The recent murder of six people (including three children) at a school in Nashville by a transgender activist should surprise no one. The response to it reveals an embrace of the denial of reality and inversion of morality that can produce only more of the same atrocities.

Transgenderism is a mental illness. It stems from a social contagion rampant in American urban centers, spread by social media and the support of corrupt schoolteachers and administrators who have chosen to pursue child sacrifice rather than the education and protection of young people. It feeds on narcissism and victim culture, two toxic wells we have been digging for a number of years. The poison they produce has ruined the minds and bodies of thousands of American children and young adults. We now have a generation of Americans that has “identified” itself out of any possible future not filled with misery and early death. A boy who pursues a chemical and surgical solution to a crisis of identity will never draw healthy partners —men or women—and will simply enter a downward spiral of depression, resentment, and anger toward a world that promised him a medical cure for his emotional suffering. He will wind up alone and justifiably filled with a desire for vengeance.

The disaffected often lash out, especially when they feel they have nothing less to lose, because they feel they have no future to pursue. Once the Nashville school shooter’s manifesto is made public, we will have a better idea of the specific motivation of this sick young woman. I expect it will include anger, alienation, resentment, and revenge, all products of narcissism and victim culture, all remarkably well-represented in the transgender activist movement. The shooter very likely saw herself as a victim while spending all her time looking in the mirror, and growing to hate what she saw. I doubt we will read one word of gratitude in her manifesto, as those who live in gratitude rarely carry out a plan to take the lives of others.

Rather than condemn this woman and what she did, many leaders responded to the murders by labeling the murderer as a victim, while simultaneously attacking the actual victims whose lives she took. News organizations studiously avoided referring to the shooter as a man or woman, some refusing to even use pronouns to refer to her at all. Bloggers and Twitter users protested the “deadnaming” of the murderer who was, ironically in this case, actually dead. Sandy Cortez immediately began speaking about “transphobia,” while the White House press secretary blamed assault weapons. The President also blamed assault weapons but only after a lengthy discourse on ice cream, revealing he is also suffering from a serious form of mental illness. A transactivist group called the Trans Radical Activist Network (TRAN) announced a “trans day of vengeance” to punish those responsible for the death of the transactivist murderer. Is this not a denial of reality and an inversion of morality? A young woman murders children in a school, and we are ordered to feel sorry for her while self-flagellating. This reveals a sickness in our society that runs as deep as the mental illness in the shooter.

Previous mass shootings have consistently provoked a polarized set of responses focused on gun control. Most Americans sided with either a gun restriction or gun liberalization direction as a legislative solution to the problem of violence. This time, though, something new has emerged: official glorification of the shooter. Perhaps there is no other choice, politically. When identifying as a transgender person necessitates that you identify as a victim, no matter what acts of evil you perform, you can only be seen as the victim. And the lives you take must be assigned some degree of guilt and responsibility. In this case, the dead children are guilty because they attend a Christian school whose values oppose the celebration of transgenderism.

Anorexia became widespread while I was in training and during the first decade of my career. Most anorexics are young girls. All see themselves in a way that inverts reality—thin is fat. They are narcissistically preoccupied with an impaired capacity to observe and interpret reality. No clinician ever proposed “affirming” the anorexic state as normal and healthy or prescribed weight-loss drugs to ensure the patient stay dangerously underweight and at risk of life-threatening complications. Yet that is exactly what clinicians are doing today with transgender youth: affirming their illness and ensuring they remain sick. They are paving the way for their early death. And politicians, media, and activist groups are all cheering this along as morally necessary. Anyone who opposes it is accused of “transphobia” and “denying medical care.” The truth is just the opposite.

The Nashville school shooting has provided us with perhaps the clearest example of how denying reality and worshipping narcissism endemic in the transgender movement leads to a horrific end. This is the logical and only endpoint—death. It’s time to accept that we are heading down a very dark road, where the price we pay for preventing hurt feelings is the death of children. There will most certainly be more to come.