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This article was produced jointly by Verificado , a media outlet specializing in Fact Checking, and Presentes.

Social media users have been repeating that most attackers in mass school shootings in the United States have been LGBT+ people, particularly trans people. However, the reality is that mass shootings have been perpetrated primarily by cisgender men .

Most shooters are cis men, not trans people.

Users of X (formerly Twitter) spread the word that most school shootings in the United States have been carried out by people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.

But according to institutions specializing in the analysis of gun violence, trans people involved in these types of acts are very few compared to the number of cisgender men responsible for shootings.

The Violence Project is a database from Hamline University that compiles information on shootings in the United States. The most recent study concludes that 97.46% of shootings between 1966 and 2023 were perpetrated by men. In contrast, 2.03% were by women, and only 0.51% were committed by transgender people.

Similarly, The Gun Violence Archive recorded over 4,400 mass shootings (where more than four people were injured) in the last decade. And executive director Mark Bryant told the media that they only have records of 10 shootings perpetrated by transgender people. That is, 0.11% of the total .

In contrast, transgender people are four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime, according to a study by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Misinformation: Shootings and trans people

Viral posts claiming that most mass shootings are perpetrated by LGBTQ+ individuals emerged after the shooting at Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, on February 12. News outlets and social media users reported that the person identified by police as the shooter was Genesse Ivonne Moreno, from El Salvador.

Although being transgender is a lived experience of identity and cannot be judged by appearance, this photograph led the press to claim that Genesse Moreno was a transgender woman. However, Houston police clarified in a press conference that Genesse is a 36-year-old cisgender woman and that Jeffrey Escalante, another name associated with her identity, is an alias.

“Yes, we have reports that she uses multiple aliases, including Jeffrey Escalante. She has used both female and male names, but after all the investigation we have done up to this point—speaking with individuals, interviews, documents—the Houston Police Department reports that she has been identified as female all this time,” detailed Commander Cristopher Hassig of the Houston Police Department (HPD).

Trans people targeted by disinformation agents and anti-rights groups

The case of Genesse Moreno is not unique, as in recent years there has been a growing trend of unfounded attempts to link dangerous situations to transgender people. Anti-rights groups and social media accounts dedicated to spreading disinformation have promoted this narrative that violence is supposedly a product of the “radicalization of (LGBTIQ+) activism toward terrorism.”

For example, in May 2022, posts also circulated falsely claiming that the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was the work of a transgender woman. However, the shooter was actually an 18-year-old man identified as Salvador Ramos, who was killed at the scene by police. 

At that time, social media users and even some media outlets used the photo of Sam, a trans woman who was not even in Texas but in Georgia, to accuse her of the murder of 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

On networks such as 4chan, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, photos of Sam and images of at least two other women are still being used to spread transphobic misinformation.

Time and time again, transphobia

This same transphobic rhetoric was also used on March 27, 2023, during the Covenant High School shooting in Tennessee. In that case, it was the police who speculated about the gender identity of the perpetrator, surnamed Hale, which sparked a wave of misinformation and hate speech against the trans community.

This is happening amid a political climate in the United States where the human rights of transgender people (both adults and minors) are being violated exponentially . In 2023 alone, 589 anti-transgender bills were proposed; and so far in 2024, 471 such bills have been introduced.

Although the motives for shootings are often unknown, some anti-rights groups have blamed them on 'gender ideology', falsely claiming that people of diverse sexual and gender identities are ill and therefore commit violent acts. 

However, a report from Hamline University's Center for Violence Prevention Research found that "mental illness is not a factor in explaining the problem of mass shootings." And that, since 2015, shootings have been motivated by hate and the pursuit of fame.

The researchers warn that “'motives' can become labels used to explain the problem of mass shootings. Mental illness, for example, is not a motive. If a mass shooter has a mental health diagnosis, this does not mean that every one of their actions is related to that diagnosis or that their symptoms caused them to pull the trigger.”

At Verificado y Presentes we explain with data from the World Health Organization and other institutions that sexual orientations, non-normative gender identities and the experience of distress such as gender dysphoria are not mental illnesses .

Similarly, gender ideology does not exist as a category within the social sciences and is actually a construct that seeks to denigrate the demands of women's rights and sexual diversity.

This is a disinformation tactic that is used negatively to cancel or dismiss diversity by arguing that it goes against nature and endangers the established social order.

This narrative that seeks to link shootings to LGBTIQ+ people also causes the focus to be lost on patterns that are verifiable.

One factor attributable to gun violence, for example, is the easy access to and legal purchase of firearms, which allows for the constant occurrence of massacres in schools in the United States.