Mass shooters are not disproportionately transgender, contrary to claims

Multiple databases of mass shootings indicate that transgender people are not unusually likely to commit mass shootings.

Emery Winter

Published Aug. 29, 2025

Following the August 2025 shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school that killed two children and injured 18 people, some conservative social media influencers claimed there was an "epidemic" of transgender and nonbinary mass shooters in the United States. Federal officials have referred to the shooter, Robin Westman, as transgender.

While the exact numbers vary based on how one defines a mass shooting or mass killing, this claim is false based on all of the definitions used by various public mass shooting databases. No matter how the terms are reasonably defined, cisgender men — that is, men assigned male at birth — most disproportionately commit mass shootings.

First, we need to establish the proportion of transgender people in the United States. An August 2025 report from the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute estimated that about 1% of Americans 13 or older identify as transgender, which is about 2.8 million people. That lines up with other general estimates of the U.S. transgender population.

Databases of mass shootings or killings are maintained by the Violence Prevention Project Research Center and Gun Violence Archive. Other major databases, such as one maintained by USA Today, Northeastern University and The Associated Press and another maintained by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, did not track gender-identity data.

The Violence Prevention Project defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are fatally shot, excluding the shooter, in a public location, with no connection to underlying criminal activity such as gangs or drugs. This definition would exclude the Minneapolis shooting because only two people were killed.

There were 195 mass shootings committed by 200 people between 1966 and 2024 that met the VPP's definition. Of those 200 mass shooters, VPP only listed one perpetrator as transgender: the 2023 Nashville shooter. That's 0.50% of all the shooters.

The VPP's data said 192 of the shooters were non-transgender male, which was 96% of all shooters. Men who are not transgender make up about 47% of the U.S. population, according to USAFacts, using Census data.

The Gun Violence Archive has a broader definition of a mass shooting: a shooting in which at least four victims are shot, either injured or killed, not including the shooter. The GVA does not separate other underlying criminal activity, such as gang activity, from its definition. This definition does include the Minneapolis shooting.

Snopes reached out to the GVA by email because its public database did not include the gender identity of the perpetrators. Mark Bryant, its founding executive director, replied with gender-identity data for mass shootings and mass murders (in which four or more people are killed) since Jan. 1, 2013.

Of 5,729 mass shootings in the GVA's database, there were five confirmed transgender shooters. If including a few incidents in which the gender identity of the shooter was not confirmed, GVA estimated that there may have been eight transgender mass shooters since 2013. That's between 0.09% and 0.14% of all mass shooters in the GVA database.

Bryant said 319 of those shootings qualified as mass murders, by the group's definition. There were three proven transgender shooters among those 319 incidents, Bryant said. That's 0.94% of all mass murders since 2013.

A January 2023 Secret Service report on mass attacks — attacks in which three or more people, not including the attacker(s), were harmed — between 2016 and 2020 found three of the 180 attackers from the time period were transgender men. Of the remaining 177 attackers, five were cisgender women and 172 were cisgender men.

That means about 1.67% of attackers in the Secret Service report were transgender and 95.56% of attackers were men who were not transgender.

Problems with the data

It can be difficult to quantify the number of transgender and nonbinary people in any population subset, including in mass-shooting perpetrators. That's because some transgender people may not be openly trans and some people who use different names and pronouns don't identify as transgender. Because many mass shooters die during their attacks, mass shooters often are unable to speak on or confirm their gender identity. Those difficulties are why Bryant made a distinction between confirmed transgender shooters and unconfirmed transgender shooters in GVA's data.

Among the attacks specifically singled out by the social media posts, some were perpetrated by people believed to be transgender. In others there were questions about the attacker's gender identity, and in still others there was no evidence the attacker was transgender.

Snopes covered some of these attacks when similar claims were made after the 2023 Nashville shooting. Police claimed the perpetrator of that attack was transgender, although there were questions about the veracity of the shooter's transgender identity, which was covered by Snopes at the time.

There was no evidence a 17-year-old student who attacked a high school in Iowa in 2024 was transgender, although their social media accounts included support for transgender rights, according to NBC News.

Also in 2024, a 14-year-old student who shot students and teachers in a Georgia high school was falsely claimed to be transgender by some people on social media. A Discord account that law enforcement had linked to the eventual shooter a year prior "expressed frustration with the acceptance of transgender people," according to CNN.

Some people falsely claimed that a man who went on a shooting spree in Philadelphia in 2023 was transgender based on online photos of the man wearing what appeared to be women's clothing. However, the Philadelphia district attorney's office referred to the shooter as a man and said he identified himself as a male.

The shooter who carried out a 2022 attack on a Colorado Springs LGBTQ+ nightclub claimed to be nonbinary, but that claim was cast in doubt due to the nature of the attack, which was charged as a hate crime. A Department of Justice news release alleged the perpetrator attacked the nightclub "because of the actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity of any person."

Two students opened fire at a school near Denver, Colorado, in 2019. The younger of the two students identified as transgender and was reportedly bullied because of their identity, according to Reuters. There was no evidence the older of the students was transgender.

The perpetrator behind a mass shooting at a Rite Aid in Aberdeen, Maryland, in 2018 did reportedly come out as a transgender man prior to the attack, according to media reports from the time.

Some social media posts claimed the shooter of Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, in 2018 was transgender. But although the woman who perpetrated the attack sometimes used a masculine name as an alias, she did not identify as transgender.

As for the chart purporting to show the number of transgender mass shooters as a proportion of the U.S. population that identifies as transgender, the user who created it combined information from multiple data sets to arrive at his conclusions. The chart also subdivides cisgender people by race while not doing that for transgender people.

In a subsequent post (archived), the chart's creator said he had identified 32 mass-shooting perpetrators from 2015 to 2025 — a much smaller sample than those from the Violence Prevention Project or the Gun Violence Archive. One case he identified as involving a nonbinary shooter was the 2022 Colorado Springs attack, which, as noted above, is a dubious claim.

Social media personalities on the right have repeatedly stirred up false claims about the gender identities of past mass shooters and made attempts to falsely link transgender people with a significant pattern of violent attacks. For example, Snopes previously fact-checked false claims that the shooter of a school in Uvalde, Texas, was transgender.

Sources

By Emery Winter

Emery Winter is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and previously worked for TEGNA'S VERIFY national fact-checking team. They enjoy sports and video games.