This is part 3 of a three-part series.
- Read Part 1: GOP Voters Share The Message, Not The Priority
- Read Part 2: Trans Population And Treatment By The Numbers
SITUATION:
Following high-profile attacks, including the 2023 Nashville school shooting, conservative media figures have increasingly framed transgender identity as a recurring factor in mass shootings. Conservative commentators have claimed a pattern, even a wave, of transgender perpetrators.
Critics call this a fabricated, scapegoating narrative built from a handful of cherry-picked cases that isn’t reflected in real data.
Mass-shooting databases, tracked over decades by academic researchers and journalists alike, make it possible to test both claims directly, on transgender representation among shooters specifically, and on what the data shows about mass shooters overall.
THE TRUTH:
The raw numbers, laid side by side, show how these claim hold up:
- Mass shooters identified as transgender, 2013-2025, per the Gun Violence Archive’s broader definition: 5 of 5,748 total incidents, less than 0.1% of all mass shooters
- Transgender share of the U.S. population aged 13 and older: about 1.0%, meaning transgender people are not overrepresented among mass shooters in either dataset
- Share of cisgender male mass shooters, per National Institute of Justice data on the full historical dataset: 96%-98%
- Male share of the U.S. population: about 49%
- Race of mass shooters: 52.3% white, 20.9% Black, 8.1% Latino, 6.4% Asian, 4.2% Middle Eastern, 1.8% Native American
- Rate at which transgender people age 16 and older are victims of violent crime, per Bureau of Justice Statistics data from 2017-2020: 51.5 per 1,000 people, compared with 20.5 per 1,000 for cisgender people. This means transgender people are victims of crime 2.5 times more often than cisgender individuals.
Small numbers make these figures easy to distort in either direction. A single additional case can swing a percentage meaningfully when the total pool is a handful of incidents, and determining a shooter’s gender identity after the fact, through manifestos, family statements, or police records, is not always agreed upon across trackers.
For example, if one person of a particular group committed murder in 2024, and then two people from that group committed murder in 2025, it would factually correct but highly misleading to state that violent crime amongst that group doubled in a single year.
WHY IT MATTERS:
These numbers are easier to weigh next to a trait that actually does predict mass shootings. Nearly all mass shooters, 96%-98%, are cisgender male, against a general population that is about 49% male, a gap far larger than anything transgender identity produces in these datasets.
Transgender people are, if anything, far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Being a victim of violent crime at 2.5 times the rate of cisgender people sits alongside a mass-shooter representation rate at or below their 1.0% share of the population.
Readers should know the specific claim driving conservative media coverage, that transgender people make up a rising share of mass shooters, is not supported by actual data.
SOURCES:
- Violence Prevention Project, Hamline University, mass shooter database, 1966-2024
- Gun Violence Archive, mass shooting data, 2013-2025, as reported to FactCheck.org and GLAAD
- PolitiFact, review of Fox News and Sebastian Gorka claims on transgender mass shooters, September 2025
- National Institute of Justice, “Public Mass Shootings: Database Amasses Details of a Half Century of U.S. Mass Shootings with Firearms”
- Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Violent Victimization by Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, 2017-2020”
- Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, “Transgender people over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime”
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