The pattern is so reliable you can set your watch by it. A mass shooting happens, the country is still counting the dead, and within hours a familiar set of accounts is already certain of one detail above all others: the shooter, they say, was transgender. Libs of TikTok, the account run by Chaya Raichik, is often among the loudest. [4] The certainty is the tell. It arrives before the facts do, and when the facts arrive, they rarely cooperate.
A claim built on exceptions
The argument leans on a few real cases and a lot of misidentified ones. Right-wing accounts have repeatedly named mass shooters as transgender on thin or fabricated evidence, in at least one instance circulating a photograph of an innocent, uninvolved person as the supposed shooter. [4] A small number of perpetrators in recent years have in fact been trans or nonbinary, and an honest accounting includes them. The question is not whether any transgender person has ever committed a mass shooting. It is whether transgender people commit them at unusual rates. They do not.
What the mass-shooter record shows
The most thorough catalog of American mass shooters, The Violence Project's database, tells the same story decades of research already told: the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are cisgender men. [3] Transgender people make up roughly half a percent of the US population over age 13, by the Williams Institute's count, and they are not overrepresented among mass shooters relative to that share. [2][3] A vanishingly rare act committed by a tiny share of the population does not become a trend because it makes a more shareable post.
The number the rumor buries
Turn the data around and the real pattern is hard to miss. Transgender people are not unusually likely to commit violence. They are unusually likely to suffer it. The Williams Institute, analyzing federal crime-victimization data, found transgender people are more than four times as likely as cisgender people to be the victims of violent crime. [1] That is the finding that never trends. The same accounts that can name a hypothetical trans shooter within the hour have nothing to say about the trans people who are actually, measurably, being hurt.
Data
| Cisgender people | 1x |
|---|---|
| Transgender people | 4x |
Why the lie is built this way
The trans-shooter rumor works because it runs before anyone can check it. [3][4] It does not need to be true on Tuesday; it only needs to be loud on Tuesday, because the correction comes on Friday to a fraction of the audience. The accounts pay no price for the misidentified innocent person, because being first and being angry travels, and being right and being careful does not. The counter is not to relitigate each case in the replies. It is to hold up the two numbers that settle it: transgender people are about half a percent of the country, and they are more than four times likelier than their neighbors to be the victim of a violent crime. [1][2] The rumor has the story backward, every single time.
The next viral certainty will arrive on schedule, sourced to nothing, hours ahead of the police report. [4] Now you know which numbers to reach for while it is still trending. The people in the most danger here are not the ones in the meme. They are the ones it is aimed at.
