The myth of transgender violence

Well. It happened again. There was yet another mass shooting committed by a transgender person. Roberta Esposito, a transgender woman, opened fire during a youth hockey game in Rhode Island. Esposito specifically targeted family members in the shooting, killing her ex-wife and adult son and injuring her ex-wife’s parents and a family friend before turning the gun on herself. The three injured parties remain in critical condition.

This shooting comes quickly on the heels of one of Canada’s worst-ever mass shootings that left nine dead and more than 25 wounded. The shooter in this case was 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, a transgender teenager, who first targeted their mother and step-brother at their home before attacking their former school where they killed five students and a teacher. Van Rootselaar also ended their own life.

Conservatives, who have a history of incorrectly attributing mass shootings to transgender individuals, predictably latched onto the gender identity of these two shooters, extrapolating that all transgender people are violent. Karol Markowicz, writing for the New York Post, penned an op-ed claiming “a pattern has emerged” between transgender identity and gun violence. Fox News host Lawrence Taylor suggested transgender individuals should not be allowed to own guns. Matt Walsh warned of more violence to come, writing in a tweet that was reposted by X owner Elon Musk that “the trans violence we’ve seen so far is nothing compared to what’s coming if we don’t treat trans ideology as a severe public safety hazard.”

A history of American anti-trans rhetoric

Anti-trans rhetoric has existed for as long as transgender individuals have existed — which is to say, forever — but the spurious connection between transgender identity and violence is a relatively recent phenomenon on the national scale. Prior to the 1990s, most anti-trans rhetoric focused on the belief that transgender individuals were intrinsically morally deviant, not extrinsically violent. The focus was on transgender individuals’ perceived harm to the social fabric or moral order.

In the 1950s and ’60s, medical technology began to allow for gender-affirmation surgery. Sex-reassignment surgery, as it was called then, was seen as a way to rehabilitate transgender individuals to fit more neatly within the gender binary so as to retain that sense of moral order.

Christine Jorgensen was the first high-profile example of gender-affirmation surgery. In 1951, Jorgensen traveled to Denmark where she had multiple surgeries and hormone therapy. Upon her return to the States, the New York Daily News ran an article headlined “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Bronx Youth is a Happy Woman After Medication, 6 Operations.” The article spoke positively of the process, framing hormone therapy and surgeries as helping Jorgensen — formerly an “abnormal” man — change into a “blonde beauty” who better reflected gender stereotypes.

A decade later, Johns Hopkins University hospital became the first gender-identity clinic in the United States. The hospital framed its work as a way to help “unfortunate individuals, trapped in the wrong body.” Gender activist Gordene Olga MacKenzie writes that many Americans at the time expressed support for this “rehabilitation” of deviant individuals. Transgender individuals were meant to be brought into alignment within the social order from which they had deviated. Specifically, transgender women were seen as effeminate homosexuals fixed through their transformation into a feminine heterosexual.

However, in the decades that followed, cultural expressions of gender widened. Men grew their hair long. Women wore pants. Patriarchal gender hierarchy — a key component of cultural gender expression — began to be challenged as women fought for equal rights and a place in the workforce.

Within American culture, there was a blurring of the gender binary because the inequalities protected by the binary were being dismantled. With the rise of feminism, anti-trans rhetoric shifted from perceiving transgender individuals as being socially deviant to being violent threats.

From social concern to violent threat

The loudest and most influential voice in this space came from Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire, published in 1979. Raymond quite inflammatorily framed trans women as rapists by “appropriating this (female) body for themselves” and penetrating “women’s mind, women’s space, women’s sexuality.”

Because Raymond still saw trans women as castrated men, she saw this presence of men-as-women as an invasion of the patriarchy into female spaces. She wrote that trans women can “gain entrance and a dominant position in women’s spaces” and thus “revert to masculinity … by becoming the man within the woman.”

Raymond was particularly concerned about transgender women infiltrating lesbian spaces and engaging sexually with cisgender lesbians and thus “getting back their maleness in a most insidious way.”

This view that transgender women are inherently a violent threat to cisgender lesbians was the beginning of the rhetoric regarding transgender violence. That rhetoric continued into the 21st century as transgender individuals and communities became more visible in the public sphere. From the late 1900s into the early 2000s, media coverage of transgender individuals (although usually sensationalized) and violence against them brought gender identity into the broader public awareness.

By the 2010s, Raymond’s concept of transgender women as a violent threat to lesbians had been extended to rhetoric claiming transgender women were threats to all cisgender women regardless of sexual orientation.

In 2014, the Houston City Council voted 11-6 to enact the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance. The ordinance prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in employment, housing and public accommodations. Max Miller, a local Baptist pastor, helped lead opposition to the bill on the basis that its protection of transgender individuals to use public restrooms consistent with their gender identity put women and children at risk of sexual predators.

Currently, 19 states have a law or policy banning transgender people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

This piece of civil rights legislation soon became known as the Bathroom Law and a whole new genre of anti-trans legislation was born. Currently, 19 states have a law or policy banning transgender people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

From bathrooms to locker rooms

This alleged concern about transgender violence — or individuals pretending to be transgender to gain access to women’s spaces with violent intent — soon spilled over to the sporting world. In 2016, the Obama-era U.S. Department of Education began to interpret Title IX protections to include gender identity.

In a “Dear Colleague” letter signed by civil rights leaders in the Departments of Education and Justice, the government mandated that “a school must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity.” This would include equal access to restrooms/locker rooms and participation in sex-segregated activities.

This connection of sex-segregated spaces with sex-segregated activities — like sports — soon led to the contention that the inclusion of transgender girls would disadvantage cisgender girls and create potentially violent outcomes.

Ironically, the earliest instance of this came in 2017 when, despite the above mandate, Texas required transgender male athlete Mack Beggs to compete in high school wrestling in the women’s division, as he had been assigned female at birth. En route to a state championship and a 57-0 season, Beggs faced a lawsuit alleging that his medically prescribed steroid use to facilitate gender affirmation put female athletes in “imminent threat to bodily harm.”

At the elite level, this connection between transgender identity and violence was brought into context when Imane Kalief won the gold medal in the women’s 66kg boxing event at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. High profile anti-trans individuals like J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk and Donald Trump all claimed Kalief was either male or transgender.

In a 2024 presidential election ad, the Trump campaign spoke about how the United States “took a wrong turn” when it elected Joe Biden as president in 2020. The ad displays a clip of Kalief boxing with the ominous voiceover that, as part of that wrong turn, “men could beat up women and win medals.” Obviously, an Algerian woman defeating a Chinese woman in boxing at the Paris Olympics has nothing to do with America’s political choices — Trump simply wanted the image of transgender individuals as violent to drive votes his way out of a baseless fear.

From sport violence to gun violence

The transition from sports-related violence to gun violence appears to have started with initial false reports on 4chan that the male perpetrator of the 2022 Uvalde school shooting was transgender. Republican Rep. Paul Gosar went on record claiming the shooter was a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.” A photo of a person purported to be the shooter draped in a transgender flag was actually of an unrelated woman who lived in a different state. While these allegations were soon dropped when it became obvious the shooter was not transgender, the speed and vitriol with which those claims spread became fodder for future claims. Anti-trans activists learned the efficacy of blaming mass violence on transgender ideology.

Now, any time there is a mass casualty event, there are immediate attempts to link it to transgender violence. Grace Abels, a PolitiFact fact-checker, says that blaming school shootings or mass tragedies on transgender individuals is “a consistent pattern of rumor.” Every recent high-profile shooting in the United States has come with a vilification of the transgender community.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, on the 24th anniversary of 9/11, Donald Trump Jr. made the wild claim that the “radical trans movement” is “more violent per capita” than al Qaeda or the Taliban. Texas Republican congressman Ronny Jackson claimed, without evidence, that transgender people “have an underlying level of aggressiveness” and called them a “virus.” The Heritage Foundation urged the FBI to label transgender individuals as domestic terrorists.

“Two mass shootings in just a couple of weeks by transgender identified individuals? It’s an epidemic.”

And when you cry wolf every single time, occasionally you are going to be right. Since 2013, there have been seven mass casualty events attributed to a transgender suspect. And each time conservatives find this vindication, their dehumanizing treatment of transgender individuals feels justified. Two mass shootings in just a couple of weeks by transgender identified individuals? It’s an epidemic. Per capita, they’re the most dangerous type of people.

All the fears feel like they are coming to fruition. But it’s actually the result of a terrible bias.

The myth of transgender violence

The Tumber Ridge, Canada, mass shooting took place on February 10, 2026. The Rhode Island mass shooting was on February 16, 2026. These two mass shootings, perpetrated by transgender identified individuals, have been enough for conservative commentators and politicians to call transgender violence an epidemic.

Two mass shootings in a seven-day period ought to be shocking. It ought to be tragic. It ought to compel us as humanity to investigate any possible connection or root cause. One death by gun violence is too many. One murder is a tragedy. It is understandable, then, that if you have two consecutive mass shootings by transgender individuals, the link between gender identity and gun violence ought to be investigated. That has been conservative rhetoric, but it has not been the truth.

Place these two shootings into context and you’ll see that between these two mass shootings by transgender individuals, there were nine mass shootings in the United States, none of which have been attributable to or involving anyone with a transgender identity. While not every one of those cases currently has a known perpetrator, all known shooters in these nine mass shootings are cisgender males.

After the Annunciation Church shooting in September 2025, Factcheck.org cited information from Mark Bryant, founding executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, that between Jan. 1, 2013 and Sept. 15, 2025, there were five confirmed transgender mass shooters amid 5,748 mass shootings. Utilizing information from the GVA database, that number can be updated to six transgender shooters amid 5,904 mass shootings as of February 21, 2026.

A 2025 Gallup study reported 1.3% of Americans identify as transgender. If the demographics of mass shooters were proportional to the demographics of Americans as a whole, we could then expect that transgender individuals would comprise 1.3% of mass shooters. They don’t. Based on that data, they account for only 0.1% of all mass shootings in the United States. One-tenth of one percent.

That’s about 12 times lower than their share of the population. If mass shootings reflected population proportions, one would expect roughly 70 to 80 cases involving transgender perpetrators. Instead, there are six.

Simply put, there is no transgender gun violence epidemic. Transgender individuals are not, as Matt Walsh claims, “per capita … the most dangerous people on the planet.” Rather, they may be one of the least likely demographics to go on a gun rampage.

The myth of trans violence has been a false story that has evolved throughout the years to demonize transgender individuals and justify the violence done to them. Anti-trans activists and commentators cry “trans” at every mass shooting because reality does not fit their subjective conception.

The data are clear. There is no statistical justification for fear, only a propagandized narrative meant to vilify a marginalized group.

 

Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.