The truth about trans violence We need research, not demonisation

Before the authorities identified Tyler Robinson as Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin, and before the information broke that Robinson may have lived with a transgender partner, the Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder released internal law-enforcement messages suggesting the shooter had engraved what Crowder asserted were transgender ideology references on his bullets. A Wall Street Journal report soon echoed the claim (which ultimately proved misleading; one message referred to the so-called furry sexuality), and the online Right jumped to associate the crime with the stereotype of the deranged and homicidal trans person, a longtime bogeyman among conservatives.

Then, on Monday, Aaron Sibarium of the Free Beacon reported that the FBI is investigating a series of social-media posts published in advance of Kirk’s assassination that “appeared to indicate foreknowledge” of the shooting. Several of those accounts appear to be run by transgender individuals, and at least one of them apparently followed Robinson’s trans roommate on TikTok, Sibarium reported.

Among the most hyperbolic polemics on the Right about this quickly shifting story are those from Daily Wire pundit Matt Walsh, who took to X over the weekend to declare: “Transgenderism is a death cult.” He added that “trans militants” are “inherently violent” and insisted that the “threat they pose is very serious”. Then there was Donald Trump Jr., who before the shooter was identified, said in an interview with Fox News, “I can’t frankly name a mass shooting in the last year or two in America that wasn’t committed by a transgender lunatic that’s been pumped up on probably hormones since they were 3-year-olds.” (Donald Jr.’s grasp of the age a minor might start hormone therapy, even at the outer limits, is wildly inaccurate.)

It’s obviously tempting for some on the Right to claim Kirk’s murder as a general indictment of trans people — and equally, for their opponents on the Left, to fervently deny any connection between violence and trans identities. A better society, however, would tread carefully. Science on trans issues has indeed been politicised, not least by trans activists, but this is no reason to give up on it. Everyone is left poorer by each side’s rigidity and refusal to examine the facts.

Let’s start with the claim that transgender people are more likely to be mass shooters. Such figures are difficult to assess, since comparisons depend on a morass of diffuse and distortable data, including the definition of mass shooting and the size of the trans population. In fact, Kirk’s last words — “Including gang violence?” — addressed the issue of how difficult it is to define these matters, in response to a question from a student at Utah Valley University.

Assessing the per capita mass-shooting rate for trans people is also challenging, given the increasingly broad definition of what it means to be transgender and the inability for authorities to determine each shooter’s gender identity; such uncertainty leaves the door open for both sides of this issue to juice the numbers in favour of their preferred conclusion. Also, the population of trans youth has been growing faster than data analysts can necessarily keep up.

Caveats aside, the day before Kirk’s assassination, PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact-checking organisation, published an examination of the claim that trans people are disproportionately represented in the mass-shooter population and found no evidence to support it. PolitiFact examined Gun Violence Archive data and determined that seven out of 4,147, or 0.17%, of mass shootings since 2018 were committed by people with a trans or nonbinary identity.

PolitiFact calculated the mass shootings tally fairly broadly, which means it both included gang-violence incidents as well as the shooting at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis in August, which resulted in two deaths not including the perpetrator. According to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, considered the most reliable source of such data, about 1% of the overall US population identifies as trans or nonbinary; and among adolescents and young adults, the figure is just above 3%. So simply comparing those admittedly very rough figures, the claim that there is a disproportionate mass-murder trend among trans people is not supported by the evidence.

Importantly, there have been no academic studies that have analysed the available data to produce an estimate of the per-capita rates of mass shootings among trans people versus other demographics.

As for what the psychological research shows about whether trans people are more prone to violence, there’s a similar dearth of information. Researchers such as Amy Tishelman, a psychology professor at Boston College and one of the leading experts in the care of young people with gender dysphoria, suggest the reverse is largely true. “Youth who identify as transgender are actually more likely to experience internalising symptoms — anxiety, depression — than externalising symptoms, including aggression and violence,” she told me.

A Finnish study published in 2021 did find that transgender youth were more likely to be both victims and perpetrators of bullying. But overwhelmingly, the available scholarship has established that this population is disproportionately victimised, subjected to physical violence, bullying, dating violence, and forced sex.

What is abundantly clear is that the quickly ballooning population of youths with gender dysphoria also typically suffer from a host of other major psychiatric conditions. A 2021 paper found that, compared with their siblings, trans youth receiving care from military services from 2010 to 2018 were five times as likely to have a mental-health diagnosis. A 2018 paper found 30% to 50% of trans and gender-questioning youth reported a recent suicide attempt, compared with 18% of girls and 10% of boys. And a 2015 study of a Boston community health centre found that, compared with matched controls of youth who were not trans, trans youth were three to four times more likely to have been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, to have experienced suicidal ideation, and to have engaged in self-harm.

Irrespective of their gender identities, this is a remarkably troubled population of young people. And it is substantial. According to Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, between 2017 and 2023, some 320,000 to 400,000 minors received a gender-dysphoria-related diagnosis.

Interpreting these research findings to address the question of any greater potential for violence moves into the realm of speculation. Tishelman raised the question of whether there is a certain stratum of people who are indeed prone to violence and who profess to be transgender but who are not in fact genuinely trans. The Minneapolis shooter, after all, confessed in a diary entry shortly before the incident to regretting transitioning. 

This line of thinking rests in part on the fact that the profile of youth with gender-related distress has undergone a sea change. A generation ago, cross-sex identification among minors was very rare, and the youth who presented to mental-health professionals with what was then known as gender-identity disorder had lower rates of other psychiatric diagnoses than what is seen today, according to research by Canadian psychologist Ken Zucker and his colleagues.

Since then, profound cultural shifts have taken place in swift succession. In 2007, Boston Children’s Hospital became the first American clinic to offer puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat paediatric gender dysphoria. The Occupy Wall Street movement, in 2011, heralded the dawning of the social-justice-warrior era, which saw dramatically overhauled mores about sex and gender among progressives in particular. And during the early 2010s, children first became exposed to smartphone-based social media, opening them to a new realm of online identity exploration and expression as well as myriad unprecedented hazards.

As psychologist Erica Anderson, who specialises in caring for youth with gender dysphoria, told me, “It changed from kids that I saw as likely persistently trans, and who didn’t have flagrant coexisting psychiatric problems, to a heterogeneity of cases and kids who clearly had psychiatric issues that needed, in my opinion, to be treated before we could sort out the gender issues.” She continued: “The appropriation of the word trans has come to include people who would not have been characterised as trans 10 years ago and would not have been encouraged to medicalise.” 

Almost all of the trans shooters included in the PolitiFact tally were under 30 and thus part of the surge in trans identification among youths that began in the early 2010s. 

All this is to say that while we obviously have a mass-shooter problem, there is no clear scientific basis to argue that it is a trans mass-shooter problem. There are too many other complicating factors at play.

Leading researchers have been eager to sweepingly blame the poor mental health of gender-dysphoric people on what’s known as minority stress, or the suffering spawned by stigma and mistreatment regarding an individual’s trans identity. This theory is similar to many others that colour the progressive approach to societal problems: that external, or so-called structural, factors are overwhelmingly, or exclusively, to blame for disparate negative outcomes among disadvantaged populations. 

When applied to people with gender dysphoria, minority-stress theory is predicated on the notion that a trans identity is a fixed facet of the inner self and that hostility directed at that identity unidirectionally causes internal suffering. Leaders of the paediatric gender care field have fervently denied that trans identities are ever a product of social influence. 

It may, however, be time to distinguish between the subgroups under the trans umbrella, and to acknowledge, as many detransitioners have attested, that factors outside of brain wiring could possibly lead some people to identify as transgender. Have some youth adopted a trans identity as part of a deeper psychopathology that is itself tied to violence? Is this identity misdirection being fuelled by an internet culture that foments violence and also intersects with spaces where young people cultivate their gender identities? Enterprising — and brave — researchers might consider addressing these admittedly hazardous questions.  

To do so could lend credence to a theory that is anathema in paediatric gender medicine: that for some, asserting a trans identity may be a maladaptive coping mechanism and a distraction from a deeper wellspring of psychological distress. If this is true, then at least in some cases, gender-transition treatment and surgeries might only exacerbate the individual’s struggles with mental health. 

“What’s totally unhelpful and unproductive, not to say petty and just false, is to say that anybody who identifies as trans is inherently a threat, and should be regarded as such,” Sapir told me. The question, he noted, is how to grapple with any possible connection between violence and a portion of the trans population without resorting to trans hatred. “To focus only on the people who actually pull the trigger, and not on all the systemic causes that enable and encourage that type of behaviour seems to be totally unhelpful,” Sapir said. 

Sapir faulted many trans activists for being what he called “agents of pessimism”. These activists, he said, tell their followers, “‘Your life sucks, the world hates you.’” Even amid aggressive pushback by the Trump administration against the goals of transgender activism, Sapir insisted such messaging is hyperbolic and that it could be radicalising.

Psychologist Erica Anderson added that when it comes to transgender issues, “too much of the chatter online is polemical, over-generalises, and demonises ‘the other side’”. She expressed concern that “someone who is seeing themselves as a victim and feels that they have an identified enemy may be more likely to lash out”.

Trans activists would no doubt characterise such a view as blaming the victim. However, the one thing science — and the epidemic of mass shootings of all types tell us — is that we have a generation of youth, trans and otherwise, in desperate need of better care. We should not be afraid to ask questions and answer them diligently with science in service of protecting both their well-being and society at large. 

---