A Wall Street Journal commentary published Oct. 6 criticized what it called a media “charade” surrounding the would-be assassin of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, arguing that journalists and court officials falsely portrayed the assailant as a “transgender” woman.
As CatholicVote previously reported, 29-year-old Nicholas Roske of California was sentenced Oct. 3 to eight years and one month in federal prison and lifetime supervised release for attempting to assassinate Kavanaugh in 2022. Roske has indicated that he planned to kill Kavanaugh to block the Supreme Court’s pro-life majority from overturning Roe v. Wade after a leaked draft of Dobbs v. Jackson was made public. Roske ultimately turned himself in before carrying out the attack.
In the opinion piece, titled “Kavanaugh’s Would-Be Assassin Is a Man,” WSJ deputy editorial features editor Matthew Hennessey noted that “most of the mainstream media, and Judge Deborah L. Boardman of the Federal District of Maryland, decided to endorse the fiction that Mr. Roske is now a woman named Sophie.”
Boardman, who presided over Roske’s sentencing, reportedly told the courtroom she was “heartened that this terrible infraction has helped the Roske family” to “accept their daughter for who she is.”
Hennessey praised the Department of Justice (DOJ), under the Trump administration, for refusing to follow that framing, writing that the department “distinguished itself by refusing to participate in this charade.” In an Oct. 3 DOJ statement announcing the sentencing, the agency referred to Roske by his legal male name.
The commentary also questioned what it described as the “legal convenience” of Roske’s supposed gender “transition.” Hennessey noted that Boardman cited President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order requiring men to serve prison time in male-only facilities as a reason for imposing a lighter sentence. Prosecutors had requested 30 years, but Roske received just over eight.
“[I]t seems that playing the trans card will save Mr. Roske two decades behind bars,” he wrote.
He added that Roske’s case reflects a pattern: Several recent acts of political violence have involved self-identified “transgender” individuals.
“You’d have to be pretty out of touch, or really committed to the bit, not to have noticed how trans people have been at the center of recent episodes of political violence,” Hennsey wrote.
He cited cases including that of Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who police said was dating “a biological male who was transitioning genders”; Robert Westman, the Minneapolis Catholic school shooter, who identified as “transgender”; and Audrey Hale, who killed six people at a Christian school in Nashville in 2023 and claimed to be a man.
“As journalists often say, one example is a fluke. Two is a coincidence. Three constitutes a trend. Four puts us well into trend territory,” Hennessy said, “but the media has been loath to connect the dots.”
Hennessy noted that the majority of “journalistic investigations of the trend are dedicated to the proposition that trans people are more often the victims of crime than perpetrators of it,” which he said “could be true” But, he added, “it doesn’t explain why the media mobilized in near unison to ‘debunk’ the clear presence of a trans angle in the cases mentioned above.”
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