The American Churchman: Transgenderism Vs. Creation

Welcome to the first ever in the history of podcasts, American Churchmen Podcast. I am your host, John Harris, and I have with me my co-host, Matthew Pearson. Matthew, everyone listening has been listening, hearing my TruthScript Tuesdays.

Why don't you tell them a little bit about yourself and who you are, and then we'll tackle some of the subjects that we're gonna talk about today.

Yeah, certainly, but as John said, my name is Matthew Pearson. Some of you, if you keep up with John on Twitter, may have seen me around on there. We're in very similar circles and all that, but yeah, I'm just a good bud of John, you know?

Met him in person once, so I guess we're like that now. No, but I'm a seminary student at Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando, and I love God, I love studying the things of God. I aspire to pastoral ministry, but I'm also very interested in the cultural issues that are at hand, and especially think that has significant impact for the church.

So when John reached out about this idea, I was, yeah, I was excited about it. So that's me, I'm happy to be here, and yeah, I'm just very excited.

Awesome, awesome, and I wanted to have Matthew along for not just this episode, but Matthew and I are gonna be doing most of the American Churchmen podcasts moving forward, because Matthew is very bright, and he does bring a different perspective.

This is kind of humbling for me, but I'm a millennial, which I guess is no longer the up-and-coming cool generation. I am now becoming an older guy, and anyway, Matthew brings a fresh perspective on some of the things that the Zoomer generation is dealing with, which actually is gonna be particularly important today as we talk about transgenderism.

And so anyway, Matthew, just thank you for being willing to do this, to co-host. For everyone else who's listening, this show is obviously new, but most of you are familiar with the TruthScript Tuesday podcast that I've done, which was basically just going through articles at the TruthScript website.

This podcast is also sponsored by TruthScript, but it's gonna be a little different. We're not gonna go through as many articles. We're probably gonna take a closer look at maybe one, maybe two. Sometimes we won't even do an article, we'll just be interviewing people, authors, people who have written for TruthScript mostly.

And we're gonna talk about theological topics, cultural topics, political topics, all of the above, with a special focus on really what it means to be a man, a Christian man specifically, in the 21st century, and how can we as Christians encourage other Christians to meet the obligations that society really is reinforcing against.

They don't want us to meet those obligations. They don't want us to be men. And so today we have an article we're gonna look at. We have a broader subject of transgenderism that we're gonna be talking about.

But one of the key features of these podcasts moving forward is going to be talking about an attribute of God. And I'm really excited to do that. And so I've been obviously explaining what the podcast is about moving forward, but in general, we're just gonna start with an attribute of God.

I do need to just remind everyone real quick before I do that, that TruthScript, which sponsors this podcast, is a 501c3 organization. And if you wanna donate to TruthScript, just go to truthscript .com, scroll down to the bottom.

There's this little tab that says donate. You can donate there. It helps us out greatly. We have a lot of stuff coming up. We actually have a conference that's coming up. I don't even know if Matthew knows about this, but it's called Christianity and the American Founding.

And that's coming up at the end of April. We'll have a website for that. And we got some great speakers already lined up. We have Zach Garris, who's gonna be there. Sean McGowan is gonna be there. Will Tanner, or not Will Tanner, Jacob Tanner is gonna be there.

We have Stephen Wolfe. We have Sam Smith, who is the head of the history department at Liberty University is gonna be there, and some others who have yet to confirm. So this is a pretty big deal. And hopefully you'll get to be there as well, Matthew.

We'll have to figure that out. We haven't talked about it yet.

My interest has peaked. I had no idea about this actually, but I'm glad to learn about it live on the air.

Yes, yes, you're learning about it in real time as everyone else is. It's gonna be focusing on different denominations and traditions. So we have congregationalism and Presbyterianism and really just Protestant denominations that had an impact in America.

So let's start with this attribute of God. Matthew, I know you're in seminary. Are you doing systematic theology this year?

No, not yet. I just got started. So no systematic classes. I mean, I guess the closest thing I have is with Dr. Michael Allen. I have intro to pastoral and theological studies. So that's somewhat similar, but I'll get there soon, I'm sure.

I'll get there soon.

Well, I mean, I know you probably are pretty well-versed on the Trinity. What would be a definition, if someone asked you what the Trinity is from a different religious background, what would you tell them?

Oh boy, that's quite the question. Is it not? You know, I hesitate to even just come up with something off the dome. I could always just say, you know, three persons, one God, just very, very simple. But you know what?

Just to be safe, John, I kind of expected something like this from you.

So what I'm just gonna do is I'm just gonna read.

No, no, no, you're good.

I'm just playing around. What I'm just gonna do is read to you a chapter 2 .3 of the Westminster Confession of Faith, because I feel like they could say it

Perfect.

Much better than I can, so yeah. So it says in Westminster chapter 2 .3, in the unity of the Godhead, there'll be three persons of one substance, power, and eternity. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father, the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son. So that's like a basic definition of it.

If you want something a bit more thorough, something I'd recommend going to is not just like the Nicene Creed, but that's great, but also the Athanasian Creed. That goes into great, great, I actually read it right before this cast, and it goes into great detail on helping to define the Trinity.

And part of when we're talking about the Trinity is you have to have this idea that there is one God, but there are three persons, or hypostasis, if I'm saying that right. And the way in which we distinguish them is by their modes of relation.

So we distinguish the Father from the Son because the Father begets the Son. We distinguish the Son from the Father because the Son is begotten of the Father. And we distinguish the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son because the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father.

And if you're a Western Christian and the Son, if you're an Eastern Christian, then you'd just say from the Father, but that's a lot of meat and potatoes, and I don't know if we'll get into those differences today, but yeah, that's the Trinity, and every Christian should know a little bit about it, because it's very important.

Foundation.

What is the difference between the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed?

Yeah, so the Nicene Creed was the creed which was produced at the Council of Nicaea, not in its complete form. The part about the Holy Spirit was added at a later council. I don't remember which one exactly it was, but it was 40-ish years later, if I remember rightly.

But so the Nicene Creed is just, that's like the basic creed that a lot of, if you go to like a church website of a somewhat confessional church and they list what we believe, they may list their confession of faith, but then they'll usually have the apostles and then the Nicene Creed.

The Athanasian Creed came about, so it's called the Athanasian Creed, but we don't know if Athanasius actually wrote it, but he probably did not. But that came about, I don't remember what exact year it came about, but that came about much later.

And it was used widely in Western churches because it does have the idea that the spirit proceeds from the father and the son there. But they're pretty distinct in that the Athanasian is just much more specific on the Trinity, whereas the Nicene Creed, it mentions and codifies the Trinity, but it has much more, like it's the basic outline of the Apostles' Creed with expanded Nicene and Trinitarian theology, basically.

That's excellent. Yeah, I don't think we actually have a date for the Athanasian Creed, because I don't think it was the product of a council, which we have firm dates on. It more developed. And that's my understanding, at least.

Maybe there is a date that I'm not aware of, but I think you were thinking of the first council of Constantinople. I just looked it up, so I didn't know that off the top of my head, but.

No, that's what it, that's, yeah, that's it.

That expanded the Nicene Creed. But real briefly, or really briefly, let's just talk about a few of the objections to this, because this is a unique belief that Christians hold that other religions and religious cults obviously disagree with.

And it would seem, I think, at a first glance, for good reason, because it seems like a complicated and hard to understand belief. What do you mean that there is one Godhead, three persons that are distinct, yet they share the same divine essence?

Co-equal, co-eternal, and fully God. That is so different than any other religion that I can think of. So Arianism was the, was one of the primary challenges to the Trinity. And that was solved, more or less, at the Council of Nicaea.

That's what they were

Through the Jehovah's Witnesses, again, though. So thank you for them.

Yeah, the Jehovah's Witnesses. I think there's another cult, right, that's Arian. But they're, yeah, the most prominent one.

Probably, yeah, yeah.

And Arianists, Arians deny the full divinity of Christ. They claim that Jesus is a created being, not of co-eternal with God the Father, right? And then you have modalists, or Sabellianists, who assert that God is not three distinct persons, but rather one person who manifests in three different modes or forms.

And so God takes on, like, it's like shave shifter,.

I guess, I don't know.

It's almost like when you say that God's three persons for them, they could be like, oh yeah, he's three different personas. He has this one here, and then this one here, and he kind of shifts. So, and you see that a lot today in among oneness Pentecostals.

There were actually a few of those people at my private Christian school growing up, and I used to always argue with them. That was a lot of fun.

Did you always, because what I always hear bred up with them is what do you do when God the Father at Christ's baptism says, this is my beloved son whom I will please, and then the Holy Spirit descends like a dove.

You have all three represented there. I guess, like, how is he in all three modes simultaneously? I've never actually heard an answer from their tradition,.

But.

Maybe what they would say is something like, well, the, you know, the massive power of God, he's able to manifest his different personas at the same time because God's not bound by our limits.

They could probably just say that, I don't know.

Yeah.

And then subordinationism holds that the son and the Holy Spirit are subordinate to the Father in essence and authority. That's another.

That sounds familiar.

Yeah.

It sounds like eternal functional subordination, doesn't it?

Yeah, which is different, of course. It's more orthodox, but that doesn't mean that it actually is orthodox. And that's another reason why the Athanasian Creed is very helpful because it helps to clarify that according to divinity, the son and the Spirit are not in submission to the Father.

You can still have this idea of, you still have this idea of the monarchy of the Father because it is from the Father that the son is eternally begotten and from whom the Spirit eternally proceeds. But no, there's no divine submission because submission requires exercise of will and will goes with nature or essence.

So if there's multiple wills within the Godhead, that necessitates multiple essences. And if there's multiple essences, there are multiple gods, and then you have tritheism and then you're just polytheist, so.

Right, yeah. And I think that's the problem with eternal functional subordination as well. It's a little bit like talking, I think, about certain forms of Arminian. I shouldn't even say certain forms.

I'm trying to couch my language. I mean, I'll just say I'm Reformed, so I believe Arminianism. It's not a heresy in and of itself. It's one breath away from it, though. It's a step away from it. And thank God that Arminians who do believe that man is autonomous in a certain sense are not consistent with that.

And I would say the same thing about people who believe in the eternal functional subordination. They're not consistent, but they do believe in some kind of a hierarchy. And so Jesus, they'll take verses about Jesus in his humanity and then apply that to the second person of the Trinity.

And say that he's not equal to God in the sense of the authority that God has is above or beyond. So there is an ordering in the Trinity, but it is not a hierarchical ordering. And then we have Unitarianism, of course, which rejects the doctrine of the Trinity entirely.

And then Tritheism, which you mentioned, suggests that the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit are three separate gods, or rather that one God, or three separate gods, rather than one God and three persons,.

Which is the Trinity.

So this is a doctrine that is more complicated than perhaps some of the other attributes of God we're gonna be talking about. I saved the first, the most complicated one for the first opportunity, I guess.

But in most of, I don't know why this is, but in most of the lists, traditional lists of attributes of God, that is the first one listed. So trying to be Is it Trinity, yeah.

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. When I was on my drive back here, I was wondering, I'm like, is Trinity an attribute? And then I realized, oh yeah, the idea that God is three subsistences a part of one substance.

Yeah, that would be, I guess we could say an attribute. So yeah, that makes sense, so yeah.

So bridging the conversation we're having now to the next one, we're gonna be talking about transgenderism, and specifically this Nashville shooter manifesto and making some broad conclusions from it.

But I thought it was appropriate that we talk about the Trinity and then talk about this in a way, just because we're talking about being and we're talking about identity. And when it comes to personal identity, like God has designed us in a specific way.

It says in his image, he has made man. And I wanna talk about, I wanna get there eventually, but whether or not transgenderism is a direct attack on the image of God and maybe the most like potent attack, like blatant attack, a complete rejection of the way God has actually made someone.

And obviously some of these heresies regarding the Trinity are complete attacks on the identity of God himself. And so attacking man, attacking God, attacking our natures, attacking who we are is always going to have detrimental effects.

So we already have comments coming in. Someone says, Paul Kern says, there was a cult where the female goddess was both male and female as she wished. Sounds like the transgender cult. I've heard about this.

I've heard that this runs through a lot of different pagan religions. In fact, I don't know how, how do you pronounce it? Bofoment? Or I'm probably botching. Bafoment, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

That's Bafoment. It has a breast on the statue, but while despite having more masculine appearances.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's the Satanist statue. Often we see that's what a representation.

And I think I'm part of what's helpful for this conversation is remembering like, as the author, Solomon of Ecclesiastes says, there's nothing new under the sun. It's not like, oh, all of a sudden, in Germany, these random people just came up with transgenderism.

And it's like, well, sure. And it's modern articulation, yes. But the idea of men cross-dressing, I mean, there's a reason that's prohibited in the Mosaic polity, because that was a thing where for like weird ritual, like sex things that they would conduct in religious settings, they sometimes would dress like the women or they would even play the part of the women.

And as a matter of fact, there is like this, I don't remember what the studies is. It's like African studies from this African-American female scholar. And she wrote this book on different gender identities among like various African tribes or whatever.

And she's like, see, this is proof that our Western conception of gender is not the same as around the world. And as a Christian, I say, well, I mean, that doesn't shock me that pagan cultures would have things that Satan so obviously loves and supports, you know?

So I think that just makes sense to see that kind of come about, even cross-culturally, even in primitive times. Because we know that Satan hates the order of God because Satan rebelled against the order of God.

So I think that's something that we have to consider as well when we're looking at this, is that in its particular iteration, yes, it's somewhat new, but it's been around a bit. There's nothing new under the sun.

So it's funny you mentioned, and I can't remember the name of that person, but I'm pretty sure I know who you're talking about.

Oh, you do? Yeah.

Well, I think it was Jamar Tisby a few years ago, maybe two years ago, had, I wish I could remember her name, but he had that lady you're talking about on his podcast to talk about like post-colonialism or something.

And Jamar Tisby went to RTS. He's, I don't know if he's still Presbyterian or where he landed, but he seems to be deconstructing himself quite a bit.

Well, in one of my religious studies classes at my secular undergraduate university, the class was New Religions in America. We actually read his book, so.

Oh, well, there you go.

Yeah, yeah.

But anyway, he had this lady on, and Bodie Bauckham wrote me a note afterward and sent it to me and said, hey, I don't know if you're aware, but that person that Jamar Tisby was platforming and having on to talk about racism and post-colonialism and that kind of thing, that person actually argues that African tribal religions, animistic religions have this prominent place for female deities and matriarchy and ultimately blurring the lines between gender.

And I was like, I had no clue about any of that, so.

Wow.

What a shock, what a shock.

What a shock, right?

That pagan cultures would have that, yeah, yeah.

Well, obviously, oh, and Michael just posted this. I was gonna read this, but it's in King James. So we'll just read it in the, I think that's in the King James. Deuteronomy 22, five says a woman shall not wear that which, you have a King James, that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God.

And the context of that, by the way, is various laws. It's not like the verse before and after doesn't actually connect to it in a direct way. So like, this is it, like, this is cut and dry. God says that when a man puts on a woman's garment, that is an abomination.

And I was wondering about this. I didn't do deep research on it. I don't know if you know, Matthew, but I was wondering what the garments looked like back in the Old Testament, because my mind is still on flannel wraps I saw as a kid.

So what would the woman's garment versus the man's garment look like? Obviously, there were some differences, differences enough that it would designate, like, it wasn't just a bland robe or something.

Like, there was something about them that people saw as uniquely feminine or masculine. I don't know if you know anything about that.

I don't, but I do have access to Google images, so.

Michael says that it's partially regarding men avoiding war and women becoming a Mulan type. So I did read that, I looked in a commentary, and I did read that that had implications for war.

But

I've never, yeah, I've never dug too deeply into the topic. I just know that, I mean, obviously, clothing is very culturally contingent. There's a reason why, like, someone who's Scottish celebrating their traditions can wear the kilt, whereas in another context, if you wear something like that, it would be cross-dressing.

There's a reason why, I don't know if you have any IFB listeners, John, but this may upset them, but there's a reason why women can wear jeans and it's not seen as cross-dressing, whereas 70 years earlier, that would be cross-dressing.

Because, you know, these clothing, clothing is culturally contingent in its expression and things like that. But the principle behind it is, so here's the thing is when we read the Mosaic, like the law of Moses and things like that, oftentimes when you bring up things like prohibition against homosexuality or prohibitions against cross-dressing, people will usually retort, oh yeah, but do you eat shellfish?

Do you cross your linen or whatever? And the thing is, is we have to distinguish between, like this is basic stuff that people can't get though. There's ceremonial, there's civil, and then there's moral law.

And out of those three categories of law, moral law is the only law which is immutable. It doesn't change. It's a part of the very character of God. One could even say it's an attribute of God, His law.

So the thing is, is that's clearly when you look at the context, that's a part of the moral law of God is not cross-dressing. It's not like a cultural thing with the Israelites because yada, yada, yada.

Now there could have been their neighbors that did cross-dress and that's why they made it specific. But even if God didn't say that in the book, it still is true regardless. Because God says other things which by good necessary consequence would entail that.

But lucky for us, God says it right straight.

He directly talks about this though in 1 Corinthians chapter I think 10, where it talks about the temple prostitutes who shaved their heads. And then the male prostitutes, as I understand, they actually grew their hair long in Corinth.

And so they were doing like a flip, like the men were looking like women, women were looking like men. Which for, not that I don't know about this, I don't have any direct knowledge of this, but I saw on X, it was trending for some reason that there were some female, were they, I guess, I don't know if you saw this Matthew, pornographic actresses or something that were pretending to be transgender to try to get attention.

Did you see that?

Yeah, sadly I did have to see that.

It came across my newsfeed and I thought

Don't you love X?

Well, and the explanation was that this is a trend right now, that transgenderism is a trend in I guess the pornographic industry. And so these women are, they're women, but they're pretending to be men who are pretending to be women.

Yeah, just don't think about it too hard.

My favorite part of that was seeing all the really upset transgender sex workers that were like, this is our identity, you can't steal that. And it's just like, oh, the irony behind this. That was funny, I do have to admit.

Yeah, they're like, you can't just pretend to be us. It was like, well, isn't like,.

You kind of missed the plot. I don't know what your whole identity is. Anyways,.

But yeah, that's funny.

But in 1 Corinthians chapter 10, it's the same thing where there's a role reversal switch. And this is the context in which we find commands about head coverings and the reasons given for women to wear head coverings in church.

And it does say, I don't want to get into the head coverings conversation because we could go down a big rabbit hole here. But whether you think it's an actual hat or the covering is the woman's hair, longer hair or whatever, there is a demarcation that says this is a woman.

And the two reasons given for it are creation. Has it not been this way since creation? And then the angels, the angels are watching. Both of those transcend culture. So this isn't a cultural context thing where you say, well, at that time in ancient Israel, it was like this, but that was then, this is now.

No, this is something that from the beginning, God expected that men would be different than women. They would dress differently. They would behave differently. He didn't even have to spell it out in so many details.

He could just say things like, act like men, play the man. And we were supposed to kind of know what that means. We don't have to have that thoroughly explained.

And what that also does is that plays into like a principle of grace doesn't destroy nature, it perfects it. Because I can easily like see the retort. I've actually heard this from like transgenders that claim to be Christians where they'll take the Galatians 3 .28.

And you hear that so often in like race conversations or things like that. Like I remember seeing the verse all the time during the George Floyd summer of love where people would say that to be like, oh, see, we're all one, yada, yada, yada.

But it says neither male nor female. So it's like, oh, in Christ, we're all androgynous. Well, no, because Paul very clearly lays out that like you just mentioned in 1 Corinthians 11 where he speaks of like the angels are watching.

So grace doesn't destroy nature, but it perfects it. So grace doesn't make you no longer a man, it makes you a Christian man. Grace doesn't make you no longer a woman, it makes you a Christian woman. Grace doesn't make you no longer a Greek, it makes you a Christian Greek.

And so a lot of these things are important to keep in mind. And that's why it's just scripture interprets scripture is just such an important principle that scripture is not schizophrenic. It's all balanced together.

And that's why we do systematic theology. That's why we do biblical theology because we see scripture as it has multiple authors and things like that, multiple divine spokesmen, but God weaves one divine narrative and it all coheres, it all fits.

And yeah, it's just, it's so important.

It's so important.

Thanks for correcting me too. It is 1 Corinthians 11 and Michael just posted that as well, the passage there, not 1 Corinthians 10. I was, I think that's communion, right? 1 Corinthians 10, so.

Communions in both chapters, yeah. But yeah, close enough, close enough.

Yeah, you know, I did seminary, so I. All right, so let's talk about this article. This is the best article in my opinion on the subject of the Audrey Hale manifesto. And I did read a bunch of them. I already covered it on my other podcast that I host conversations that matter, but it wasn't written at that point.

And my brother actually wrote this. He spent two days poring over every page, all 90 pages of the manifesto, read everything. And these aren't pages that are easy to read. They're like, it's scribble.

And you have to make out what Audrey, I guess, was saying. I don't remember what Audrey Hale's, that's the name. I guess that is her name, right? So it's a she who's wanting to pretend to be a male. Yeah, so that's the proper designation, I guess.

Well, her preferred name was Aiden. So even though she was a wicked person,.

John, you shouldn't be hateful and you need to respect his pronouns.

I need to say Aiden.

I'm actually glad the Audrey thing stuck. I think I get confused by that. And because I'm used to everyone using the preferred name. And in this case, for some reason, it didn't actually stick. It was her actual name, which I'm really glad.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know what to make of that, but. So here's the article, it says, it starts out, it's kind of chilling. It says, forgive me, God, this act will be inglorious. So reads the second to last journal entry that Audrey Hale wrote just hours before she blasted through the doors of the Covenant School in 2003.

And of course she killed the school custodian, Mike Hill. She walked up to the second level where she shot three nine-year-old children and a substitute teacher, pausing briefly to put more bullets in.

And then she was gunned down. And within 14 minutes, that was 14 minutes of, I guess, the beginning of her entering the school and committing these horrible actions. And one of the reactions that David talks about is that there was kind of like a weird, I remember this, I guess it wasn't ancient history, but it feels like yesterday in a way.

There was an odd backlash and there were people that were advocating for trans rights that very week from the federal level down to the state level in Tennessee and getting on people's cases for misgendering Hale.

I remember that. I remember that there was several legislators, state legislators who were doing these MLK styled speeches at the state Capitol about saving our children. And it was all pro-transgender.

It was the weirdest thing. You can't make it up. Like how would this happen in like Tennessee, nonetheless? Like this isn't in California, right? So I'm remembering back to that. David covers some of that.

And there was a story in a leftist media source. What source is this? Vice, okay. The right is using the Nashville shooter to declare war on trans people. So this is how they were using this.

She shot first. I don't know what to say to that.

They flipped the whole victim and culprit to make Audrey Hale out to be the victim somehow. And then of course the manifesto was leaked November 6th. Stephen Crowder leaked it. You had Brent Leatherwood from the Southern Baptist Convention upset about that and saying how horrible this was.

He said, you are a viper to Stephen Crowder in a news conference. You have now allowed this woman who terrorized our family with bullets to be able to now terrorize us with words from the grave. And he's been doing everything he can and even using Southern Baptist funds apparently to try to keep that manifesto from going public.

Of course that didn't happen. As I understand it, there's still more material that has yet to be released but 90 pages were released recently. And then they were almost entirely ignored because Tucker Carlson had on Martyr May.

And everyone started talking about that. That interview. And it was like buried in about a day but this really should have been the story last week. So here's just a few things from the journal. David picks out, I was born wrong, she said.

This is a near constant theme throughout all of Hale's writings. She comes back to this idea on nearly every page, which 90 pages. I mean, that stuck out to me too. Like, yeah, I was born wrong. That's the drumbeat throughout the whole thing that she's thinking that there's something fundamentally in error about her.

And there's a mistake that was made and this creates really a lashing out at God. She says, religion won't save. And there's a frequent appeal to God but they're generally dismissive of her particular Christian tradition, her religious upbringing.

So she believes in God. She thinks she's going to heaven in some sense but then she has these things where she'll drop saying like religion won't save. And then there's references to autism. Apparently that she may have been a high-functioning autistic person although she was not diagnosed.

She has a fascination with black people, I guess. And she says, brown love is the most beautiful kind. There's some pornographic sound like, I don't know how to like erotic, I guess the literature you could call it involved in this.

That's very explicit. She has hatred for her father which I'm sure ties into this. And then two dominant themes of Hale's writings are her desire to die because she's been born into the wrong body and her infatuation with an unspecified brown girl.

Hale specifies or sorry, references God numerous times usually positively God is love, so are you. She also though frequently references heaven and seems to have an idea. Like I said, that she's gonna go there.

She alludes to having planned an attack at covenant school since 2021. She chickened out, then she did it. And the most disturbing part is her last written words. I hope I have a high death count ready to die, ha ha.