A list of perpetrators in four shootings in the U.S. who identified as transgender or non-binary represents the minority of suspects in mass shootings. Still, users online are sharing the list without this context. Data collection on mass shootings varies by methodology, but experts told Reuters data shows that cisgender men carry out most mass shootings.
Cisgender refers to people who identify as the sex assigned at birth, while transgender is an umbrella term for those who do not. Non-binary is for those who do not identify exclusively as a man or woman, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
One tweet said: “The Colorado Springs shooter identified as non-binary. The Denver shooter was identified as trans. The Aberdeen shooter was identified as trans. The Nashville shooter was identified as trans. One thing is clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists” Another example can be seen. Other posts with similar language can be seen.
LIST OF PERPETRATORS
The posts mention a “Nashville shooter,” which references the recent school shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, on March 27, where the suspect, identified as Audrey Elizabeth Hale by police, reportedly identified as transgender.
The “Colorado Springs shooter” refers to Anderson Lee Aldrich, who is accused of killing five people at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in November 2022, and whose lawyers have asserted identifies as non-binary and prefers they/them pronouns (here). (Skepticism over Aldrich’s assertion has since arisen, with extremism experts and people who knew the shooter weighing in, more on that here ).
The “Denver shooter” in the posts refers to a shooting at a charter school in Denver, Colorado, in May 2019. Alec McKinney, a transgender teenager, was sentenced to life in prison following the shooting, Reuters reported at the time.
The “Aberdeen shooter” appears to reference Snochia Moseley, the suspect of a shooting at a Rite Aid Corp facility in Aberdeen, Maryland. Some news reports said Moseley identified as transgender.
NOT THE MAJORITY
Calculating exact percentages when it comes to mass shooting statistics in the U.S. varies by way of counting, as organizations define mass shootings differently.
A spokesperson for The Violence Project, which records data on mass shootings in the U.S. since 1966 with “four or more” people killed in public, told Reuters via email that “Nashville is the first case of a trans” perpetrator in their database and per their methodology. They sent Reuters a database of shootings with 190 entries.
Executive Director Mark Bryant told Reuters via email that the Gun Violence Archive, which began collecting data on gun violence in the U.S. in 2013, recorded more than 4,400 mass shootings in the last decade. Its definition of a mass shooting is four or more people shot resulting in injury or death (excluding the perpetrator).
Of those, “the number of known suspects in mass shootings which are trans is under 10 for the last decade,” which translated to “1:880 [or 0.11%] of the 4,400 shootings” they recorded, he said.
Further, the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC), which studies all forms of targeted violence including mass casualty attacks, published a report with data from 2016 to 2020 (here).
The report examined 173 attacks in the U.S. that “that resulted in harm to three or more individuals in public locations,” Justine Whelan, press secretary for the U.S. Secret Service, told Reuters via email, and “three attackers (2%) were transgender, assigned female at birth, but were known to identify as male at the time of their attacks.”
Whelan said that consistent with previous analyses of mass attacks, “nearly all of the attackers,” or 96%, in the study, were male, and the remaining five attackers were female.
In terms of the gender breakdown, the Violence Project also found that 168 (97.7%) of mass shooters in their database up to March 2021 were men (scroll to “explore the shooters” section, select gender “female” box among selections).
Reuters reported on studies in mid-2022 that found about 0.5% of U.S. adults identify as transgender and about 1.3% of 13 to 17-year-olds.
Moments after the assailant who killed six people at a Nashville private school was identified as transgender, a baseless narrative emerged: that there has been an incredible rise in transgender or nonbinary mass shooters in recent years.
Some pundits and political influencers on social media went further, suggesting that movements for trans rights are radicalizing activists into terrorists.
The data tells a different story, according to gender and criminology experts. Mass casualty shootings perpetrated by someone identifying as trans or nonbinary are rare, and in fact, those groups are far more likely to be the victims of violence. Here’s a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: Four recent shootings show there has been an “incredible rise” in transgender or nonbinary mass shooters in the past few years, making the group “by far the largest group committing as a percentage of the population.”
Donald Trump Jr. spread the narrative widely on Twitter, claiming the supposed “incredible rise” and later saying there was a clear trend forming. The idea was amplified by hundreds of other social media users. Trump Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.
THE FACTS: While specific data on transgender and nonbinary mass shooters can be hard to isolate, available information shows that the overwhelming majority of assailants in mass shootings are cisgender males.
In making the claim, social media users are citing four examples over the past five years in which the assailant in a shooting identified as trans or nonbinary: the November killing of five at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado; a 2019 shooting at a Denver-area school by two shooters, one of them a trans man, that left one student dead and eight wounded; a 2018 shooting at a Maryland warehouse that left four dead, including the shooter; and the shooting Monday in Nashville.
The number of mass shootings committed by those identifying as trans or nonbinary — and their ratio compared to mass shootings committed by other groups — is hard to quantify. It depends on the database used, how the act is defined and how gender identity is recorded — for example, transgender males may statistically be counted as just men. But experts agree that the most reputable information still shows a clear pattern that cisgender males are the most likely to commit such an act of mass violence.
Using the Gun Violence Archive, and a definition for mass shooting meaning “at least four gun injuries,” there have been 3,561 mass shootings since the beginning of 2016.
Laura Dugan, a professor of human security and sociology at Ohio State University, said the four widely cited examples out of the 3,561 shootings translates to 0.11% being perpetrated by someone who is not cisgender — a very low number relative to the number of mass shootings total.
“We cannot statistically make any claim of a trend,” she said.
Dugan also pointed out that there are some doubts about the nonbinary identity asserted by the Colorado Springs shooter.
James Alan Fox, a statistician and professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University, helps maintain the Associated Press-USA TODAY-Northeastern database of mass killings in the U.S., which does not contain full data on perpetrators’ gender. The claims on social media this week amount to extreme cherry-picking of data, he said.
“There are a lot of mass shootings, hundreds of mass shootings, and to cherry-pick four of them and say here’s a trend, that’s wrong,” Fox said. “You can’t make a conclusion that that’s significant. It is not significant in any statistical sense.”
Olivera Jokić, the director of the gender studies program at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, referred to a National Institutes of Justice database that tracked U.S. mass shootings — defined as a shooting that kills four or more people — from 1966 to 2019. The research found that of the 172 people who committed public mass shootings covered in the database, 97.7% were male. The data makes no distinction between transgender and cisgender perpetrators.
“The political rhetoric using ‘statistical information’ about gender identification of mass shooters is wrong,” she said, “and seems to serve to distract from existing discussions about mass shootings as a public health problem.”
The claims come amid a flood of legislation nationwide targeting transgender people. Conservative lawmakers are pushing dozens of proposals in statehouses to restrict transgender athletes, gender-affirming care and drag shows. Last week, a pair of laws passed in Iowa that restrict the bathrooms transgender students can use and ban gender-affirming medical care. Other legislative proposals in at least eight states could prevent transgender people from changing their driver’s licenses and birth certificates.
Against that backdrop, studies also show trans people are more than four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime, according to a report by the Williams Institute, an LGBTQ think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“This is capitalizing on tragedy for political purposes,” Fox said. “One should not conclude that being trans or nonbinary, they should be more likely to commit a crime like this.” ___
