I posted about this in the Beauty Parlor thread, but with all the info coming out about her (the carrying around a stuffed animal, strange clothing, obsessive delusional crush on a middle school classmate, normal and nice family, the degree from a for profit college, etc etc) I'm 90% sure that the troonism is just a symptom. Like the majority of adult school shooters, she has schizophrenia or another form of psychosis.
Here's a systematic review of mass shooters.
Schoolshooters.info is also a fascinating resource. (
Here's an article on adult school shooters, specifically - small sample, but ALL of them have psychotic symptoms. That's a little too much to be a coincidence imho.)
He describes three kinds of school shooters:
- Psychopaths (Dylan Harris, Brenda Spencer)
- Psychotic (Dylan Klebold, Kip Kinkel, the Supreme Gentleman)
- Severely Traumatized (Evan Ramsey, Jeffery Weisse)
There's a bunch of traits that psychotic killers have in common, besides being crazy. They tend to have long standing issues with social skills/socialization and their ability to function over time decreases as their illness gets worse. They have good families -- but ALL OF THEM have older siblings that are normal and successful, and are very aware that they are failures in comparison. Plus they feel like misfits and unsupported by their families, who while they're decent people, they seem to not be up to the task of empathizing with and helping their kid actually cope with their illness.
(This is actually one of the reasons over diagnosing autism is a huge fucking problem -- psychotic disorders make people awkward and socially inept, and the tools to screen for autism throw false positives for psychosis. So many of these shooters have people saying they're on the spectrum -- but most of those show symptoms of psychosis when you look at them retrospectively. Getting them on antipsychotics would keep them from murdering children, but the families don't want the stigma of having a crazy in the family.)
Could online troons have influenced/convinced her to do this in the name of troonery?
Maybe.
But my bet is that the troonery is just a symptom of her distance from reality and general deteriorating mental state. If you read about Klebold, they sound eerily similar in their presentation.