-on catechism: channels that supply constant micro-doses of meaning, a shared lexicon, and a rolling stream of peer affirmation.
You don’t simply adopt new terms; you enter a world with its own rituals (pronoun rounds, content warnings, “educate yourself” scripts), its own courts (mods and ban hammers), and its own sacraments (screenshots, call-outs, public abasements followed by reinstatement).
The result is a comprehensive moral ecology that makes the new identity feel not only true but good.
Inside these servers, adherence is gamified. There are quests (coming out, changing names, starting HRT), boss levels (surgeries), and speedruns (compressing the timeline to prove sincerity).
Purity spirals form quickly: those who hesitate are “eggs,” those who ask questions are “unsafe,” and those who dissent are “fascists” or “TERFs.” The platform’s mechanics—badges, boosts, roles—map neatly onto status hierarchies that reward zeal over prudence, critical thought, or basic sanity.
Discord also builds what amounts to a memetic immune system. Any external critique is pre-labeled as “hate,” any internal doubt is reinterpreted as trauma talking, and any attempt to leave becomes proof you were never authentic.
The social architecture enforces a no-exit logic: block the “toxic” family member, cut off the “unsafe” friend, replace them with a “family of choice” in the server. Once your social world is routed through the ideology’s channels, leaving feels like death; staying feels like protection, belonging, and mission.
In a totalizing environment like this, the original magical promise—turning a man into a woman, a woman into a man—functions as the keystone.
If that can be true, then speech norms, sports categories, prisons, rape shelters, medicine, and law can all be rebuilt around it. The worldview doesn’t just claim a part of life; it claims the map itself.
And when a map claims everything, those who defend it start to believe they are defending reality itself.
That’s the point at which radicalization changes from a risk to a trajectory.
Vulnerability
The fifth radicalizing element is vulnerability. I know this one personally. I grew up with more male-typical interests than female-typical, and like many girls who were victims of childhood sexual abuse, I spent years wishing I could be a boy instead. I believed that if I had been a boy, it wouldn’t have happened—and eight-year-old me? Well, she was right about that.
If I had first encountered trans ideology in that moment of fragility, I would have been an easy mark. That longing to escape, to shed the old self and step into a new one, is powerful—and dangerous—when the ideology promises exactly that. It is only because I was in therapy—with a real therapist, not a paid friend—that I didn’t fall for it.
When I was in college, I asked him once, “What if I decided I wanted to transition? Would you support it?” (I wasn’t seriously considering it, but I was so miserable, and had been for so long, that I couldn’t help but ponder the notion that nearly every professor in nearly every course either explicitly or implicitly implied was good, noble, and a source of joy.)
To his everlasting credit, he took the notion seriously, as ridiculous as it was. He told me that if I was asking him if he thought I was male, in any sense, or ever had been or ever could be, the answer was no. If I was asking if he would support my getting access to medical transition out of any belief that I was, ever had been, or ever could be male, then the answer was no. But if I thought that transition might work for me “as a strategy for happiness,” then he was open-minded. I was welcome to try to convince him. If I did, and if he remained convinced over a long period of time, then at that point we could talk about the risks to my health, the costs and benefits, and only then would the possibility of his support even become relevant.
I grinned and said, “I was just curious. I’m not actually considering it.”
He said, “I assumed as much, but I gave you an honest answer.”
Now compare his reaction to the reaction of the average therapist in 2025. If a female client today admits that, even for a moment, she once wished she had been male—perhaps as an obvious response to sexual trauma—what happens?
In many jurisdictions, therapists are bound by “affirmation-first” standards of care. State laws like California’s ban on “conversion therapy,” combined with professional guidelines from the American Psychological Association and World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), strongly discourage clinicians from questioning a patient’s stated identity. In practice, this means that hesitation, probing, or exploring other explanations for dysphoria can be treated as unethical—or even legally risky. A therapist who responded as mine did could indeed face complaints to a licensing board, and in some states could be accused of violating anti-conversion-therapy statutes.
That is how far the pendulum has swung. What once would have been a therapeutic conversation is now framed as malpractice. The law and the licensing environment tilt overwhelmingly toward instant affirmation, not careful discernment.
And it promises this impossible, emotional utopia to young people who are damaged by trauma and not yet mature enough to recognize the bullshit for what it is.
Robinson, the young man who killed Charlie Kirk, had his own vulnerabilities. He was gay in a conservative family and culture, with all the shame and alienation that implies. The ideology, to say nothing of a first-love that let him pretend not to be gay (and oh, how intoxicating that must’ve been, especially for a boy with a law-enforcement, macho dad) gave him both a new identity and a mission.
For him, radicalization wasn’t just about politics; it was likely about survival, love, and meaning.
But the truth is that even children from intact, two-parent families are vulnerable today. The standard of “good enough parenting” that sufficed in the past no longer suffices. In 2025, being good enough means not just providing food, shelter, and affection—it means recognizing the predatory pull of online subcultures.
It means standing against the tide of “ALL THE OTHER KIDS” when your child says everyone else has a smartphone, everyone else is on Discord, everyone else is on TikTok.
And unlike the past, that’s not teenage exaggeration—it’s often the literal truth. Parents who step up to the challenge may find their child is indeed the only one in the class without unfiltered internet access.
Few parents are willing to bear the cost of that isolation, and so children are left exposed.
Layer onto this the collective trauma of COVID. An entire generation was locked down, cut off from peers, school, sports, and the ordinary structures of growing up. Even kids without a high Adverse Childhood Events score carry that wound.
Loneliness, dislocation, and too much time online became their developmental environment. Into that vacuum flowed the ideological communities that promised belonging, clarity, and a way to reimagine the self.
Vulnerability, then, is the common denominator.
Whether it comes from trauma, family culture, or the sheer fragility of growing up in an era of hyper-connected isolation, it primes young people to grasp at the totalizing promises of trans ideology. And when those promises are reinforced by the four dynamics I’ve outlined—victimhood as authority, belief as obligation, hijacked instincts, and the allure of a magical reboot—the path to radicalization becomes frighteningly clear.
Conclusion
The Charlie Kirk assassination is not an isolated tragedy. It is the visible tip of a deeper cultural pattern: the way trans ideology radicalizes by blending victimhood with moral authority, demanding belief rather than tolerance, hijacking primal instincts, offering a totalizing promise of deliverance, and exploiting the vulnerabilities of a generation already battered by trauma and dislocation.
None of this means every trans-identified person is violent, nor that every young person who drifts into these circles is doomed.
But it does mean the movement itself has become one of the most potent radicalizing forces in American life. It recruits the wounded and the lonely, it rewards extremism over balance, and it justifies escalation in the name of “protection.”
We should not be surprised when a culture that treats words as violence eventually produces people who treat violence as words. The ideology’s own logic leads there.
And until we confront that logic head-on—until we resist the seduction of victimhood as righteousness and the demand for enforced belief—we will see more Robinsons, not fewer.
The question, then, is not whether this ideology radicalizes. The question is how many more young people will be captured by it before we find the courage to say no.
A culture that mistakes fragility for holiness will always end up sanctifying violence.
Call words violence long enough, and someone will eventually pick up a gun to correct the grammar.
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