Fact Check: Transgender Mass Shooters
Co-authored by Kat
We fact-checked their claims and—spoiler alert—found them completely baseless.
Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) write that the first Intifada (Palestinian freedom movement, circa 1987) failed because a few youths threw rocks, undermining the nonviolent promise of the movement. Because of this, the movement failed to gain sympathy from Israeli citizens because they did not see the nonviolent aspects of the movement in the news. They were only shown the rock throwing.
Now, was rock-throwing truly prevalent among Palestinian youths? Or did the state-run Israeli media merely say it was so? We’ll never know for certain, but the familiar framework of this practice in propaganda suggests the latter.
Today, in America, the U.S. federal administration is claiming that transgender people are violent. And our state-run media are eating it up.
Mass 50501 would like to set the record straight: the administration’s claims of transgender people perpetrating violence are not earnest, or based in any fact. These claims are strategic shots meant to undermine the nonviolent movement to secure transgender human rights.
You will often hear right-wing individuals, from elected officials to your next door neighbor, use divisive anti-transgender language. Without a care for truth or the consequences of their lies, they spin false narratives out of nothing. Politicians stand behind podiums and create folk devils for their constituents to raise their fists and rally against instead of the Epstein list. As if we’d simply forget.
Here’s an example: recently Donald Trump, Jr., stated he could not “name a mass shooting in the last year or two in America that wasn’t committed by, you know, a transgender lunatic.” Fortunately, I can name many.
Photo via Mass 50501 Volunteer
Over the past 12 years, there have been 5,748 mass shootings in the U.S. Of thousands of perpetrators, only 5 have identified as transgender or nonbinary. These numbers are based on the widely accepted Gun Violence Archive definition of mass shootings, which requires a minimum of four victims shot not including the shooter.
That’s under 0.1% of mass shootings being perpetrated by a transgender person. But even this number is iffy because this number includes Anderson Aldrich, who experts and neighbors think may have claimed to be nonbinary in order to receive a lighter sentence that wouldn’t label it as a hate crime.
Even including Aldrich, these numbers just don't add up. But let’s get into them anyway:
Five out of 5,748 is 0.09%.
The remaining 99.01% of mass shootings were committed by cisgender individuals.
Of those individuals, 97% were cisgender men. That’s 5,576 out of 5,748, for the record.
Let’s remember now that trans individuals only count for about 1% of the U.S. population anyway. In order for trans people to even make up 1% of mass shootings, there’d need to have been an additional 51 trans shooters over the past 12 years of data. And there was not.
In order to sufficiently back right-wing claims that transgender people pose any type of threat, far more than 1% of shooters would need to be transgender. But again, according to the facts, they are not. In fact, transgender individuals are 10 times less likely to be shooters than cis males.
We’ve done the research, and we’ll speak truth to power: the administration’s claim is an outright lie, motivated by hatred. Instead of ensuring freedom for all, they’re choosing to hurt innocent people.
Concluding that the false narrative posing trans people as violent extremists, or “transtifa,” have no factual backing. You can chalk them up to just another attempt to distract us from their shortcomings and, of course, from the Epstein files.
References:
Chenoweth, E. and Stephan M. (2011). Why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. Columbia University Press, New York.
Wang, A. (2025). “Few mass shooters have been transgender”. Retrieved from https://www.factcheck.org/2025/09/few-mass-shooters-have-been-transgender/
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