They Want Charlie Kirk’s Killer to Be Trans
More than anything, it seems, the loudest members of the right had assumed, or at least hoped, that Charlie Kirk’s shooter was a trans person. Just two weeks before Kirk’s killing at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, the right hyperfixated on signs that the shooter behind an attack on a Catholic school in Minneapolis may have been trans, all to push a false, propagandizing narrative about “trans shooters.” Some went as far as to label it an act of “trans terrorism.”
Kirk himself posted repeatedly on X about the Annunciation shooter’s transition (though the shooter seemingly detransitioned before committing the shooting), blaming “the evil perpetrated on young people by the trans medical industry” on August 28. This, of course, wasn’t Kirk’s first time pushing the “trans shooter” talking point; he insistently posted about it in 2023, after a Nashville school shooting that left three children and three adults dead, and had many, many other posts accusing trans people of violence. That same year, during a recorded speech, he called former college athlete Lia Thomas “an abomination,” and “the transgender thing happening in America” a “throbbing middle finger to God.”
It’s posts and comments like these that are likely why, at the time of his death, Kirk was responding to an audience question about the trans-shooter rhetoric on the first stop of his organization Turning Point USA’s debate-oriented American Comeback college tour. It was an eerily prescient final conversation before the trans-shooter propaganda rapidly became as mainstream-media-endorsed as the right’s attacks on youth gender-affirming care.
The next day, September 11, with Kash Patel’s FBI and Utah authorities in a scramble to locate the shooter, The Wall Street Journal reported that “an early bulletin circulated widely among law-enforcement officials” said there was “transgender ideology” on the bullet casings. There was no backup for this, but amid the government’s bumbling to solidify details in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the suggestion that there might be some association with “transgender ideology” from a mainstream outlet predictably blew up right away. Other outlets immediately cast doubt on it, including the New York Times, hardly known for its sympathy to trans people. The same day, the Trans Journalists Association, of which I am a member, urged caution, noting that “transgender ideology” is “a term coined for and used in anti-trans political messaging to falsely equate identity with politics, which is a way to frame transgender identity as a political choice rather than an innate identity.”
Within 24 hours, law enforcement had found the shooter — not trans — and released what was actually written on the bullets — also not trans. (The Journal did not issue a retraction, despite calls from trans advocates to do so, instead amending its headline and adding an editors’ note.) The frenzy shifted in tone. Once Fox News knew the suspect was, as far as we can tell, a cis white 22-year-old named Tyler Robinson, it started blaming college for “radicalizing” him (Robinson attended UVU for one semester). Within 48 hours, Republican representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, known for her attacks on trans people, went from calling for the death penalty to thoughts and prayers.
That doesn’t mean they’re done trying to blame a trans person. On Sunday, Utah governor Spencer Cox told Meet the Press that Robinson was seemingly in a romantic relationship with a roommate who is trans as if that were enough, without any further evidence presented, to lead someone to assassinate a public figure in broad daylight. In fact, there has so far been zero evidence presented that links this individual to the shooting at all. Fox News had initially reported the story, simultaneously asserting that this individual was “shocked” by the shooting and that the FBI “declined to comment” when asked if charges would be pressed against them. In a clip posted by journalist Ken Klippenstein, following the news, Fox was running an all-caps banner reading “Suspect’s trans lover received messages after attack,” with its hosts claiming “the transgender movement” is responsible for “many of the mass shootings we are seeing” while providing no backup.
When CNN asked Cox what relevance the information might have, he replied, “That’s what we’re trying to figure out right now.” If the implication is that all trans people are followers of “leftist ideology,” I suspect Caitlyn Jenner might have something to say about that. If it’s just about blaming Robinson’s actions on his roommate, well, where is that proof? If they were indeed unaware of the shooting as NBC and CNN reported, then the whole thing actually smacks of misogyny — blame the partner! — and it’s just the same lazy transphobic scapegoating members of the right were engaging in before Robinson was ever identified.
The trans-shooter myth, reports the Trace, a newsroom focused on gun violence, largely began circulating in 2023 around the aforementioned Nashville shooting, “as the right began rolling back LGBTQ rights in earnest.” As I’ve explained previously, trans people are over four times more likely than cis people to be victims of violent assault. Conversely, over the past decade, according to the Gun Violence Project, less than a tenth of one percent of shootings were committed by someone who identified as trans or nonbinary. Nonetheless, last week the Justice Department was reportedly considering how to ban trans people from buying guns.
Two years later, and just a decade after the so-called trans tipping point, anti-trans harassment and violence is all the rage. Trans people are afraid to leave the country, let alone leave their houses. The right-wing ecosystem has gladly spent years creating these conditions, while Democrats have by turns avoided saying anything about them at all or, like in the past week, spending more time mourning the death of a guy who gleefully mocked Nancy Pelosi’s husband being attacked with a hammer than urging caution to protect a population that voted for Kamala Harris second only to Black women. It would almost be surprising, considering those numbers, how quickly 2028 hopeful Gavin Newsom praised Kirk, if Kirk hadn’t been Newsom’s first podcast guest.
Charlie Kirk’s killing arrived in a perfect storm of online misinformation, the loss of a fact-checking infrastructure via a politicized media targeted and undone in part by the Trump administration, and a post-DOGE/anti-“DEI” purge creating an incompetent federal response. I knew the day it happened that the trans-shooter myth would be invoked, even before I learned the last question he had been asked was about it; after I heard that, multiple trans friends texted me something like “we’re cooked.” I’ve reported on anti-trans politics for years and know how this thing goes. When the WSJ reporting came out, I knew it didn’t matter if it was true or false; the damage was already done. It’s not about truth or reality. It’s about demonization and easy targets and reaffirming their own rhetoric.
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