As new details emerge about connections between Charlie Kirk’s assassin and transgender ideology – most notably, his “transgender” lover and obsession with bizarre forms of pornography – gender ideology has surfaced in yet another high-profile assassination, although this one was thankfully unsuccessful. The man who pleaded guilty to attempting to murder Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 now identifies as a woman.
Nicholas Roske made it to Kavanaugh’s house on June 8, 2022, intending to assassinate him. He came armed with a pistol, ammunition, a crowbar, a knife, and tactical gear. When he spotted U.S. federal marshals guarding the residence and got a call from his sister, Roske turned himself in. As Fox News noted, the “incident occurred just two weeks before the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision overturning Roe v. Wade”; a leak of the decision months earlier had brought protesters to the residences of those justices expected to vote in favor of overturning the abortion ruling.
Roske’s case has been ongoing for three years; he has pleaded guilty and will be sentenced on October 3. On September 19, however, a court filing named Nichoals Roske instead as “Sophie” Roske, and referred to him as “Ms.” The filing observed in a footnote that his legal name is still Nicholas, but that: “Out of respect for Ms. Roske, the balance of this pleading and the counsel’s in-court argument will refer to her as Sophie and use female pronouns.” Fox News noted that there is no evidence that “Roske is undergoing any treatments to become transgender.”
It is a bizarre decision, and yet another indication of how thoroughly gender ideology is embedded in American institutions, despite a series of executive orders by the Trump administration designed to begin purging gender ideology. Nicholas is not just male and cannot, as a matter of biological fact, become female; the court is using a non-legal name that affirms Roske’s conveniently timed transgender delusions. For the court to refer to Roske as a woman is to make a mockery not just of reality, but of the proceedings themselves.
Indeed, it seems clear that Roske’s deep-seated “mental health issues,” as the Department of Justice prosecutors’ sentencing memo put it, are in part responsible for his plot to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. For around ten years, Roske had apparently had “thoughts of violently murdering his sister” and had “received treatment for the issues,” which were left unspecified. His claim to now be a woman, however, is obviously one of the issues, not a revelation of a gender identity worthy of respect by the courts.
The Department of Justice is, at least, undeterred in seeking a 30-year prison sentence for Roske (who may be hoping to get into a female prison after sentencing). “While the defendant has mental health issues, those issues do not detract from the gravity of the defendant’s crime: the defendant researched and targeted multiple members of the judiciary and intended to alter the composition of the Supreme Court for ideological reasons,” the prosecutors wrote in their memo.
Roske’s assassination plot was borne of his desire to stop the overturn of Roe v. Wade; Charlie Kirk’s killer allegedly murdered the conservative icon because of Kirk’s opposition to LGBT ideology, which he referred to as “hatred” in texts to his trans-identifying romantic partner. The gunman who murdered two Catholic schoolchildren at church last month was identified as transgender; so did Audrey Hale, the shooter who went on a killing spree at Covenant Christian School in Nashville, Tennessee in 2023.
“Transgenderism” – the belief that your gender and your sex are somehow distinct – is a mental health issue, and that fact is becoming more clear by the day.
