What Am I Supposed to Tell My Terrified Friends?

Every time there's a mass shooting in the US, my trans friends and I hold our collective breath. If the shooter turns out to be trans, it could signal the final days of our human rights in a country that is supposed to be a shining beacon on the hill for freedom. Trans people are rarely responsible for these mass shootings, but it does sometimes happen. There are disturbed people in every demographic, of course, but conservative white men are responsible for the overwhelming majority of mass shootings.

But there have been trans shooters before, and there will be another one again in the future. And conservatives have long been salivating for a trans shooter they can use as a casus belli to full on institutionalize or incarcerate every day trans people.

Every time there's a mass shooting in the US, my trans friends and I hold our breath.

I used to do daily reporting for a variety of outlets in the late 2010s and early 2020s. I was a part time political reporter for Vox in 2020 and was a weekend news writer for them from 2019 to 2021. I covered the initial aftermath of over a dozen mass shootings in that time.

There is always an information vacuum in the first several days of a mass shooting, particularly if the shooter isn't detained or killed on site. As a reporter, you need to leave open the possibility that your initial reporting will end up wrong. Details are scattered, rumors run rampant online, assumptions are made before anything is known.

For the last 3 or so years, every time there's been a mass shooting, conservative influencers, who are already soaked in daily trans hate, rush to fill that information vacuum with made up garbage about the shooter being trans. The first time I saw this in action was in 2018, when a 38 year old woman broke onto the campus of YouTube HQ and started shooting people. She had been an Iranian refugee as a teenager and had struggled to build a YouTube following on the site before her shooting spree.

But conservative provocateurs argued, inaccurately, that it was biologically unlikely that a cis woman would commit a shooting (infamously, a major mass school shooting was committed by a cis girl in 1979). So they took videos of the shooter and her unique ethnic features, and deep voice and concluded that she was a trans woman.

I was a breaking trans news reporter at Conde Nast's "them." at the time, and so I dove into reporting out whether this shooter was trans or not. I called the Bakersfield, CA police department hotline and spoke with a very nice detective who was utterly baffled why I would be asking these questions. "No," he told me. "Of course she isn't trans."

He had seen the shooter's body himself.

But my article did nothing to quell the right wing rumors. So I pushed for even more confirmation, eventually sending a FOIA request to US immigration officials, and years later I got an answer. She was classified as female as a young tween when she first entered the US. Online TERFs later responded to this by suggesting that she got bottom surgery in Iran as a pre-teen back in Iran.

Little did I know that this would eventually become the standard conservative response to all mass shootings a few years later.

We saw this again recently with the shooting death of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. Accompanying the very first reports of his shooting, before we even knew if he was dead or alive, conservative influencers jumped at the chance to claim that the shooter was a trans leftist. After all, they said, he had just answered a question about trans mass shooters on stage before the bullet hit him. The Wall Street Journal poured gasoline on the fire by falsely reporting that the bullet casings recovered with the gun had "trans ideology" engravings.

I texted my group chat. We were all terrified.

We all began hoping and praying that the shooter was not a trans person, that conservatives wouldn't end up having ammunition to declare war on us. The far right is filled with violent groups of varying stripes and ideologies, pointing them at our tiny demographic with a permission structure to do violence upon us is a circumstance I'm afraid many trans people will not survive.

It turns out the shooter was not trans, though there are reports he was roommates and lovers with a newly transitioning trans woman. This trans woman reportedly cooperated openly with police and FBI investigators and was horrified at the shooting.

Right wingers, however, simply do not care. The fact that this shooter spent a lot of time around a trans person was proof enough that trans people as a demographic were directly responsible for Kirk's death. Right wing troll Matt Walsh has been particularly strenuous in his claims that trans people are a violent cult that must be eradicated.

Last week, Trump's DOJ announced that it would consider transness as inherently violent. The Heritage Foundation released a paper making the case that being trans was a marker of propensity to terroristic violence.

Meanwhile, a trans woman was beaten in the streets of downtown Seattle last week by a group of 3 teenagers and an adult.

I have personally had several conversations with my family over whether it was time to flee the United States. Me, a middle class journalist who writes for one of the biggest news outlets in the country, living in a bright blue area of a bright blue state. I do not feel safe living in the US anymore. I have nightmares every night now. At least I ostensibly have the ability to leave the country when most of my trans peers simply do not have the means to do so.

This is the reality of being trans in Trump's America. Every single one of my trans friends has an escape plan. Another trans friend of mine is looking at houses to potentially buy in Canada this weekend. This shit is dire and beyond our control. It is not possible for trans people to dial down the rhetoric because the rhetoric is aimed at us by right wingers.

New York Times columnist and commentator Ezra Klein these last few weeks has been stressing the need for all of us to find a way to end up living together in harmony at some future point. He wrote this ostensibly in an effort to try to find peace and common ground with his right wing counterparts. I suspect he saw himself in the images and videos of Kirk being shot.

Noticeably, Klein does not ask any of his conservative peers, many of whom have written abhorrent things about trans people in the pages of the New York Times, how they can live alongside trans people peacefully. In fact, just a few months ago, Klein had a lengthy discussion with US Rep. Sarah McBride about how the left had gone too far with trans rights and provoked the right into a backlash.

Earth to Ezra, the right has been developing plans to drive trans people out of public life since 2015 when they lost in Obergefell and gay marriage became the law of the land. There has been very little actual movement towards trans rights legislatively since then besides a handful of state nondiscrimination protections in a couple of states.

The movement for greater acceptance of trans lives has been almost entirely cultural, but the GOP response has been an all out assault, using legislation, executive power, and cultural influence in an attempt to morally mandate trans people out of existence. Even the most milquetoast of trans people will not survive this onslaught unless the good people of this country decide it's been enough.

Trans people cannot live alongside people who promise to eradicate us from society. We cannot exist in this space where just one person who happens to share a demographic feature with us does something heinous and then that, in turn, justifies right wing violence against us at large.

That must be acknowledged as political violence of its own kind and we must all realize just how deep this violence is already embedded within our society, before it's too late to stop it.

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