The claim that human persons can change their fundamental sexual identity has never been supported by any sound science. That hasn’t prevented many lawmakers in the U.S., and much of the U.S. medical establishment, from buying into the agendas of “transgender” activists.

But in recent months, the tide of public opinion has begun to take a decisive turn. Tragically, one of the reasons for this pushback against transgender ideology is the recent series of horrific mass shootings in student settings committed by individuals who identified as transgender.

The latest such tragedy took place in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where a man who had “transitioned” as an adult opened fire during a Feb. 16 high-school hockey game, killing his ex-wife and his own biological son and critically injuring three other people before committing suicide.

Only five days earlier, the entire nation of Canada was anguished after an 18-year-old male, who underwent gender-transition treatments as an adolescent, murdered his mother and another of her sons in their home in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. He then traveled to a nearby high school in the small and isolated community, where he killed five students and wounded another 25 people before taking his own life.

Individuals who identified as transgender were also responsible for the 2025 shooting at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis, where two children in attendance at their Catholic school’s Mass were killed, and for the 2023 shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, which claimed the lives of three schoolchildren and three school employees.

No one should ever suggest that these appalling actions, undertaken by four deeply disturbed human beings, are representative of people who identify as transgender. Categorically, that’s not true.

But these horrors are collective tragedies, and it’s not demonization to point out that the perpetrators had undergone “gender transitioning.” Individuals who identify as members of the opposite gender, and who attempt to deny their biological identities via destructive hormonal and surgical procedures, are troubled individuals who need help of a completely different nature from the medical profession and from society as a whole.

It’s hard enough to deal with this problem, only to be hurt further by the medical profession rather than helped.

Supporters of the false ideology of transgenderism are aware that this month’s tragic pair of mass shootings in student settings has reinforced the concerns of Americans. It was no accident that The New York Times, a consistent cheerleader for transgender activism, published an article two days after the Pawtucket incident, taking note of the broadening legislative pushback that’s underway across the nation.

While this pushback is strongest in the arena of banning biological males from competing in women’s sports, it’s also taking place with respect to banning “gender transition” treatments for minors and with legally recognizing transgender identity at all.

The U.S. medical profession — including the American Medical Association, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and major hospitals in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. — is in the process of walking back its earlier insistence that scientific evidence has proven the benefit of providing hormonal and surgical treatments to minors. Comprehensive studies have demolished this claim, prompting some European nations to institute bans on such treatments for minors.

A similar legal and medical recalibration was delayed here, due to the strength of the transgender lobby. But it’s now fully underway — and powerfully reinforced by a pair of recent legal developments.

In January, Fox Varian, a young woman who underwent gender-transition treatments, including a double mastectomy, was awarded a landmark $2-million jury verdict in her malpractice lawsuit against the medical practitioners involved with her mastectomy.

And on Feb. 19, the Board of Education of Montgomery County, Maryland, was ordered to pay $1.5 million in damages to a coalition of religious parents who had objected to the board’s refusal to allow parental opt-outs from readings of storybooks that promote gender transitioning, “Pride” parades and pronoun preferences.

In the aggregate, these recent events confirm the approach that the Catholic Church has advocated for people who experience confusion about their authentic sexual identities. The U.S. bishops released a document in 2023 that addresses this issue. It instructed Catholic medical providers to reject medical interventions that damage the human body and to instead “provide the best medical care, as well as Christ’s compassionate accompaniment, to all patients, no matter who they may be or from what condition they may be suffering.”

Amen to that spiritually sage and medically sound direction. We should hope and pray that the rest of the nation’s medical establishment is now willing to follow it, too.