WARNING: The below story includes graphic and disturbing content written by the shooter responsible for six deaths at the Covenant School on March 27, 2023.
The Covenant School shooter obsessed in her private journal over her desire to be a man, fantasizing about having an “imaginary penis” and lamenting that so-called gender affirming treatments weren’t available to her, according to images of her journal obtained by The Daily Wire.
The shooter’s handwritten journals, recovered by authorities at the scene of her deadly attack, have been hidden from the public for more than a year now, leaving unresolved questions about her motive to attack the private Christian school in March 2023. Images obtained by The Daily Wire from a source familiar with the Covenant investigation provide perhaps the most thorough illustration of her mental state in the days leading up to the shooting.
The images, first revealed Wednesday by Daily Wire host Matt Walsh, show the shooter was driven in part by anger over her gender identity as she wrote a three-page journal entry called “My Imaginary Penis.” The journal entries from March 11, 2023 — less than three weeks before the transgender-identifying shooter’s horrific attack — reveal both a fixation on her desire to be a man and anger at forces she believed stood in her way, including Christianity and her parents.
Fragments of the below journal entries have been reported on by the Tennessee Star, but this is the first publication of those pages in full.
Image obtained by The Daily Wire
The first entry that appears is fashioned as a letter to someone named “Paige.” It is unclear exactly who this is, though Paige is also the name of a woman the shooter played basketball with as a child who detailed to ABC News how the shooter had long been infatuated with her. Paige called authorities after the shooter messaged her on the morning before her attack.
The journal entry reveals disdain for Christianity, and specifically her parents’ alleged attempts to maintain religion in her life.
“It’s total ignorance when parents step in and try to change their child’s environment,” the shooter wrote. “Make them go to youth group and force Christian friends in their life because the old ones were a ‘bad’ influence, I can’t f***ing stand that sh**.”
“Parents actually believe religion can change nature,” the shooter wrote. “That could explain why I don’t practice religion anymore. Let kids think for themselves, listening to parents does no damned good but to mold their premature minds into a pre-formatted program.”
Officials have denied that there was evidence suggesting that The Covenant School, a private Christian school that the shooter attended as a child, was targeted because of animus toward religion. The mentions of Christianity, which appear throughout the journal entries, suggest that it certainly may have been a factor.
The remainder of the four pages, however, revolves around the shooter’s fixation on being a man, and suggests a serious case of gender dysphoria. She fantasized about what it would be like to have a penis.
“I want to know what that’s like, but I never will because I was damned to be born this way,” she wrote in the journal. “I swear to f*** I hate it so goddamned much. It’s a f***ing curse.”
Image obtained by The Daily Wire
The journal entry shows both anger at living through the “torture of being raised a girl,” as well as at her mother and “people in this world” for not accepting that she could change genders. She complains that for much of her life she “actually believed” she “had to deal with it” — until she learned that changing genders was “possible.”
“That didn’t last long after high school ended and no longer had to fear of being called a dyke or a fa**ot,” she writes. “It was only until my early 20s I finally found the answer — that changing one’s gender is possible, and who I really was I finally embraced to show.”
After more than a year of a near total lockdown on materials relating to the shooter, a flood of documents has come out in recent weeks. The leaked images further undermine official claims that there was no focus in her so-called manifesto about “specific political, religious, or social issues.”
Much of her anger was directed at her inability to get the treatments such as puberty blockers made available to children today.
“Children who were able to successfully take puberty blockers and never enter a tortured puberty, those little fa**ots don’t know how good they f***ing have it,” the shooter wrote. “I’d kill to have parents who would let their child be happy no matter how different it is to their viewpoints or dont agree or scared of it. They are willing to listen to their children, not the other way around. I’d kill to have those resources.”
She blamed not only her parents, but also their Christianity, the journal reveals.
“F*** parents like them who think of themselves first, and their preference of conservative religion,” the shooter writes in the entry on her imaginary penis.
She said in the journal that puberty was a “life sentence for her.”
“A bare flat chest made me free. Girl puberty imprisoned me. And so does my mind. Puberty = life sentence. The people in this world adds more bullets to shoot violent thoughts into my head on full-auto.”
Aside from three pages from her writings released last November by conservative commentator Steven Crowder, there has been a blackout of all materials that could provide insight into why she opened fire at the Christian school. Those pages showed the shooter rage about “white privilege” and state that she wanted to kill “crackers going to private fancy schools.”
That blackout appears to be due to a newly reported memo by the FBI, in which the federal intelligence agency warned Nashville police that releasing her writings could result in “false narratives” that “may lead to unintended consequences for the segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories.”
The Tennessee Star revealed last Wednesday, however, that it had reviewed nearly four dozen images of the shooter’s writings — including the entry on her “imaginary penis.” Fox 17, a local Nashville outlet, also published an image from the journal on Monday afternoon, in which she refers to herself as the “most unhappy boy alive” and confesses to thinking of “death a lot.”
In addition to the journal entries, The Tennessee Star has reported that the Metro Nashville Police Department sought a search warrant for records from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where the shooter had been a patient of mental health professionals for 22 years, according to an affidavit published by the Star last week. Vanderbilt has declined to answer questions about what kind of treatment she was receiving, including whether it was treating her apparent gender dysphoria. Vanderbilt did not respond to a request for comment.
Also revealed last week is the recording of police interviewing the shooter’s parents, revealing to them that the shooter “wanted to kill” them. The investigators also ask the parents about her treatment at Vanderbilt.
She wrote in the journal that “puberty already hit” before puberty blockers were a medical possibility for her. It’s unclear where she learned this, or what the medical information her belief is based on. In the same entry, she also describes herself as having an “autistic brain.”
“I’d kill to have those resources; 2007 was the birth of puberty blockers and a newfound discovery for treatment of non-conforming transgender children. 2007 was when I was in the 6th grade. Puberty already hit me,” she wrote. “The only reason I could conclude why it didn’t bother me too much is that my boobs were small. I thought they’d stay that way forever. My autistic brain … change in body f**ked me over now, even if my boobs are still small for the most part.”
Elsewhere in the journal entry she describes at length graphic sexual games she would play with her stuffed animals, fantasizing that she was the boy performing sex acts on a girl doll. The margins of her journal entries are filled with immature sexual drawings.
“I can pretend to be them and do the things boys do and experience my boy self as Tony — my stuffed boy doll is like the boy I am in another form since childhood,” she writes in the journal. “I constructed him a penis, then got out my girl doll named Ashley (who is Tony’s life-long boyfriend) to have sex w/ Tony. Ashley was represented as my dream girl I wished to have in real life.”
The Daily Wire is not naming the shooter. Nashville police did not respond to a request for comment on the journal entries.
Walsh, after revealing the images on his show, addressed the FBI’s blackout demand, as well as Vanderbilt’s refusal to respond to questions about its years-long treatment of the shooter, calling the lack of transparency a “national scandal.”
“Contrary to what the FBI said, it’s the absence of transparency that leads to ‘false narratives’ like the ones we’ve seen in the last year about the Covenant shooting,” said Walsh. The point of transparency, he underscored, is not to “demonize” or “marginalize” anyone, but to “give the public the information it has a right to know — and to likely save people’s lives in the process.”
A Tennessee judge is set to rule in the coming weeks on whether Nashville police must release the shooter’s writings. The Tennessee Star, which has reported on the contents of several of the pages, is the plaintiff in the case, arguing for their full release.
