TWIBS: Conservatives Fabricate Connection Between Trans People and Mass Shootings
Speaking to far right outlet Newsmax, an anti-trans activist suggested that being transgender could be linked to carrying out mass shootings.
Opinion by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Let’s talk about mass shootings in the United States.
Yeah. I’m sorry.
On Tuesday, extremist conservative outlet Newsmax reported that Dr. Jennifer Bauwens told them “transgenderism” could be linked directly to a rise in mass shootings. I would say I don’t have words to express how vitriolically stupid that statement is, but I would be lying. I’m a professional writer. I always have so many words. Here are some of them:
Bauwens appeared on Newsmax’s Frontline, where host Carl Higbie asked her whether or not “transgenderism is possibly a symptom [in the increase of mass shootings].” Higbie should be well acquainted with the concept of murdering strangers in cold blood, since he used to be a Navy SEAL, which probably explains why he’s such a raging douchebag as well.
In response, Bauwens said, “I believe so because you have all of these other comorbidities that are not being addressed in the clinical community… and a lot of times you have clinicians who, the first sniff of a transgender identity, they go down the path of gender-affirming care rather than addressing the real issues.”
Just tell that to the trans Scots currently waiting 224 years for their first gender clinic appointment.
This is not some novel observation. Anti-trans activists pretending to be experts in fields they know very little about have been suggesting that trans people (typically, they mean children) are being fast tracked to hormone therapy instead of simply undergoing therapy. Besides ignoring the historical reality that gender-affirming care was long gatekept from trans people by hostile medical professionals, or the modern reality that many trans people still see therapists both before and after beginning medical transition to treat the “comorbidities” Bauwens laments, her claim fails to account for the inalienable truth that GAC directly addresses mental health on its face.
A systematic review in 2021 found that hormone therapy “was associated with increased QOL, decreased depression, and decreased anxiety,” and that results “were similar across gender identity and age.” Further studies in this area would be wonderful, but the evidence is already quite clear that undergoing hormone therapy is incredibly likely to treat those “comorbidities” without further intervention.
To say nothing of the fact that many trans people do not medically transition, and do not experience the same kind of mental stress or bodily discomfort that a highly dysphoric trans person might. Ours is a community with a very broad range of experiences; there is no singular way that trans people feel, think or act.
Know, too, that Bauwens is not some ideologically agnostic good faith mental health professional. She’s a Senior Research Fellow at the Family Research Council, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists in their extremist files. “FRC often makes false claims about the LGBTQ community based on discredited research and junk science. The intention is to dehumanize LGBTQ people as the organization battles against LGBTQ rights,” their entry on the group explains. “In the past, this included stances against same-sex marriage, hate-crime laws, anti-bullying programs and the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. FRC continues this work but has also revived long-debunked pedophilia and grooming myths in its work against transgender rights, opposition to drag performances, and support for conversion therapy.”
Truly nasty people. Bauwens is a gear of significance in a machine built to harm queer Americans, and the beliefs she expresses about trans people should be viewed through that lens, attributed to a zealot involved in a culture war and not an experienced professional informed by factual information.
Newsmax goes on to list just three allegedly transgender killers in mass shooting incidents, starting as far back as 2018. By comparison, the Gun Violence Archive founder Mark Bryant told FactCheck.org that by their count there had been 5,748 mass shootings in the United States between January 1, 2013, and Sept 15, 2025, and just five of them were carried out by trans people. That means fewer than 0.2% of American mass shooters since 2018 have been transgender.
There are other organizations that track mass shootings by stricter definitions than the GVA. The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government’s factsheet starts in 1966, and counts 510 mass shootings in the United States. 95.4% of them have been carried out by cisgender men. The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University is even stricter, counting just 201 mass shooters since 1966, of which only one was transgender.
James Densley, the project’s co-founder and deputy director, as well as a professor and department chair for the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University, told FactCheck.org that “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. Put simply, transgender individuals account for a vanishingly small proportion of perpetrators.”
“The overwhelming pattern is clear and consistent,” he surmised: “mass shootings are committed almost entirely by men.”
Despite these facts, conservatives would have you believe that trans people are inherently dangerous, more likely to commit violence than others. This simply is not true. It’s one part in a larger strategy to vilify our community, and make it easier to erase trans Americans from public life, and justify any measures they take to eradicate us entirely.
Do not let them lie to you.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
