Q: Have many of the mass shooters been transgender?
A: The number of transgender mass shooters in the U.S. varies depending on how “mass shooting” is defined, but is relatively small. The Gun Violence Archive, which uses a broader definition, lists five mass shootings by transgender or nonbinary people since January 2013. That’s less than 0.1% of the mass shootings it says happened in that period.
FULL ANSWER
Since an alleged shooter who identified as transgender killed two children and injured 21 others at a Catholic church and school in Minneapolis on Aug. 27, some Republican commentators have suggested that transgender individuals have shown a pattern of violence or are responsible for many of the mass shootings in the U.S.
The Trump administration even has reportedly looked into ways transgender people can be prohibited from purchasing guns, according to a “person familiar with the matter” cited by the Associated Press.
We’ve received several emails from readers inquiring about the number of transgender mass shooters, with some asking if “the majority” or “all” of mass shooters are transgender. That’s false.
While the exact number of transgender mass shooters is difficult to ascertain because of varying definitions of a “mass shooting,” the number is exceedingly small.
Yet on Sept. 11, Donald Trump Jr. said in a Fox News interview that he couldn’t “name a mass shooting in the last year or two in America that wasn’t committed by, you know, a transgender lunatic.” And moments before he was fatally shot at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10, Charlie Kirk, founder of the youth political group Turning Point USA, said “too many” when an audience member asked him if he knew “how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years.”
More than a week earlier, White House Senior Director for Counter Terrorism Sebastian Gorka provided a number. “In just a couple of years, we have seen seven mass shootings involving people of transgender nature or who are confused in their gender,” he said during an Aug. 31 appearance on “State of the Union” on CNN. “Seven in just the last couple of years. That’s inordinately high.”
But Gorka’s total is questionable.
The Gun Violence Archive, an independent organization that tracks gun-related violence in the U.S., defines mass shootings as incidents in which there are “a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident.” Under this standard, there were 5,748 mass shootings between Jan. 1, 2013, and Sept. 15, 2025, according to the GVA. “OF THAT NUMBER OF INCIDENTS, there have been FIVE CONFIRMED Transgender shooters,” Mark Bryant, the GVA’s founding executive director, told us in an email.
The five mass shootings in the GVA’s database with a transgender shooting suspect are the August shooting in Minneapolis, the March 2023 shooting at a school in Nashville, the November 2022 shooting at a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the May 2019 shooting at a school in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and the September 2018 shooting at a warehouse in Aberdeen, Maryland. However, Anderson Lee Aldrich, the convicted shooter in Colorado Springs, identified as nonbinary, according to Aldrich’s lawyer. A transgender individual identifies with a gender that does not match their sex assigned at birth, while a nonbinary individual identifies as neither exclusively male nor female. While many nonbinary individuals identify as transgender, not all do, the Human Rights Campaign says.
Gorka included those same five shootings on his list and added shootings in Perry, Iowa, and Philadelphia. But the gender identity of the alleged Jan. 4, 2024, Perry shooter, Dylan Butler, hasn’t been established, and local law enforcement officials said Kimbrady Carriker, who was charged with the July 3, 2023, mass shooting in Philadelphia, is not transgender, as some falsely claimed.
Overall, Bryant said the number of transgender mass shooters could be as high as eight, if some individuals whose gender identity hasn’t yet been verified are included. That would still mean that transgender individuals were responsible for less than 0.1% of mass shootings in the last 12 years, according to the GVA. (It would be less than 0.2% of incidents from 2018 until now.)
Trends Based on Another Definition
The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University defines a mass shooting as “four or more people shot and killed, excluding the shooter, in a public location, with no connection to underlying criminal activity, such as gangs or drugs.” By that more restrictive measure, the project’s mass shooter database identifies 201 mass shooters between 1966 and 2024, and only one of them – Audrey Hale, the 2023 Nashville school shooting suspect – was transgender, James Densley, the project’s co-founder and deputy director, told us in an email.
Densley, who is also a professor and department chair for the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University, said a few high-profile shootings, including the 2019 Highlands Ranch shooting, the 2018 Aberdeen shooting and this year’s Minneapolis shooting, did not qualify according to the center’s mass-shooting definition. The 2022 Colorado Springs shooting also was not included.
But “even if you expand beyond strict definitions, we are still talking about a handful of cases in a nation that experiences tens of thousands of shootings annually,” Densley said. “Put simply, transgender individuals account for a vanishingly small proportion of perpetrators.”
He said of the 201 mass shooters in the database, “196 (97.5%) are cisgender men,” “4 (2.0%) are cisgender women,” and “1 (0.5%) is a transgender individual.” The term cisgender refers to those whose gender identity matches their sex assigned at birth.
“For comparison, about 1% of the U.S. population identifies as transgender, meaning transgender perpetrators are underrepresented in the data, not overrepresented,” he wrote, with emphasis. “The overwhelming pattern is clear and consistent: mass shootings are committed almost entirely by men.”
In addition, Dr. Ragy Girgis, a Columbia University professor of clinical psychiatry and an expert on mass murders and shootings, told us in a phone interview that being transgender is “not a causative factor in mass shootings.”
“There’s no reason that being trans would have anything to do with mass shootings,” Girgis said. “So, when it’s seen, it’s completely incidental. The data are clear on that.”
Correction, Sept. 17: We used the wrong pronoun for Aldrich and have corrected the story.
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