Prominent conservatives, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), have seized on Wednesday’s school shooting in Minneapolis and reports about the shooter’s identity to push anti-trans rhetoric and policies.
In a Wednesday post shared in response to a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School that left two children dead and 17 other children and adults wounded, Greene described “gender dysphoria” as a “mental illness” and urged Congress to pass legislation that would “make it a FELONY to perform sex change surgeries and all forms of medications on minors.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and conservative commentator Benny Johnson also shared posts alleging a “pattern” regarding instances of violence and trans or nonbinary gender identity. (These statements are patently false: As the Gun Violence Archive noted in 2024, about 0.11% of known suspects in mass shootings have been transgender in the last decade.)
And top Trump officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel, emphasized the shooter’s presumed gender identity in their updates about the shooting as well. Noem described the shooter as a “23 year-old man, claiming to be transgender” and Patel stated that the shooter was “a male” who was born under a different name.
