As I move through this life, I try to find reasons to be grateful. Even very dark times can have an upside, if you’re looking for it. For instance, the mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville — the 130th mass shooting in the United States in 2023, and the 37th mass shooting in March 2023 alone — might look like a pure tragedy. Three adults and three children were killed, so, by any rational assessment, that is what it is.

I, however, choose to see the bright side: We’ve finally figured out how to make Republicans give a shit about mass shootings.

The school shooter in Nashville, who was killed by police at the scene of the crime, was described as “female” in certain early reports. Later coverage, based largely on scouring the alleged shooter’s social media presence, identified him as a 28-year-old trans man named Aiden Bray.

There are reasons to be skeptical here: Several mass shootings have given rise to unfounded conspiracy theories about the shooter being trans. In 2016, Ted Cruz claimed that Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Lewis Dear was a “transgendered leftist activist,” based on Dear having incorrectly checked “female” instead of “male” on a voter registration form. After the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona claimed that the killer was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien named Salvatore Ramos,” which ultimately led to a random trans woman from Georgia being wrongly identified as Ramos on social media.

Still: Police have seemingly confirmed that Aiden Bray was transgender. (More accurately, according to the New York Post, they “feel that she identifies as trans, but we’re still in the initial investigation into all of that and if it actually played a role into this incident.”) There are reasons to take this particular rumor more seriously than the others.

So, sure: Maybe Aiden Bray really was a transgender school shooter. Maybe, in America’s long and illustrious history of fucked-up, manifesto-scribbling guys deciding to prove their masculinity by firing an assault rifle at children — Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, Adam Lanza, Nikolas Cruz, the list has several hundred more entries — one of those dipshit fucked-up guys was trans.

What, exactly, would it prove if that were the case? That trans people are all terrorists? That being trans is a mental illness? That testosterone — which Bray may not have even been taking— is pure murder juice?

See, here’s what I think it proves: There are a whole lot of mass shootings in America. There are so many mass shootings, in fact, that we’ve started to run out of cisgender white men to commit them, and it’s become statistically inevitable that at least some of the hundreds of mass shootings per year (again, Nashville is the 37th in March alone; the 38th mass shooting was committed less than 24 hours later in Maryland) will be committed by people who aren’t cis, straight, male and white.

If demographics are significant to mass murder — or if testosterone really does have 28 Days Later rage-virus capacities — then the burden of suspicion still rests with the cis guys, who have committed 98 percent of all mass shootings in US history. (The Violence Project, which tracks mass shooting data, says that of the 191 mass shooters in its database, four were women, and two of those women partnered with a male shooter to commit the crimes.) It also rests with white people, who have committed just over half of all mass shootings in US history.

Identity does, pretty clearly, play a role here — and gender identity plays a huge one. A mass shooting is an act of domination. It asserts the shooter’s will through violence. Men are encouraged to build up a sense of power and agency through violence, and so are white people, and the combination of the two leads white guys into the gun aisle of Wal-Mart at disproportionately high rates. Aiden Bray does appear to have been a white guy, and his medical history evidently didn’t stop him from defining his whiteness and masculinity in the same patriarchal, annihilating terms as every other gun-toting shithead. This isn’t the “trans men are men” moment I was hoping for, but it tracks.

That’s not what the takeaway will be, though. White masculinity is unmarked. Cis masculinity is unmarked. “White cis man” isn’t an identity, it’s a default setting. Only people who belong to marginalized demographics — trans, or Black, or immigrants, or Muslims, or or or — are defined in demographic terms. When a white, cis guy shoots up a school, a crazy person shot up a school. When a white, trans guy shoots up a school, trans people are terrorists.

Just as there have been Black mass shooters (Lee Boyd Malvo), and Muslim mass shooters (Omar Mateen), and immigrant mass shooters (Seung-Hui Cho) there may now be a trans mass shooter — but none of these men are representative of their communities. They’re not even representative of guys who shoot people. They are spectacularized exceptions, used to whip up hatred and create false equivalencies. They distract the public from what we know about violence, namely, that it almost always comes from people in power.

Guns are not elitist. They don’t care who buys them. They work just the same in every pair of hands. As long as guns are widely available, some marginalized men will buy them and participate in the grand American tradition of trying to prove their manhood through indiscriminate killing. That’s not surprising. What’s surprising is how few marginalized men do so. Out of millions of trans men in America, one became a mass shooter, yet violence comes to us every day from men with much less to fear.

Edit: One of the hateful Tweets originally quoted in this article came from a troll account impersonating a real medical doctor (who does not, as far as I know, hate trans people). It’s been deleted to slow the spread of misinformation.