The Charlie Kirk assassination has driven a wedge into the United States’ steep political divide as right-wing pundits take aim at the left. But after days of focus on the gender identity of the suspect’s alleged partner, the far-right’s response has also fueled a deluge of anti-trans rhetoric that could beget more violence.
“The U.S. is at an inflection point,” a spokesperson for LGBTQ+ rights organization GLAAD, who declined to provide their name out of fear of harassment, told Salon. “There is a growing trend of right-wing politicians and influencers spreading unfounded accusations against transgender people, trying to cash in on harmful narratives particularly during high-profile events.”
Those pundits — including Kirk himself in the moments preceding his killing — have falsely claimed that trans people are responsible for the majority of mass shootings. Some have even pointed to the alleged shooter in Minneapolis last month, whom authorities identified as a transgender woman based on a 2019 name change application, as purported proof. But the profiles of the suspects in the Kirk assassination and last week’s Dallas ICE facility shooting better reflect what the data suggests. More than 95% of the perpetrators are cisgender men and more than 54% are white, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government — a fact that goes ignored by right-wing commentators, politicians and social media users itching to tie transgender people to the crimes.
“These attempts to tie the murder of Charlie Kirk to trans people is a red herring at best and, at worse, a clear example of the sort of violent ideological rhetoric that we know is used to justify violent legislation and that creates a climate in which trans people are particularly vulnerable to physical violence,” Emily Lenning, a professor of criminology at Fayetteville State University, told Salon.
Immediately after a mass shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, last December, anti-trans and out-of-context posts from right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and conservative news site Townhall fueled a flurry of online speculation about the shooter’s gender identity; police identified the shooter as a 15-year-old cisgender girl. A similar social media storm, spearheaded by the Libs of TikTok account, emerged in the wake of the Lakewood Church shooting in Texas last February, in which two people were injured and the suspect was killed, as conservatives speculated about the perpetrator being transgender, which local law enforcement debunked.
The aftermath of the Kirk shooting was no different. On Sept. 11, the day after Kirk’s assassination, The Wall Street Journal ran a story with false claims headlined “Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology: Sources.” The Journal updated its headline later that day to read, “Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology; Some Sources Urge Caution” and appended an editor’s note the following day after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s description of the engravings did not suggest any references to trans people or “ideology.”
As the case against the suspect, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, progressed, however, Cox claimed that Robinson’s roommate and alleged partner — who the FBI said Robinson confessed the shooting to in a text exchange — is “a male transitioning to a female.” Authorities also said that Robinson was living with and in a romantic relationship with a trans person, drawing from a secondhand account from Robinson’s mother. The claim that the suspect “lived with [a] transgender partner” originally stemmed from a Fox News report that cited anonymous FBI officials, according to Snopes.
Notably, the roommate, who is cooperating with authorities, has not publicly come forward or confirmed their gender identity, meaning that any claims as to their identity are speculative. More important, still, is that the roommate’s — or anyone’s — gender identity is irrelevant to the crime at hand.
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“Placing emphasis on this individual, this partner, that we don’t have concrete evidence about, is a distraction,” Lenning said. “It is a distraction to keep us from looking at the bigger issue, which is political violence. Whether we’re talking about political violence as a shooting, or we’re talking about political violence as in the violent rhetoric against trans people, which is also a form of political violence.”
In a 2024 research paper, Lenning and her co-authors found that violent ideology, violent policies and acts of violence have a strong correlation that increased over time. They found a link between anti-trans rhetoric and homicides of trans people and an increase in both between 2015 and 2022. The same was true with anti-trans policies and homicides between 2017 and 2022.
“The ACLU is currently tracking over 600 anti-LGBTQ laws in this country. That is an unprecedented amount of legal violence thrown at a single group, and we know historically that any time you remove civil rights from a group of people and dehumanize them, you open them up to violence,” Lenning said. The scapegoating of trans people after mass shootings, she added, “serves to justify all of the policy and legal steps that this administration has done to actively harm transgender people.”
In reality, the limited data on mass shootings and homicide assailants’ gender identities suggests that “trans people make up an insignificant percentage” of perpetrators, Lenning said.
Trans or nonbinary people have only carried out five mass shootings since January 2013, amounting to less than 0.1% of all shootings from the last 12 years, the executive director of the Gun Violence Archive told FactCheck.org.
Instead, LGBTQ+ Americans — especially trans and gender nonconforming people — face a greater risk of violence and death from gun violence. Trans people, in particular, are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than cisgender people. In the year between May 1, 2024, and May 1, 2025, 52% of the 932 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents GLAAD’s Anti-LGBTQ Extremism Reporting Tracker Desk recorded were targeting transgender and gender nonconforming people. The communities have faced increased scrutiny in recent years as politicians attempt to limit their rights and freedoms through legislation and wield acceptance of transgender Americans against opponents.
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“Narratives fed by baseless and harmful conspiracy theories [that] maliciously target people who are transgender or thought to be transgender are attempts to undermine authentic identity, smear political opponents, and threaten free expression,” the GLAAD spokesperson said, adding that these narratives also put cisgender people in harm’s way.
Take the Minnesota teen who said a Buffalo Wild Wings server followed her into a women’s restroom and demanded she “prove” she was a girl. Or Imane Khelif, the Algerian Olympic boxer whose eligibility to compete in the 2024 Summer Olympics was called into question because of false claims that she was born male. Or France’s First Lady Brigitte Macron, who is planning to present photographic and scientific evidence that she was born female in court after months of rightwing influencer Candace Owens claiming that she was born male.
“Rampant speculation based on a person’s looks or body type is harmful and dehumanizing,” the spokesperson said. “It’s about oppression and control, particularly of women and girls, and who is ‘feminine enough’ to live by these outdated and toxic notions.”
“Demonizing any marginalized group flies directly in the face of [everyone’s freedom to be themselves and live safely] and our country’s promise as a place where equality, liberty, and justice are promised for all,” they added.
This piece has been updated to correct the date of the Wall Street Journal article’s publication.
