I was talking to someone the other day about school shootings and they opined that many of them were committed by transgender people. They were adamant that this was the case, and I was almost certain that it wasn’t the case, but as with most conversations where unsupported crap is dispensed with certainty, it takes a while to find the real data. This happened to me previously where someone said that the Covid-19 vaccine had killed 700 people in Australia. I went and chased up the data from the Therapeutic Goods Administration who said that of those 700 who died after receiving the vaccine only 11 could be linked to the vaccine. Fortunately, when I informed them of this, they thanked me1.
The claim that transgender people are frequently responsible for school shootings in the US has been popularised primarily by prominent right-wing commentators, politicians, and social media accounts. While there have been rare instances of shooters identifying as transgender or non-binary, the people who deal with the actual data note that the vast majority of mass shooters are cisgender men.
Prominent figures and groups involved in spreading or amplifying these false narratives include the following:
Chaya Raichik has frequently posted claims linking transgender identity to violence, including a false claim that the 2024 Lakewood Church shooting was an “act of trans terrorism”. She is the founder of the social media account @LibsofTikTok, an astroturf account pretending to be something she is not. She was brought up in an orthodox Jewish household, and is one of the people who has spread the lie that all LGBTQ+ people are paedophiles, and that LGBTQ+ ‘groomers’ have infiltrated every social institution with the aim of sexualising children. She has used this disinformation to mobilise RWNJs into committing violent attacks on LGBTQ+ people and events, as well as against doctors, hospitals, librarians, libraries, teachers and schools2.
Matt Wallace is a conservative commentator who has been sued for defamation after falsely blaming a mid-air collision on a transgender person, calling it a “trans terror attack”. Of course, it was nothing of the sort. Indeed, the transgender woman who was erroneously identified as the helicopter pilot involved in the January 2025 Washington DC crash that killed 67 people has filed a lawsuit against Wallace who spread the false claims about her. In the suit, she claimed Wallace “concocted a destructive and irresponsible defamation campaign” that monetised a “false narrative” about her. The suit was filed in federal court in Colorado, where Wallace is believed to live. The 29 January crash led to a swarm of claims that diversity was to blame. Ellis, who was not involved in the crash in any way, is a Black Hawk pilot with the Virginia National Guard. To dispel the rumours, she posted a video showing she was alive, effectively refuting the claims because all involved in the crash had died3. Wallace operates the Xitter account @mattwallace888. The number 888 is reputed to be the number of Jesus, which may say something about Wallace’s religious bent.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has used her former platform in congress to claim that there is a ‘transgender shooter epidemic’, using such specific cases as the 2023 Nashville shooting to push for restrictions on gender-affirming care. The Nashville shooter wanted to be famous and was suicidal and seemingly looked upon the school as a soft target. Six people were killed, three children and three adults4. The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University studied mass shootings that it defined as shootings in public places that resulted in four fatalities excluding the shooter. Its analysis found that males were the perpetrators in 98% of the shootings, female shooters accounted for 2% of the attacks and transgender people accounted for less than 1%5.
Jesse Watters, a talking head from Faux News, highlighted an August 2025 Minneapolis school shooter’s transgender identity to say it’s part of a “pattern” of violence perpetrated by transgender people. However, crime and terrorism experts still agree that there is no evidence that transgender people are more likely to commit gun violence than others. The data shows that vastly overwhelming proportion of school shootings are perpetrated by men who are not transgender. When asked to provide evidence of the transgender nature of the shooters, Watters provided nine cases. Of these four were transgender, one was nonbinary, while the others were unclear. In addition one of the incidents was not a shooting and in another there were no fatalities, just a single injury5.
The Oversight Project is a spinoff of the Heritage Foundation, which wrote the Project 2025 manifesto for which Trump is the front. It attempted to link high profile incidents, such as the Charlie Kirk murder to transgender rights movements despite a lack of evidence. In fact, the Oversight Project has called for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to designate ‘Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism’ as a domestic terrorism threat category. This is all part of the Project 2025’s plan to formalise anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric into federal policy, including eliminating transgender heath care in Medicare and Medicaid, and to permit discrimination against LGBTQ+ people6,7.
Paul Gosar is a U.S. Representative famously spread a false rumour on Twitter (now X) following the 2022 Uvalde shooting, claiming the shooter was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien,” which was quickly debunked. Others quickly mislabelled the shooter as transgender – even going so far as to misidentify him with photos photos of an uninvolved transgender woman from Reddit were circulated as “proof” of the shooter’s identity. Gosar faced a backlash for spreading the lies and subsequently deleted his tweet8.
The “transgender shooter” narrative often surges on social media immediately following a shooting, and is often based on misidentified photos, unverified reports or simple lies. Research from organisations like the Violence Project9 and FactCheck.org10 indicates that transgender people are statistically underrepresented among mass shooters. However, facts will not affect the RWNJs who spread this horseshit,nor, I suspect, will it convince those who are gullible enough to believe it.
Sources
- https://blotreport.com/2023/03/07/argument-is-futile/
- https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/chaya-raichik/
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/dc-place-crash-trans-pilot
- https://nashvillebanner.com/2025/04/02/covenant-school-shooting-report/
- https://www.politifact.com/article/2025/sep/09/trans-people-mass-shootings-gun-violence/
- https://www.wired.com/story/heritage-foundation-uses-bogus-stat-to-push-a-trans-terrorism-classification/#:~:text=3:43%20PM-,Heritage%20Foundation%20Uses%20Bogus%20Stat%20to%20Push%20a%20Trans%20Terrorism,or%20likely%20involved%20transgender%20ideology.%E2%80%9D
- https://outrightinternational.org/insights/equating-respect-trans-people-terrorism-dangerous-it-absurd#:~:text=The%20Oversight%20Project%20and%20the,not%20follow%20this%20authoritarian%20path.
- https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1101479269/texas-uvalde-school-shooting-misinformation-conspiracy-far-right
- https://www.theviolenceproject.org
- https://www.factcheck.org/
The most obvious conclusion to draw from this is that the vast majority of worldwide bullshit, discrimination and violence emanates primarily from one country/culture. They export lies, bullshit and extremist views to all corners of the globe and their billionaire social media owners do sfa to rein it in because it keeps the gold coming. The sooner that corrupt culture implodes the better.