The lies started to circulate just 38 minutes after a teacher in Madison, Wisconsin, called 911 to report Monday’s school shooting.
The first one simply stated: Placing bets on another trans shooter in a post on X. The post didn’t get that many hits.
However, the untrue allegations regarding the shooter’s gender identification gained traction 57 minutes later.
Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who frequently posts baseless allegations following murders, wrote on X: If the statistical pattern holds true for this horrible incident, there is a 98% possibility that the shooting was connected to gangs or transgender people. Jones’ article had 282,000 views in a single day, and he has 3.4 million followers on the website.
Jones was capitalizing on a trend that has been observed on the conservative internet following a number of high-profile crimes: People look for hints to try to link transgender people to a particular crime, or they assume a suspect is transgender regardless of whether the evidence supports this or is pertinent to the crime.
One minute after Jones, the conservative news outlet Townhall shared a video of Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes conducting a rushed press conference. In the video, he stated, “I’m not sure if it’s a male or female.”
The context of Barnes’ remark was not shown in the eight-second Townhall footage. He was asked a number of questions by reporters, and he was unable to provide answers for many of them, including the type of firearm the gunman had used. The video didn’t make it apparent if the shooter’s gender was unclear or if the chief was just unaware of it.
Using the Townhall footage, dozens of X accounts conjectured that the shooter was transgender without providing any information. More than 650,000 people viewed the video, and when other accounts reposted it with their own conjectures, the total number of views skyrocketed to over 1.5 million. Other conservative accounts with millions of followers, such as @EndWokenessandIan Miles Cheong, speculated about the shooter’s gender and if it was nonconforming for hours after the incident.
Though there was no proof that the shooting suspect was transgender, police ultimately determined that she was a 15-year-old girl, dispelling the rumors.
Hours after making his first comments, Barnes was questioned by a reporter about the transgender rumors at a follow-up press conference on Monday night. He claimed that he was unsure of how she identified and that he thought the response was unimportant.
He stated, “I don’t believe that anything that occurred today has anything to do with how she, he, or they may have wanted to identify.” Additionally, I wish people would sort of put aside their own prejudices.
In a subsequent direct message on X, the EndWokeness account stated that they published the footage of Barnes’ first press conference because they didn’t think his claim that he didn’t know the gender was credible.
According to the report released on Thursday, the police chief who was delivering the news conference ought to find another position if he was unaware and others were aware.
A request for comment addressed to Alex Jones’s media site, Infowars, was not answered. Requests for comment were not answered by Townhall, Cheong, or X either.
Law enforcement, the news media, and social media users who are attempting to separate fact from fiction following a mass shooting may find the tendency of attempting to attribute crimes to transgender people to be distracting and time-consuming. LGBTQ activists also argue that the unfounded allegations caused unreasonable panic among the community.
Similar situations have occurred in the past, such as following massacres in Houston in February, Philadelphia last year, and Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, where it was incorrectly claimed that a mass shooting suspect was transgender or nonbinary.
According to Mark Bryant, executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, which keeps track of shootings, 0.11% of known suspects in mass shootings during the previous ten years were transgender. According to the archive, a mass shooting occurs when four or more people—not including the shooter—are hurt or killed. Bryant said that transgender persons were victims in a lot more cases.
When he questioned X on Monday afternoon why trans control, not gun control, was being discussed as a response to the shooting, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., added to the unfounded rumors.
Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., who chairs the Congressional Equality Caucus, responded to that.
Your lack of knowledge is really evident. He stated on Xlate Monday, “Your hate is eating up your brains (or what’s left of them).” In contrast to the millions of views the fraudulent claim earned on the platform, his message only garnered roughly 47,000 views.
Experts claim that attempts to link transgender people to criminal tendencies are unfounded.
According to Henry Fradella, a criminology and criminal justice professor at Arizona State University who has researched the topic, there is absolutely no proof that transgender individuals are any more dangerous than cisgender individuals.
In a larger attempt to gauge the mortality of transgender persons, some researchers have searched for a possible association, and one study carried out in Sweden using data gathered since the 1970s produced conflicting results. However, Mikael Land, one of the study’s authors, warned against reading his research as suggesting that transgender people are more likely to commit crimes. Even if there were a correlation between the two, other factors including substance use disorders, socioeconomic pressures, and neurodivergent diseases could be at work, according to Land in an email to NBC News.
He wrote, “As far as I’m aware, no study has tried to separate these effects.”
A study that was published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2021 found that transgender people are four times more likely than normal people to become victims of a crime.
The president of the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, Sarah Kate Ellis, claimed that Monday’s anti-trans rumors were a smoke screen for policies aimed at lowering gun violence.
Ellis said in a statement on Tuesday that social media radicals frequently take advantage of these terrible murders to divert attention from the fact that gun violence is still the leading cause of death for children by spreading more of their damaging propaganda toward marginalized and vulnerable groups.
In the event of Monday’s shooting, the pursuit of her true motivations fought for attention with the gender-related rumors. Natalie Rupnow, also known as Samantha, was the shooter who died en route to a hospital from what seemed to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Many of the posts that conjectured Rupnow was transgender originated from accounts that are generally anti-trans. Libs of TikTok is one of those accounts; it shares videos of trans, queer, or progressive persons in an effort to expose what it perceives to be misconduct. A request for comment from Libs of TikTok was not answered.
The majority of the conjecture around the Wisconsin shooting took place on Elon Musk’s tech millionaire app, X. Musk has voiced opposition to trans rights, and X modifies very little content, particularly when it comes to transgender matters. Musk is still distant from his transgender daughter. Musk has also altered the way X operates, changing the platform’s incentives and implementing revenue-sharing with accounts depending on viewership.
There were also rumors on other platforms, such as Instagram, where a post claiming that the shooter was transgender got over 2,100 likes. A request for comment from Instagram’s parent company, Meta, was not answered.
The X posts from Monday includeda decade-old imagethat has beenrecycled on a regular basisfor alleged transgender shooting suspects: an altered photo of comedian Sam Hyde holding a rifle.
Why people on X believed that Rupnow was transsexual is unclear. One X account said the trans thing is obvious from comments on an X account that appeared to belong to her. Even though she was a minor, other sources emphasized her appearance and referred to it as ambiguous. 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.
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