Here’s Why Republicans Keep Scapegoating Trans People For Mass Shootings

How the far right manufactured a national threat

There’s an oft-cited colloquial phrase in political science expressing the perils of getting everything you want: the dog that caught the car. Perhaps it is better, the concept goes, for the yapping canine to be forever chasing that elusive automobile than to actually catch up to it. If he were to do so, the dog would have to ask himself: What now? What comes next? But now that anti-LGBTQ+ extremists are clearing out their wishlist under the first nine months of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second administration, we are seeing why they wanted the car to begin with. It was never about the chase; it was always about the total and complete vilification of marginalized people, at any cost.

If you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, the far right has spent the better part of the last month attempting to paint the trans community as uniquely violent, a cause for national concern. Following the deadly August 27 shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, notorious right-wing propagandist Benny Johnson alleged that “the modern trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder,” in a since-deleted post on X. Acquaintances have reported to media outlets that the shooter expressed anti-Semitic views, including performing Nazi salutes in class and praising Adolf Hitler. But only one factor appeared to matter to figures like Johnson: that the killer was born under a different name and had it legally changed as a teenager.

In the wake of the tragedy, conservative media went into overdrive to cement the idea of a bloodthirsty trans menace in the public’s collective minds. The first words in an August 28 report from the New York Post — even before the killer’s actual name — were “transgender mass shooter.” Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took that association even further: While claiming that medically transitioning engenders a predisposition to violence, she called (yet again) for a national ban on gender-affirming care for minors. “If they are willing to destroy themselves and how God made them, then they are willing to destroy others,” she posted on X.

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Declaring the community a “public safety risk,” conspiracy theorist and close Trump ally Laura Loomer openly advocated for trans segregation in schools.

They don’t belong in the school system. If you think you’re a girl when you’re a boy, you aren’t going to function in school anyway, because your brain is broken. We might as well make it a national policy to keep trans kids out of the public school system. They used to have separate classes and school programs for mentally ill children. And they were kept away from the other kids for a reason.

This first wave of vitriol crescendoed with a report that the Trump administration, never shy about exploiting ill-informed bigotry, is considering whether to restrict firearm access to trans Americans. Under federal U.S. regulation, authorities have the power to limit the Second Amendment rights of any individual who has been “adjudicated as a mental defective” or “committed to a mental institution.” A proposal being discussed internally by the Justice Department would effectively proclaim trans people to be mentally ill and, thus, ineligible for gun ownership.

This has long been the goal of the modern conservative movement — to declare trans people an existential and literal threat to public order — but it took the GOP time to build up to it. When the right first attempted to create a trans boogeyman in the shadow of North Carolina’s infamous bathroom bill, HB 2, demagogues had not properly laid the groundwork of moral panic. They had not taught the public to be scared of trans people, and so the manufactured frenzy over toilets largely landed with a thud. Gov. Pat McCrory (R) was voted out during the next election as a direct punishment for signing the bill into law, following a widely publicized corporate boycott of the state that insiders feared would cost the state billions. Even Trump, before deciding that transphobia played better to his base, admitted that trans people using the facility most comfortable for them had resulted in “so little trouble.”

If sharing a public restroom with trans people didn’t scare Americans, Republicans spent several years figuring out how to persuade voters that they needed to be afraid of a tiny community that, according to polling, many of them had never even encountered. Sports proved effective where the bathroom debate had not: creating a villain that conservatives could routinely exploit in hopes of making the case that the harm caused by trans people did not stop with athletics. Riley Gaines, a former collegiate swimmer turned anti-trans activist, suggested in a recent interview that sports had always been a waystation to other, far loftier goals. “The gender ideology movement is a house of cards, and I believe it’s lying on that sports issue,” she told The New York Times. “This will be the card that makes all of it crumble.”

Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images

The right’s resounding success in restricting trans student athletics access — 29 U.S. states currently have a partial or full trans sports ban on the books — presaged even greater successes, ones we are seeing further proliferate in our current moment. When conservatives were able to convince enough Americans that trans people were an insidious presence in women’s sports, it was easier to argue that those dangers were transferable. Within the coming years, Republicans would denounce corrected birth certificates as a danger to accurate record-keeping. Trans kids were presented as a danger to other students, even themselves. These dangers were often forcibly eradicated, such as when Florida administrators ordered the removal of LGBTQ+ books from K-12 classrooms and libraries.

Those fears, as hollow and fabricated as they may be, have remade the American legislative landscape — one which would have been unthinkable 10 years ago, when the Supreme Court’s historic legalization of marriage equality felt like the dawn of a queer utopia. How rude it is, then, to awaken in 2025, when six states have laws on the books making gender-affirming care for minors a felony and the Trump administration is threatening hospitals to hand over confidential records regarding trans youth health care. Even the bathroom issue, once considered to be a lost cause, is trending rightward: Nineteen states now have statutes prohibiting trans people from using restrooms that correspond with their gender in government buildings, public schools, prisons, universities, or some combination. Texas is about to become no. 20; the Lone Star State is one signature away from passing a law fining facilities $25,000 on the first offense for allowing trans people to use gender-congruent accommodations.

Because conservative extremists have largely won the battle, all that is left to them is all-out war — one they are unsubtly waging on an enemy they have spent a decade constructing in the mass imagination. When far-right influencer Charlie Kirk was assassinated on September 20 while spreading misinformation about the Annunciation Catholic School shooting, influential figures used those exact words to call for violent retribution. That crusade would be aimed squarely at trans people. “THIS IS WAR,” wrote Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik on X just hours after Kirk’s death. Fox News host Jesse Watters vowed on air that his supporters would “avenge Charlie’s death in the way that Charlie wanted to be avenged.” “You’ve got trans shooters, you’ve got riots in L.A.,” he said. “They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us, and what are we going to do about it?”

Photo by Gage Skidmore with overlay

Although Kirk’s shooter was not trans, those inconvenient truths have proven all but irrelevant to the far right, which has done everything it possibly can to link trans people to his killing anyway. Shortly after the deadly attack, far-right commentator Steven Crowder circulated false reports that pro-trans messages were inscribed on the bullets used to kill Kirk. The since-debunked claims were soon picked up in The Wall Street Journal, which has partially walked back its reporting, and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who has only dug in further. Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) initially blamed “lunatic tr*nnies” before pivoting to thoughts and prayers, while Donald Trump Jr. called being trans an “absolute sickness.”

Following their meticulous (and surely ongoing) campaign of dehumanizing trans people, the far-right reaction to Kirk’s death showed just how much farther they are willing to go — should the public allow them to do so. Before it was revealed that his shooter was a cisgender man with Trump-voting, Mormon parents, conservative influencer Joey Mannarino suggested that trans people should be exterminated. “If the person who killed Charlie Kirk was a transgender, there can be no mercy for that species any longer,” he wrote on X. “We’ve already tolerated far too much from those creatures.” (The post is no longer available.)

The usual suspects reacted fairly predictably to still-developing reports that Kirk’s killer had a trans girlfriend, using the information to fuel their longstanding ambitions of segregating trans people from society, one way or another. Trump floated the idea of banning LGBTQ+ Pride flags in Washington, D.C., while two sitting members of Congress called for the mass institutionalization of trans people. And at the reported urging of the Heritage Foundation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is poised to target trans people as terrorists under the banner of “nihilistic violent extremism.” That term, created by Trump’s FBI earlier this year, refers to “criminal conduct… in furtherance of political, social, or religious goals that derive primarily from a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos.”

But the right hardly needed a shred of information about the killer’s personal life to decide trans people are uniquely at fault — not merely for this crime but virtually all violence. The reaction would have been similar if he had had a trans teacher, trans best friend, trans neighbor, or trans Lyft driver. Since the Annunciation Catholic School attack, numerous memes have circulated on X inaccurately stating that trans people have been responsible for the eight most recent mass shootings. (Some of those posts even allege that the number is as high as 12.) One prominent conservative account even went so far as to assert that trans people are responsible for all mass shootings. Before police ever apprehended Kirk’s murderer, the photo of a paralegal at a Seattle law firm was widely circulated on X, with posters baselessly alleging that she was the person behind the shooting.

Although claims of a trans terrorism epidemic have certainly intensified in recent weeks, the pattern of falsely blaming trans people for mass violence is not new. Following the May 2022 murder of 17 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, numerous right-wing figures claimed the shooter was trans. Candace Owens falsely cited photos of the shooter “cross-dressing,” while Congressman Paul Gosar (R-Texas) referred to the perpetrator as a “transsexual leftist illegal alien.” The false allegations were based on images of two trans women unrelated to the attack. Similar phenomena occurred following deadly shootings in Houston; Madison, Wisc.; and Philadelphia.

The reality is that trans people are far more likely to be the targets of gun violence than the cause. Data from the Gun Violence Archive shows that, since 2018, trans people have been the perpetrators in fewer than .17% of shootings resulting in the deaths of three or more people. In contrast, research indicates that trans Americans are four times more likely than their cisgender counterparts to be targeted in a violent crime, and bias attacks against members of the community are continuing to rise. In its most recent report, the FBI found that at least one in five hate crimes was motivated by the individual’s LGBTQ+ identity, with anti-trans violence increasing by 16%. At least 32 trans people were killed in 2024, even as the total number of hate crimes is dropping overall.

Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Claiming that trans people are responsible for violence, even though it is untrue, sets the stage for actual violence against trans people: whether political violence, physical violence, or both. That is, after all, the purpose of a villain. They are meant to be defeated and destroyed so the protagonist can prosper, riding off into the sunset a victor. To the far right, it does not matter that Kirk — who infamously claimed the Civil Rights Act was a “mistake” and called George Floyd a “scumbag” — was no hero. It does not matter that their tyrannical foe is actually a vulnerable group that experiences disproportionately high rates of unemployment, homelessness, and poverty, due largely to the very bigotry their rhetoric foments. It does not matter whether any actual trans person was actually involved, as long as the right has a predetermined scapegoat, as long as they can keep misleading the public about what the real dangers are.

The right has invented monsters out of thin air before. They’ll continue doing so as long as they keep getting everything they want in return.