What compels some to believe trans people are mass murderers? | Opinion
Those who saw the news of a mass shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school, I suspect, were mostly horrified by the targeted murder of children, sickened by the ubiquity of gun violence in the United States and dispirited because they know that nothing meaningful will be done to address the root cause of said violence.
But because the person who pulled the trigger, Robin Westman, identified as transgender, the usual suspects — from politicians such as Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to conservative activists such as Charlie Kirk and Laura Loomer — fired back with their own distinctive brand of senselessness and cruelty.
Greene, for example, baselessly wrote that Westman was “likely groomed” into changing her identity to push Greene’s bill that would ban all forms of gender-affirming care for minors (despite expert consensus supporting its effectiveness). Loomer argued that transgender children should be barred from attending schools with cisgender kids. Kirk argued for gun control, but only for trans people.
How I wish this were just a fringe. But Greene’s Republican colleagues have, at best, kept their disapproval silent, and at worst, joined in her ostracism. Most notable was a subcommittee tribunal Greene led against trans athletes competing in USA Fencing events, which somehow failed to solicit the Olympic-winning women who rejected the GOP’s premises on fairness and safety. Meanwhile, Loomer is one of President Donald Trump’s most trusted advisors, and Kirk is one of his most influential surrogates.
Personally, I’m disgusted by the completely false, fraudulent notion that trans people are mass murderers in waiting. But enough people with power and influence refuse to deal with the world as it is, so here we are.
However you define what a mass shooting entails, the overwhelming amount of mass shooters are cisgender (meaning, not transgender) men. Using Mother Jones’ database of mass shootings, which the outlet defined as incidents where four or more people were killed, journalist Abby Vesoulis found only three of the 141 recorded killers were known as transgender or nonbinary — meaning, the shooter did not identify strictly as a man or woman. Expand the criteria for mass shooting to include four or more shot (not just killed), like the nonprofit Gun Violence Archives does, and you’ll find just four trans shooters over the last 5,300 recorded incidents.
In our epidemic of gun violence, trans people are much more likely to face the barrel rather than pull the trigger. As an investigative reporter with Business Insider, I studied this problem closely by helping build a database of 175 known homicides of trans people in the United States over a five-year stretch, including 21-year-old Kiér Laprí Kartier, who was found dead in an Arlington parking lot. My colleagues probed discrimination by prosecutors and law enforcement assigned to their cases, police misconduct and the frequent killings — more than half in our database — of trans women by their cisgender boyfriends and sexual partners.
My exploration of Ashanti Carmon and Zoe Spears, two Black trans sex workers uncannily murdered on the same block and within weeks of each other, focused on how poverty and race — two-thirds of murdered trans people in BI’s database were Black — ought to shape our understanding of violence against trans people.
Access to housing, healthcare, steady jobs and safe neighborhoods are issues that can affect anyone, and I don’t subscribe to the notion that violence against trans people can be broadly reduced to a killer’s bigotry. But our societal problems are intensified by discriminatory practices or policies that funnel trans people into the dangerous day-to-day of life in the American underclass.
Rather than deal with the actual cause of gun violence, be it school shootings or murders of trans people, an entire movement embraced and ratified by the Republican Party chooses to foment the conditions that make all of us, trans or otherwise, unsafe. In Texas, Republicans are trying to ram through a “bathroom bill” through the Legislature that bans trans people from using government and school restrooms consistent with their gender identity, joining 19 other states where GOP-controlled legislatures have enacted such laws.
The so-called “Texas Women’s Privacy Act” once again flips reality on its head: Trans people are four times more likely to be the victims of sexual assault than cisgender people. Concurrently, the Trump administration is threatening to pull millions in federal funds from states that include transgender references in their sex ed curriculum.
None of this will help a single person, regardless of their sexual or gender orientation, live a happy and healthy life. But under a framework that presumes trans people are wayward perverts, every school shooting is another proverbial bullet in the chamber of those who want to forever shut out a small segment of Americans from public life. Their fear-mongering won’t bring those kids back, nor will they protect future classrooms.
All this manufactured trans panic accomplishes is increasing the precarity of people who have done nothing to deserve anything less than dignity, tolerance and respect.
This story was originally published September 4, 2025 at 11:14 AM with the headline "What compels some to believe trans people are mass murderers? | Opinion."
