Moments after the assailant who killed six people at a Nashville private school was identified as transgender, a baseless narrative emerged that there has been an incredible rise in transgender or nonbinary mass shooters in recent years.
The number of mass shootings committed by those identifying as trans or nonbinary — and their ratio compared to mass shootings committed by other groups — is hard to quantify. It depends on the database used, how the act is defined and how gender identity is recorded — for example, transgender males may statistically be counted as just men.
Laura Dugan, a professor of human security and sociology at Ohio State University, said the four widely cited examples out of the 3,561 shootings translates to 0.11% being perpetrated by someone who is not cisgender — a very low number relative to the number of mass shootings total.
“There are a lot of mass shootings, hundreds of mass shootings, and to cherry-pick four of them and say here’s a trend, that’s wrong,” Fox said. “You can’t make a conclusion that that’s significant. It is not significant in any statistical sense.” Olivera Jokić, the director of the gender studies program at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, referred to adatabase that tracked U.S. mass shootings — defined as a shooting that kills four or more people — from 1966 to 2019. The research found that of the 172 people who committed public mass shootings covered in the database, 97.7% were male. The data makes no distinction between transgender and cisgender perpetrators.
“The political rhetoric using ‘statistical information’ about gender identification of mass shooters is wrong," she said, “and seems to serve to distract from existing discussions about mass shootings as a public health problem.”
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