Heritage Foundation Spreads Transgender Shooter Myth

The Heritage Foundation just issued a report that insists that half of the most recent shootings are due to “transgender ideology.” They are calling for the FBI to investigate their claim as a domestic terrorist threat, deeming it “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism.”

The Heritage Foundation is an extremist conservative think tank that was responsible for the creation of Project 2025, the plan that pledges to put restrictions on transgender healthcare, and abolish anti-discrimination practices. According to Advocate, “transgender ideology” is defined by this organization and their offshoot organization the Oversight Project as “a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable.”

In terms of the “domestic terrorism,” they claim that “Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology.” This statistic, according to Wired, comes from a tweet from one of the Heritage Foundation’s own vice presidents, Roger Severino—He claims since 2015, there have been eight shootings, four of which involved “trans ideology” being a motivator in some sense.

However, Wired challenges this, claiming that according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, there have been over four dozen shootings in that time period, and only three shooters have been “credibly identified” as trans.

The research director at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, Michael Jensen, told USA Today, “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, In fact, the data suggests quite the opposite.”

This “transgender shooter” myth is even more ironic considering that according to PBS News, right-wing extremists account for the vast majority of fatal domestic terrorist attacks. Conservative white men are constantly praised by Republicans and treated as though they are the most oppressed group in the United States. But we see time and time again, that while these men can be victims of violence, it is much more likely that they will be the cause of it.