Are Transgender Mass Shootings on the Rise? What We Know, What We Don’t 

• Monday’s massacre at a Christian school in Nashville has led to claims about a rise in mass shootings by transgender people.
• Police have said the shooter, who they identified as 28-year-old Audrey Hale, was transgender.
• Experts told Newsweek that only three shootings, including Monday’s, since 2018 have been carried out by people who were reportedly transgender.
• Overall, transgender perpetrators do not appear to be over-represented in mass shootings, but the issue is complex.

Monday’s violence in Nashville was the latest shooting at an elementary school to stun the U.S.

Three children, all aged nine, and three adults were killed when 28-year-old Audrey Hale opened fire inside The Covenant School, a private Christian school that police said Hale once attended. Two responding officers shot and killed Hale within about four minutes of their arrival on the scene.

The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department referred to the shooter as a woman for hours on Monday, but later in the day, police chief John Drake said Hale was transgender.

Authorities have not revealed any details about whether the shooter had transitioned or received gender-affirming care, saying only that Hale had used masculine pronouns on social media.

In the days since, the shooting has provoked huge discussion and debate from both sides of the political divide.

President Joe Biden and some Democrats have renewed their calls for Congress to act, starting with an assault weapons ban. Some Republicans and conservatives have said that guns are not at the root of the tragedy, instead honing in on the shooter’s reported gender identity.

“There’s a clear epidemic of trans or nonbinary mass shooters,” Donald Trump Jr. said earlier this week.

Benny Johnson, of Turning Point USA, tweeted that “one thing is VERY clear: the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists.”

The arguments about statistics are complex, and there is much that is still not known. But, overall, experts told Newsweek that such claims are not supported by the recorded data.

Mass Shootings Carried Out by Transgender Perpetrators

In his tweet, Johnson cited four shootings allegedly committed by transgender or non-binary perpetrators.

“The Colorado Springs shooter identified as non binary. The Denver shooter identified as trans. The Aberdeen shooter identified as trans. The Nashville shooter identified as trans,” he wrote. Johnson has been contacted for comment.

The gender identity of those shooters has not been definitively established. In the case of the suspect in the Colorado Springs shooting at a gay club, Anderson Lee Aldrich’s lawyers wrote in court documents that their client identified as non-binary but reportedly later used he/him pronouns in court.

The other three account for a tiny fraction of at least 2,827 mass shootings in the U.S. that have been documented by the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which defines a mass shooting as four or more shot or killed in a single incident, since the beginning of 2018.

That year, 26-year-old Snochia Moseley shot and killed three people before taking their own life. A friend told the Washington Post that Moseley suffered from bipolar disorder and depression, partly linked to feelings of rejection after first coming out as gay and then transgender.

In 2019, a transgender teenager and a friend opened fire at a suburban Denver high school, killing one and wounding eight. Alec McKinney told police he was in a “pre-op transitioning phase” and was seeking revenge on students who picked on him for being transgender.

That three reported mass shootings carried out by transgender perpetrators have occurred since 2018 has led to claims that such incidents are rising. The reality is more complicated.

How Many Americans Identify As Transgender?

In order to find out whether transgender perpetrators are over-represented in mass shootings, it’s necessary to know what proportion of the U.S. population identifies as transgender. However, it is difficult to say definitively what this figure is.

Transgender people account for about 0.6 percent of the population—some 1.6 million over the age of 13, according to data covering 2017-2020 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was cited in a study published last summer by researchers at the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA’s Law School.

A survey by the Pew Research Center in June 2022 also reported a figure of 0.6 percent of all U.S. adults.

In both studies, the proportion was higher among younger people. The Williams Institute found that among those aged 13 to 17, 1.4 per cent identify as transgender, and 1.3 percent of those aged 18 to 24. The Pew Research Center found that 2 percent of those aged 18 to 29 identify as transgender.

The Williams Institute also found wide variations depending on location, ranging from about 0.9 percent of adults in North Carolina and the District of Columbia identifying as trans, down to 0.2 percent in Missouri. The figure for Tennessee, where the shooting took place, was 0.5 percent.

The proportion of young people, in particular, identifying as transgender appears to have increased in recent years. The Williams Institute put the figure of those aged 13 to 17 at 0.7 percent in its previous report, in 2017.

Are Transgender People Over-Represented in Mass Shootings?

According to The Violence Project, which maintains a national database of mass public shootings dating back to 1966, 98 percent of mass public shooters are men. Only four shooters of the 191 mass shooters in the database are female, and in two cases, they acted alongside a man.

The project focuses on mass shootings in public where four or more people were killed, not counting the shooter. By that definition, only Monday’s shooting would be the only case of a shooting by a transgender person included in the database.

Using the metric that transgender people account for 0.6 percent of the population, they would indeed expect to be involved in about one incident in the database, as The Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler noted.

By the Gun Violence Archive’s criteria, transgender people would be expected to have committed at least 16 mass shootings since 2018—but only three possible cases have been cited.

Mass shootings by perpetrators who identify as transgender are “exceedingly rare,” Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, told Newsweek.

Because “the base rate of incidents in general is so small, any increase looks astronomical,” Schildkraut said. “So going from 1 shooting perpetrated by a transgender individual to 2 is a 100 percent increase… it is important to remember that correlation (which this is not even large enough to be that) does not equal causation.”

Furthermore, she said it’s difficult to ascertain whether transgender people commit more mass shootings because there are so few instances and because “we do not know the size or true breadth of the community.”

Mass shooters are “overwhelmingly cisgender heterosexual White men, so any deviation from that will certainly be seen as out of the norm,” Creaig Dunton, an associate professor of criminal justice at Western New England University, told Newsweek. “But that does not mean that it was a motivating factor to this crime.”

As well as the difficulty in ascertaining the true proportion of Americans who identify as transgender, and whether this proportion is rising, it is important to note that mass shootings are on the rise.

There were 646 mass shootings in 2022, according to the GVA, and 690 in 2021. In 2014, the first year figures from the GVA are available, there were 273. So, changes in the numbers of mass shootings, as well as changes in the proportion of Americans identifying as transgender, can have a big effect on whether transgender perpetrators are over- or under-represented in the statistics. The GVA does not say how many of these incidents involved transgender perpetrators.

Complicating the picture further, the average age of mass shooters between 1966 and 2020 was roughly 33 years old, according to the Rockefeller Institute. An increasingly large group of mass shooters is even younger, at 21 or less. As younger people are more likely to identify as transgender, it is difficult to ensure comparisons are representative across all age groups.

False Rumors

One reason that some may assume mass shootings by transgender people are rising is because of rumors or misinformation, intentional or otherwise, that can circulate in the confusion after a shooting has happened.

Rep. Paul Gosar was among those who repeated baseless rumors that the teenage gunman who opened fire inside an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last year was transgender.

“Most have been proven to be attributed to either initial confusion or intentional misrepresentations via social media,” Dunton said.

Over the past 5 years, only 3 of the estimated 2,840 mass shooters were trans. Trans people are 1-2% of the general population but only 0.04% of mass shooters (98% are cis men). I realize the right doesn’t care about statistics but at least we can show how ridiculous they sound. pic.twitter.com/NuUIgGZR39

— Eli Erlick (@EliErlick) March 28, 2023

Some conservatives are trying to “set up a pattern that simply doesn’t exist,” said Eli Erlick, a transgender activist and the co-founder of Trans Student Educational Resources.

“There are actually so few trans perpetrators of violence that it really is an anomaly when a trans person does something as horrible as what we saw this week,” Erlick told Newsweek.

She added that there was no evidence to suggest that any of three shooters who reportedly identified as transgender in the past five years were activists of any kind.

Police have not said exactly what drove Hale to carry out Monday’s attack, but Metropolitan Nashville police chief John Drake has said that investigators believe Hale had “some resentment for having to go to that school.” He also said that Hale was being treated for an undisclosed emotional disorder.

The Role of Gender-Affirming Drugs

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that gender-affirming drugs had played a role in Monday’s massacre. “Everyone can stop blaming guns now,” she tweeted. Greene has been contacted for comment.

It is also not known whether Hale had undergone hormone replacement therapy. However, as Newsweek has previously reported, the evidence for whether this can have an effect is also unclear.

Some studies have found that trans men taking testosterone hormones may have increased aggression, including a 2018 study from The Journal of Sexual Medicine and a 2021 study in Hormones and Behavior. The latter found that in one of three trans men taking testosterone ended up less aggressive during treatment, and that all groups had no changes in aggression at a one-year follow-up.

Overall, scientists agree that more research is needed to determine the relationship between aggression and testosterone for trans men.

Risks Faced by Transgender People

Advocacy group GLAAD said in a statement posted on Twitter that as families and communities mourn, “extremists are lying about the trans community and gun violence to distract from the brutal truth: more children are dying from gun violence than any other cause of death in America.”

They are “attempting to blame an entire marginalized community, rather than taking action to ban assault weapons and strengthen gun safety protections,” the statement added.

The targeting of her community is “truly terrifying,” Erlick said. “There is a lot of danger that comes with being an out trans person. Personally, I’ve been physically attacked, I’ve had guns pointed at me. I have been assaulted numerous times.”

Tasiyah Woodland, an 18-year-old transgender woman, was shot dead in Maryland last week. At least seven other transgender and gender non-conforming people have been killed this year, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, which tracks data on homicides of transgender people, 35 were killed last year and 60 the year before.

“In the case of the Nashville shooting, or the countless other acts of gun violence every single day, the common denominator is always the gun and the weak laws that allow these tragedies to happen,” Sarah Burd-Sharps, senior director of research at Everytown, told Newsweek.

“The fact of the matter is that people who are trans are not likely to commit violent crime because of their identity, and are instead targeted more for hate crimes,” Dunton said.