The Vast Majority of Mass Shooters Are Cis Men. Why Does the Right Keep Saying They're Trans?

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On February 11, a 36-year-old woman named Gennesse Moreno opened fire at a Houston megachurch, injuring two people. In a matter of hours, coverage of the event began appearing online. As news outlets scrambled to understand and report on what happened another kind of investigation was unfolding on social media: far-fight influencers zeroing in on whatever info they could find to prove Moreno was trans.

One of those people was Chaya Raichik, a far-right activist with almost four million followers across social media under the handle “Libs of TikTok.” Less than 24 hours after the incident, Raichik began posting false claims that the shooter was trans and that transgender people are taking up arms against the general public.

“Another act of trans terrorism,” Raichik posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We need to have a national conversation about the LGBTQ movement turning youth into violent extremists.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Sen. Ted Cruz chimed in as well, as did Elon Musk, who suggested that perhaps “hormone injections” could be “a major causal factor” in violence. Fox News ran a story (which it later changed) claiming that Moreno had “lived as a man.” The claims gained so much momentum that police clarified at a press briefing that there was no indication Moreno was trans. (It appears Raichik’s assertion was spun out from the fact that 36-year-old Genesse Ivonne Moreno had previously used male and female aliases.) But that didn’t stop anti-trans pundits from continuing to assert that the shooter was transgender.

This isn’t the first time far-right influencers have latched onto minute, often unconfirmed details about perpetrators of mass shootings to fabricate their trans bogeymen. In fact, it’s become an almost inevitable part of the news cycle that after a mass shooting occurs, far-right actors set out to convince the public that the perpetrator was trans.

For instance, when a man named Dylan Butler opened fire in an Iowa school in January, Raichik, Musk, and Donald Trump Jr. jumped on the chance to spread unconfirmed theories that Butler was trans. According to media reports at the time, far-right figures fixated on the fact that the shooter’s social media accounts contained Pride flags, multiple pronouns, and pro-LGBTQ+ messaging, using the evidence that Butler may have been LGBTQ+ to “prove” that trans people are given to senseless violence.

“Per capita is there a more violent group of people anywhere in the world than radicalized trans activists?” Trump Jr. wrote on X. For her part, Raichik posted that the “media would bury” the story of “trans genderfluid te*ror*st who shot up a school.”

These far-right-fueled conspiracies come at a time when anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation is rampant, with politicians and influencers alike spreading calculated but discredited misinformation about LGBTQ+ people “grooming” children, preying on women in bathrooms, and introducing pornographic material into school libraries. Experts say the rhetoric is one more aspect of ongoing, coordinated efforts to frame trans people as a threat to the safety of the general public. And despite best efforts to discredit them, the conspiracies are working.

“It's just another in a horrifyingly long list of ways in which right-wing media has attempted to scare [the public] about trans people,” says Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director for journalism watchdog organization Media Matters. “There's no evidence that trans people are more likely to commit mass shootings. And this is just another way that they can try to scare their audiences for clicks.”

Data shows that mass shooters are overwhelmingly cisgender men, even among more narrow estimates like the one used by The Violence Project, which counts fewer than 200 mass shootings since 1966. (The Violence Project uses the same definition of mass shooting as the Congressional Research Service, excluding incidents where the shooting occurs as part of other criminal activity, such as a robbery or domestic violence.) According to their data, 97% of mass shootings are committed by men. The dataset only counts a single mass shooting by a trans person.

The Gun Violence Archive, however, counts upwards of 4,400 mass shootings in the past decade. The Archive’s Executive Director Mark Bryant says that out of more than 5,000 mass shootings, the number of trans or LGBTQ+ suspects is in “the single digit numbers.” Of course, trans people can commit acts of violence, but there is no evidence that there is a larger pattern of that occurring.

“There is no wave of LGBTQ or trans violence,” say Yotam Ophir, an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo with a focus on gun violence. “It’s bullshit that the right has been spreading for years to kind of take the heat off of their side [...] So we are definitely talking about systemic misinformation here, because the violence is predominantly coming from the far right.”

According to Drennen, this kind of misinformation has long made the rounds in fringe internet spaces like 4chan, an online forum known for offensive and inflammatory content. Yet it's only recently that such “theories” have made their way into the mainstream, most notably with last year's shooting at The Covenant School, a Christian elementary school in Nashville, where a 28-year-old killed three adults and three children.

Immediately following the tragedy, far-right figures and news media alike latched onto unconfirmed information that the shooter might be trans. Conservative pundits used the deadly shooting to call into question the sanity of trans people, and scores of news organizations grappled with how to mention the shooter’s potential transness in the context of the shooting, if at all.

Reporters particularly seemed to struggle with how to identify the shooter without being able to confirm any information firsthand. Given the regularity with which trans people are misgendered and deadnamed by police, and the legal and financial barriers that come with changing identity documents, this case illustrates that, in some instances, few if any official sources beyond the subject can truly confirm such personal information. When that subject is deceased or otherwise inaccessible, it’s impossible to be 100% certain. In the case of the Nashville shooter, reports about their gender identity relied on the accounts of former teachers and eventually the police, who said the shooter was trans but declined to say what led them to that conclusion.

In the aftermath of the shooting and resulting media fracas, the Trans Journalists Association (TJA) released guidance cautioning journalists to be careful when sharing such unverified information, especially from the police, in such a delicate and evolving breaking news situation. [Note: This writer is the board secretary of TJA.]

“We urge newsrooms to refrain from speculating without further facts,” TJA said in a statement at the time. “It is additionally important to keep in mind that sharing partial, un-fact-checked, or contextless information and public records during breaking news events can have outsized consequences for members of marginalized communities.”

Reporters put that guidance to the test just months later, when news outlets like Vice and Teen Vogue called out an effort to spread anti-trans misinformation after a July 2023 shooting in Philadelphia. Police arrested Kimbrady Carriker after he opened fire seemingly at random, killing four people and injuring two. Police said Carriker had also killed another man almost two days earlier. Far-right figures seized on photos of Carriker with long hair and stereotypically feminine clothing to spread similarly unsubstantiated claims that he was trans.

Now, media organizations like the Associated Press and Reuters have begun to call out such misinformation. But some experts like Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, explain that debunking misinformation doesn't necessarily undo the harm caused by it in the first place. Lewis says that while debunking can help create a factual record and dispel unsubstantiated or false information among the general population, it does little to stem the spread of that misinformation in online communities sympathetic to its sentiment. This is especially true in communities like the far right, where distrust of mainstream news media is high.

“You can’t really fact-check your way out of a conspiracy,” Lewis says. “And we’ve seen that time and time and time again. You have the traditional news enterprise that is built on fact-checking and accuracy and timely reporting, and all that good stuff. But then by the time the fact-checking article comes out two weeks later, you’ve already moved on. The church or the synagogue, or the school has already gotten a bomb threat.”

These repeated claims by the far right have led some extremism experts to use language like “stochastic terrorism” to refer to this particular kind of anti-trans campaign.

Ophir, Lewis, and other experts say the anti-trans misinformation about mass shooters actually serves two purposes that advance conservative agendas, especially during yet another consequential election year when trans rights are a hot-button issue. Not only does this scapegoating give far-right figures more ammo in their fight against the very existence of trans people, but it also allows them to deflect criticism from gun control activists while dodging the far-right’s own culpability in extreme acts of gun violence.

In a number of mass shootings — including those in El Paso, Texas, Buffalo, New York, Charleston, South Carolina, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — perpetrators have posted online or made statements that echo racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic sentiments often espoused by the far right. In the case of the Philadelphia shooting, Carriker repeatedly posted online about his support for Donald Trump. Right-wing activists rarely, if ever, acknowledge that these mass shooters share some of the same worldviews they espouse.

“If you persuade conservatives that LGBTQ people are inherently flawed, that they are violent, that they are a risk to society, then any legislation against them will be justified,” Ophir says. “And you don’t have to stop at legislation. Every act of violence against them will be justified.”

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Although this kind of rhetoric seems distinct from other anti-trans arguments, like those against gender-affirming care or trans inclusion in sports, Drennen says it is all a component of a decades-old conservative fight to eliminate queer and trans people from public life, be it through legislation or stochastic terrorism. There’s a throughline, Drennen says, from conservative culture warrior Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign in the 1970s and what we are seeing regurgitated by the right today.

“Throughout this entire current anti-trans panic, there’s been the slow raising of the stakes,” Drennen says.

“First, trans people are a threat to your daughter's ability to win a college scholarship. And after that, it's that trans people are threatening your child by trying to make them trans,” Drennen continues. “And then having failed to achieve the impact that they want, they have to now go with ‘trans people are a threat to you anywhere you go.’”

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Originally Appeared on them.