A narrative in both right-wing and mainstream media drawing from early police reports has incorrectly identified the alleged armed assailant at a Texas megachurch as a transgender woman, adding fuel to a moral panic as legislators in Washington, D.C., and across the country push a raft of laws restricting the lives of trans people in the United States.
Apparently drawing from police reports, MSNBC reported just after noon Monday that the shooter was transgender, with the chyron adding that the suspect “identified as a woman.” MSNBC again identified the shooter as a “Hispanic transgender woman” in the next hour. Right-wing and anti-trans influencers also picked up the story, and Fox News soon followed, reporting that “the shooter identifies as a woman. … She was born a man.”
However, initial police reports about the shooter’s identity appear to be inaccurate. Police now say while the suspect has used “both male and female names” as part of her criminal history of forgery, she “has been identified this entire time as female.” Local reporting indicates her “antisemitic writings and conflicts with her ex-husband are being investigated as possible motives for the shooting,” and the suspect was able to legally acquire an AR-15 despite previously being placed under an emergency detention order by Houston police. Anti-trans writers hungry for negative press have mocked further updates as an “investigation to determine preferred pronouns of the shooter.”
Fox News altered the story on their website as more reporting emerged, changing their headline and removing language claiming that the suspect had been “born as a man.” On air, Fox News quickly pivoted to suggesting that the suspect instead “identified as both genders” and was “a biological woman who sometimes identified as a man named Jeffrey.”
This is not the first time that right-wing media have pushed hoaxes around trans people and mass shootings. Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, who used the Lakewood church shooting to spread fears of a so-called “epidemic of trans violence,” previously accused an innocent and unrelated trans woman of carrying out the deadly mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. Media Matters has confirmed at least 35 instances where targets of Libs of TikTok posts later received threats or harassment. Daily Wire personality Candace Owens and InfoWars founder Alex Jones also spread the Uvalde hoax, which originated on the messaging board 4chan. Raichik’s false claim about the Uvalde shooter has remained on her timeline on X (formerly Twitter) for over a month.
In another incident, Jones was sued for defamation for falsely accusing innocent Massachusetts resident Marcel Fontaine of committing the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida.
Transgender people make up a tiny percentage of Americans — just 0.6% of Americans over the age of 13, according to UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, and are four times more likely than their cisgender peers to be the victims of violent crime. The vast majority of mass shooters are cisgender men.
Right-wing media used the incident to encourage their audience to buy more guns.
