When shooters’ “gender identities” were revealed, some news outlets and commentators were quick to point out that people who identify as transgender and those who say they’re neither male nor female represent a small fraction of mass shooters.
But the numbers show a concerning pattern.
A mass shooting is defined by the Crime Prevention Research Center as the killing of four or more people in a single incident that’s not gang or drug related.
Of the 37 public mass shootings from 2018 through 2023, two were carried out by gender-confused individuals, according to John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Three additional shootings were carried out by gender-confused individuals that resulted in fewer than four victims.
The case that has received the most intense media scrutiny is that of 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who went on a killing spree at the Covenant School in Nashville in March 2023.
She gunned down three 9-year-olds and three adults before police shot and killed her.
Ms. Hale identified as a “transgender man,” according to Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake.
Ten months after the heinous act, a clear picture of Ms. Hale’s motive remains unclear. Media organizations have filed lawsuits asking to view her journals, which are still held by police.
After most mass shooting incidents, any writings that suggest a motive are released to the public quickly, Mr. Lott said.
Eventually, three pages of what police confirmed to be Ms. Hale’s journal were leaked to media commentator Steven Crowder, who posted the writings online. The pages contained racial slurs against white people. Ms. Hale was white
Aside from Audrey Hale, there was Anderson Lee Aldrich, a man who identifies as nonbinary. He was sentenced to more than 2,000 years in prison for killing five people at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs in 2022.
The three other shootings with fewer than four victims include an incident in January at Perry Middle School and High School complex in Perry, Iowa, involving a 17-year-old who reportedly used the hashtag “gender-fluid” to describe himself on social media.
On Jan. 4, he fatally shot a sixth-grade student and wounded six others before killing himself, according to Iowa police. Principal Dan Marbuger died from his injuries 10 days later, his family announced.
In 2018, a woman who identified as a man gunned down three co-workers and injured three others outside a Rite Aid warehouse in Aberdeen, Maryland, before she shot herself, according to police.
And in a 2019 shooting, 17-year-old Maya “Alec” McKinney, a woman identifying as a man, was one of two Colorado students charged in a shooting that killed one person and injured eight at a Highlands Ranch charter school near Denver. Ms. McKinney was sentenced to life in prison.
The number of people aged 13 and older who identify as transgender in the United States is estimated to be about 1.6 million, or 0.6 percent of that population, according to the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy.
And although 0.6 percent of the 13-and-older population identifies as transgender, 5.4 percent of the mass shootings in recent years involved gender-confused individuals.
“Hormones change brain chemistry,” said Ms. Platani, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology. “And if you change brain chemistry, you might just be changing behavior.”
Brain-altering hormone treatments used in attempts to alter gender may be what’s leading to trantifa (a combination of “trans” and “Antifa”) social media posts that seem to encourage violence toward “transphobes.”
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