They Were So

A reel from IceQueen Candi, posted October 18. The caption is “They were so” and a shrug. She is under a red umbrella, drinking from a flag cup, while a TikTok plays in the corner. The woman in the inset is Andi, @andreagiacini. The card Candi holds up at the end says she/they, 1,177 following, 6,998 followers, 459,100 likes, and the bio “Just a girl into yapping about tattoos and piercing.”

What Andi says, before the card, is this: if your first move after a school shooting is to go online and claim the shooter is trans, with no evidence, “you can eat fucking shit.” The reel never names a school. It doesn’t have to. Three days earlier, on October 15, a 16-year-old shot his way into Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon. Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz identified him the next day as Griffin J. John II. Krantz said “his,” and then said he would not say the name again.

John shot through the glass of a locked door with a 12-gauge Maverick 88 and opened fire in a special-education classroom. Three children were killed, ages 5, 8, and 11. The five-year-old was Rhoam Summer. The teacher was Megan Lambert, 25. A teacher in the room threw her phone at him and wrestled for the gun. Kaylub Giamanco, 36, a father of two girls at the school, had a legal gun in his car, followed John inside, and shot him. John died there. Police have not described him as transgender. The investigation is still open on motive. That is the record the shrug is standing in for.

When a shooter has been trans, the department has said so. Nashville police said Audrey Hale identified as transgender. Robin Westman’s name change is in a Minnesota court file. Bend’s chief used “his” and stopped talking. Candi’s answer to “don’t invent it” is a she/they line on somebody else’s profile. The shooter is not on that card. The children are not on that card. The shrug is.