The Heritage Foundation, the extreme right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, has issued a report claiming half of recent school shootings are linked to “transgender ideology” to back up its call for the FBI to investigate “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” as a domestic terrorist threat.
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But Wired magazine has analyzed the report and found it doesn’t align with the facts.
The report from the Heritage Foundation and its spin-off organization, the Oversight Project, defines “transgender ideology” as “a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable.” The foundation has a history of demonizing trans people.
The document claims, “Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology.” The Oversight Project did not respond to Wired’s request for comment, while the Heritage Foundation referred to a tweet from Roger Severino, a Heritage vice president who was an official in the first Donald Trump administration.
Severino’s tweet gives the 50 percent since 2015 statistic, then adds “what appears to be his entire data set: Eight shootings, four of which, he claims, involve ‘a trans-identifying shooter and/or a likely trans-ideology related motivation,’” Wired reports.
However, “the data tell a different story,” according to Wired. The K-12 School Shooting Database has tracked four dozen school shootings since 2015, and only three shooters have been “credibly identified in public reporting” as trans or undergoing gender-affirming care, the magazine notes.
These included the perpetrators at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado in 2019 and Covenant School in Nashville in 2023, whose acts may well have been linked to factors other than their gender identity. The shooter at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis in August has been characterized as trans, having changed their name and written about struggling with gender identity, “but there is no public evidence they consistently identified as transgender, making classification uncertain,” Wired reports. The shooter, who died at the scene of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, had expressed hostility to several groups of people.
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“There are no legitimate studies that suggest that a majority of school shootings since 2015 involve transgender people,” Rachel Carroll Rivas and R.G. Cravens of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project told Wired by email. “Trans people are far more likely to be victimized by gun violence than to perpetrate it.”
“I’m aware of no evidence to support the claim that transgender people are disproportionately responsible for mass violence events in the U.S., including shootings in schools,” Michael Jensen, research director at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, told USA Today shortly after the Minneapolis shooting. “In fact, the data suggests quite the opposite.”
In 1,000 “mass casualty” plots identified by Jensen since 2023, “you can count on less than one hand how many of those were perpetrated by a transgender individual,” he said.
Indeed, most mass shooters are cisgender men: 95 percent of the perpetrators in shootings tracked since 1966 were male, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government. And the vast majority have been cisgender.
Instead of “transgender ideology” being a motivation, “white supremacist, anti-government, and misogynist beliefs account for the lion’s share of ideologically motivated gun violence,” Wired concludes.
This article originally appeared on Advocate: Heritage Foundation uses false data to smear trans people as school shooters