Only 38 minutes after a Madison, Wisconsin, teacher called 911 to report Monday’s school shooting, the lies began to spread.
The first one, in a post on X, said simply: “Taking bets on another trans shooter.” The post didn’t pick up much traction.
But 57 minutes later, the false claims about the shooter’s gender identity found their footing.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who regularly spreads unfounded claims after shootings, posted on X: “If the statistical trend continues with this tragic event, there is a 98% chance the shooting is trans or gang related.” Jones has 3.4 million followers on the site, and his post was viewed 282,000 times in a day.
Jones was tapping into a trend on the conservative internet that now plays out after many high-profile crimes: People hunt for clues to try to connect a given crime to transgender people, or they jump to the conclusion that a suspect is transgender regardless of whether evidence points that way or is relevant to the crime.
Conservative news website Townhall followed one minute after Jones, posting a clip of Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes giving a hurried initial news conference. “I don’t know if it’s a male or female,” he said in the clip.
The Townhall clip was eight seconds long and did not show the context of Barnes’ comment. Reporters had asked him several questions and he didn’t know the answer to many of them, such as what type of gun the shooter used. It wasn’t clear from the clip whether the shooter’s gender was ambiguous or whether the chief simply didn’t have the information.
Without the context, dozens of X accounts used the Townhall video to speculate that the shooter was transgender. The video received more than 650,000 views, and, after other accounts reshared the video with speculation of their own, the number of views ballooned to more than 1.5 million. For hours afterward, other conservative accounts with millions of followers, including @EndWokeness and Ian Miles Cheong, joined in the speculation about the shooter’s gender and whether it might be nonconforming.
But the speculation was wrong: Police eventually identified the shooting suspect as a 15-year-old girl, with no evidence that she was transgender.
At a subsequent news conference Monday night, hours after his initial remarks, Barnes was asked by a reporter about the transgender rumors. He said he didn’t know how she identified and that he believed the answer was inconsequential.
“I don’t think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she or he or they may have wanted to identify,” he said. “And I wish people would kind of leave their own personal biases out of this.”
Later, the EndWokeness account said in a direct message on X that they shared the video of Barnes’ initial news conference because they found his statement about not knowing the gender hard to believe.
“If the guy giving the press conference (police chief) didn’t know and others knew, he should find a new job,” the account posted on Thursday.
Alex Jones did not respond to a request for comment sent to his media outlet, Infowars. Townhall, Cheong and X did not respond to requests for comment either.
The trend of trying to link crime to transgender people is a potential distraction and time-wasting exercise for law enforcement, the news media and social media users who, in the wake of a mass shooting, are trying to sort through fact from fiction. And LGBTQ advocates say the false claims spread irrational fear throughout the community.
A similar dynamic of falsely saying a mass-shooting suspect is transgender or nonbinary has played out before, including after shootings in Houston in February, in Philadelphia last year and in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022.
The Gun Violence Archive, which maintains a database of shootings, estimates that 0.11% of known suspects in mass shootings were transgender over the past decade, said Mark Bryant, the archive’s executive director. The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are injured or killed, not counting the shooter. There were many more instances in which trans people were victims, Bryant added.
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., added to the baseless speculation Monday afternoon when he asked on X why “trans control” wasn’t being considered as a response to the shooting, rather than gun control.
That prompted a response from Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus.
“Your ignorance speaks volumes. Your hate is consuming your brains (or what’s left of them),” he posted on X late Monday. His post received only about 47,000 views, compared to the millions of views the false claim got on the platform.
The attempts to connect trans people with criminal tendencies are not rooted in fact, experts say.
“There’s no evidence whatsoever that trans people are any more dangerous than cisgender people,” said Henry Fradella, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University who has studied the subject.
Some researchers have looked for a potential correlation, and one study — conducted in Sweden with data collected since the 1970s, in a broader effort to measure the mortality of trans people — showed mixed evidence. But an author of that study, Mikael Landén, cautioned against interpreting his work as implying that transgender people cause increased crime. Landén, in an email to NBC News, said that even if there were a correlation between the two, other factors could be at play, including substance use disorders, socioeconomic stressors and neurodivergent conditions.
“To my knowledge, no research has attempted to disentangle these effects,” he wrote.
Trans people are four times as likely to be the victim of a crime as others, according to a study published in 2021 in the American Journal of Public Health.
Sarah Kate Ellis, president of GLAAD, an LGBTQ advocacy group, said the anti-trans speculation Monday was a “smoke screen” to hide measures to reduce gun violence.
“Gun violence remains the number one cause of death for children, yet social media extremists routinely exploit these horrific crimes to distract from that fact with more of their harmful rhetoric about vulnerable and marginalized communities,” Ellis said in a statement Tuesday.
In the case of Monday’s shooting, the speculation about gender competed for attention with the search for her actual motives. The shooter, Natalie Rupnow, who went by Samantha, died en route to a hospital of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Many of the posts speculating that Rupnow was transgender came from accounts that have an anti-trans slant in other contexts. Those accounts include Libs of TikTok, which is devoted to sharing videos of trans, queer or progressive people in an attempt to expose what it sees as wrongdoing. Libs of TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
The speculation about the Wisconsin shooter happened mostly on X, the app owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk. X conducts minimal content moderation, especially around transgender issues, and Musk has expressed opposition to trans rights. Musk has a trans daughter, from whom he remains estranged. Musk has also made changes to X’s operation — including revenue-sharing with accounts based on viewership — that have changed the incentives on the platform.
Some of the speculation also occurred on other apps including Instagram, where a post saying falsely that the shooter was transgender received more than 2,100 likes. Instagram’s parent company, Meta, did not respond to a request for comment.
The X posts from Monday included a decade-old image that has been recycled on a regular basis for alleged transgender shooting suspects: an altered photo of comedian Sam Hyde holding a rifle.
It’s not clear why people on X thought that Rupnow was transgender. One X account said “the trans thing is obvious” from comments on an X account that appeared to belong to her. Other accounts focused on her appearance, calling it “ambiguous,” despite her being a minor. Some cited a Discord account with no confirmed connection to her that used they/them pronouns. And one account cited “unconfirmed social media postings” from alleged classmates of Rupnow.
After the posts by Jones and Townhall, other accounts picked up the speculation and spread it. One post alleging that the shooter was trans and “on testosterone” received 3.2 million views and, eventually, a user-generated fact-check from X’s “community notes” feature debunked it. Most other posts on the subject did not have community notes.