No data show trans people commit more violence; Tuberville misnamed two shooters

What Tuberville said

We checked the speech against the excerpts Tuberville’s office posted, which run about 2,000 words and mark cuts with ellipses.^[1] LGBTQ Nation’s write-up, which prompted this check, quotes the same passages.^[2] Tuberville, who is running for governor of Alabama, refers to transgender people throughout as “gender confused”; we use “transgender” except when quoting him. Two claims in the speech fall outside this check: a video game he described, which we did not verify, and his statements about medical care for minors, which are a separate subject.

Verdicts at a glance

• Unproven

  There is a “rise in violence” coming from transgender people

  No dataset tracks offenders by gender identity. The handful of known cases, about one a year since 2018, cannot establish a trend, and two of his five examples were not trans.

• False

  A “gender-confused person” assassinated Charlie Kirk

  Prosecutors describe the accused, Tyler Robinson, as living with a partner who was transitioning. No filing describes Robinson himself as transgender.

• Misleading

  Robinson was “involved in transgender, furry culture,” and the bullets bore transgender-culture engravings

  One casing carried an old internet meme linked to furries. Robinson called the engravings “mostly a big meme”; researchers traced them to 4chan, Tumblr and a video game.

• False

  Thomas Crooks, who shot Trump in Butler, was in “transgender furry culture” and used “they/them”

  The FBI found no involvement in the furry community, no indication he was transgender, and said the “they/them” label was a website default.

• True

  The 2023 Nashville school shooter was a trans man who wrote about gender distress

  Three 9-year-olds and three adults were killed. The journal line he quoted is close to the published text.

• Mixed

  The 2019 Colorado school shooter was a male student who wanted people to “pretend” he was a woman

  The shooter he means, Alec McKinney, was a trans boy, not a male student identifying as a woman. McKinney told investigators he targeted classmates who mocked him for being transgender.

• Mostly True

  A transgender parent killed family members at a high school hockey game this year

  Police say the Pawtucket, R.I., shooter identified as transgender and killed an ex-wife and son. The police chief said the family disputes “still don’t provide a clear motive.”

• Misleading

  A 2022 study found trans youth at the “highest risk of becoming violently radicalized”

  The study measured attitudes, agreement with four survey statements, among 79 trans and gender-diverse college students in Quebec. It did not measure violence.

• Mostly True

  “25% of furries are gender confused”

  Furscience, the main research group on the fandom, finds one-quarter to one-third of furries do not identify primarily as cisgender. About 12% identify as transgender.

• Unproven

  “Many” pilots, flight attendants and air traffic controllers are furries

  No count exists. A furry convention held an aviation meet-up; that is the extent of the public record we found.

• False

  Implied: transgender people are overrepresented among mass shooters

  About 0.5% of shooters in the Violence Project database, and 5 of 5,748 incidents in the Gun Violence Archive, against a trans population share of about 1%.

• Unproven

  Implied: transgender people commit violent crime at a higher rate than the general population

  No US source records offenders’ gender identity. The one national-registry study, from Sweden, found trans women’s conviction rates matched men’s, and its adjusted violent-crime estimate was not statistically significant.

• Misleading

  Implied: the public is “sitting ducks” before a distinct transgender threat

  US mass shooters are overwhelmingly cisgender men. Federal survey data show trans people are 2.5 times as likely as cisgender people to be victims of violent crime.

The five attackers he named

Tuberville built his case on specific attacks. Each is checked below against court records, police statements and the FBI’s own findings.

Charlie Kirk, September 2025: the accused is not described as transgender (False)

Tuberville said “a gender-confused person assassinated” Kirk. Utah’s charging document describes Tyler Robinson’s “lover/roommate” as “a biological male who was transitioning genders.” It describes the partner, not Robinson.^[6] That partner, Lance Twiggs, testified by recorded interview at Robinson’s July 2026 preliminary hearing; prosecutors allege Robinson texted that he targeted Kirk because he had “had enough of his hatred.”^[7][8] We found no court filing, police statement or hearing testimony that describes Robinson as transgender.

Tuberville’s narrower points hold partly. Robinson did live with a transitioning partner. The engravings he describes as “associated with the transgender culture” are four short phrases. One, “Notices bulge OwO what’s this?”, is a decade-old meme that researchers told NPR began as a Tumblr comic and is linked to the furry fandom; another, “If you read this, you are gay lmao,” is an old image-board joke; and “Hey fascist! Catch!” with arrows matches a code in the video game Helldivers 2. Robinson himself allegedly texted that “the messages are mostly a big meme.”^[6] Calling that involvement in “transgender, furry culture” stretches one joke into an identity.

Thomas Crooks, July 2024: the FBI rejected both claims (False)

Tuberville said Crooks “was also [involved] in online transgender furry culture and apparently used ‘they/them’ pronouns.” The FBI addressed each point in a document titled “Correcting False Media Reporting on Thomas Crooks,” released in November 2025 under FBI Director Kash Patel. On pronouns: Crooks had accounts on DeviantArt, where “the default settings… automatically set profile pronouns as ‘them/them’ unless deliberately changed,” and search warrants “revealed no evidence Crooks advocated for the use of ‘they/them’ pronouns.” On gender: “FBI investigation revealed no indication Crooks was a transgender person.” On furries: the evidence “revealed no evidence of involvement in the anthropomorphic community.”^[4] The pronoun report was first published by the New York Post and repeated by the Telegraph, without FBI confirmation.^[5] Tuberville’s hedge, that Crooks “seemed to be at least somewhat involved,” does not survive the FBI’s own findings, issued by an administration of his party ten months before his speech.

Nashville, March 2023: accurate (True)

The Covenant School shooter, Audrey Hale, was assigned female at birth and identified as a transgender man. The attack killed three 9-year-old students and three adult staff members. The journal later published by the Tennessee Star contains the line “this female gender role makes me want to not exist,” which Tuberville paraphrased closely.^[9] Tuberville’s inference that this distress “apparently led her to take her anger out on innocent kids” is his reading of the journal, not a finding by investigators that we could locate.

Highlands Ranch, Colorado, May 2019: he reversed the shooter’s sex (Mixed)

Tuberville described “a different gender-confused high school student” who shot classmates “because no one was willing to pretend with him that he was a woman… He was, in fact, a man.” The shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch killed Kendrick Castillo and wounded eight others. It had two shooters. Devon Erickson, 18, was convicted of Castillo’s murder. Alec McKinney, 16, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life.^[10][11] McKinney was a transgender boy, assigned female at birth. According to court documents, he told investigators he “intended to target classmates who repeatedly mocked him because he was transgender.”^[11] The event happened and a trans student was one of two shooters, so the claim is not wholly false; but Tuberville inverted who the shooter was.

Pawtucket, Rhode Island, February 2026: accurate except for motive (Mostly True)

At a high school hockey game on 16 February, Robert Dorgan, 56, shot five people and then himself. Police said Dorgan “identified as transgender and used the first name Roberta.” The dead were Dorgan’s ex-wife, Rhonda Dorgan, and son, Aidan Dorgan; three others were wounded.^[12] Court records show the ex-wife’s 2020 divorce filing first cited “gender reassignment surgery” before being changed to irreconcilable differences.^[12] Tuberville’s account that the family “told the truth” and the shooter “decided to kill them” for it goes further than the investigators. Police Chief Tina Goncalves said the disputes “still don’t provide a clear motive.”^[12]

Cases he did not name

Two other recent attacks involved shooters identified as transgender. In Minneapolis in August 2025, Robin Westman killed two children at Annunciation Catholic Church; court records show Westman legally changed names in 2020 and identified as female, though whether Westman still did at the time is unclear.^[24] In February 2026, in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, police identified the shooter who killed eight people as an 18-year-old transgender woman.^[25] These cases give Tuberville’s argument more support than the two he got wrong. They are counted in the rate section below.

What is the violent-crime rate for trans people?

Mass shootings

The two databases most cited give the same direction by different routes.

The GVA count needs a caveat that favours Tuberville. Its 5,748 incidents include thousands of domestic, gang and street shootings where no one ever reports the shooter’s gender identity, so 0.09% is a floor, not a measured share. The Violence Project figure avoids that problem because its narrow set of public mass killings is researched case by case, and it still shows trans shooters at half their population share. Adding Pawtucket, and Minneapolis (which killed two, below that database’s threshold), does not move trans shooters above their share in either set. James Densley, the Violence Project’s co-founder, told FactCheck.org that trans people “account for a vanishingly small proportion of perpetrators” and that mass shootings “are committed almost entirely by men.”^[15][16]

The strongest case for Tuberville: several of the most prominent school and church attacks since 2019 (Highlands Ranch, Nashville, Minneapolis, and Tumbler Ridge in Canada) involved a trans shooter. That is a real cluster of visible events. It is also four events, too few to support a rate, and the pool of young people identifying as transgender has itself grown: the Williams Institute’s estimate of trans youth aged 13 to 17 rose from about 300,000 in 2022 to about 724,000 in 2025, partly because of better data.^[17][22] A small, fast-growing group will produce more cases by count without any rise in rate.

Violent crime overall

Outside mass shootings, the evidence is thinner. The largest registry study is Dhejne and colleagues’ 2011 follow-up of all 324 people who had sex reassignment surgery in Sweden between 1973 and 2003, compared against population controls. Fourteen were convicted of a violent crime during follow-up. Compared with controls, the crude hazard ratio for violent crime was 2.7; after adjusting for prior psychiatric illness and crime it was 1.5, with a confidence interval (0.8 to 3.0) that includes no difference.^[20] By sex, trans women had conviction rates higher than women’s and similar to men’s: in the authors’ words, they “retained a male pattern regarding criminality,” and the same held for violent crime.^[20]

That finding cuts against both simple stories. It does not show trans people as uniquely violent; it shows trans women resembling the sex they were born, which in every country offends at far higher rates than women. It also means a comparison with the overall national average, which blends men and women, could come out above average for trans women and below for trans men, and that the answer depends on which group you ask about. The study covers Sweden, mostly before 2004, and only people who had surgery, so it does not describe today’s much larger US trans population.

Victimization

Here US data exist, from the one federal survey that asked. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that in 2017–2020 the violent victimization rate for transgender people aged 16 and older was 51.5 per 1,000, 2.5 times the cisgender rate of 20.5.^[19] An earlier Williams Institute analysis of the same survey for 2017–2018 put the figures at 86.2 against 21.7, about four times.^[18] The two figures differ because they cover different years and methods; both show trans people attacked far more often than other people. The Justice Department removed the gender identity question from that survey in 2025 under Executive Order 14168, so these may be the last federal numbers of their kind.^[23]

“Highest risk” of radicalization

Tuberville said “a study found that youth who identify as gender confused are at the highest risk of becoming violently radicalized.” The matching study is Miconi and colleagues, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2022, a survey of 3,100 students aged 16 to 25 at 18 colleges in Quebec during the pandemic.^[3]

Compared against: the other groups in the same survey (cisgender men and women, by other demographics). The ranking is the study’s own, among 3,100 Quebec students; it is not a ranking of any population’s violence.

The authors do write that “transgender and gender diverse youth emerge as the group at highest risk of support for” violent radicalization. Two words separate that from Tuberville’s version. “Support for” is measured by the Radicalism Intention Scale, where students rate agreement with four statements on a seven-point scale. It measures attitudes. The trans and gender-diverse group was 79 people, 2.55% of the sample. The authors note that “the association between support for VR and violent action is not linear.”^[3] “Highest risk of becoming violently radicalized” turns a finding about survey answers from 79 Canadian students into a claim about American violence.

Furries in the cockpit

The 25% figure is roughly right. Furscience, the research project that has surveyed the furry fandom for over a decade, reports that “upwards of one-quarter to one-third of furries do not identify primarily as cisgender,” and about 12.2% fall in the broad transgender category.^[13] The overlap Tuberville describes exists.

“Many” pilots is unsupported. Tuberville said the furry community “touts” that many aviation workers are furries. The only concrete item we found is that a Minneapolis furry convention in September advertised an “Aviation Furs Meet-Up” for pilots, mechanics, controllers and enthusiasts; View from the Wing, an aviation site, found the same and noted that Tuberville identified no safety incident.^[14] No survey counts furries by occupation in aviation. Tuberville offered no evidence that the hobby affects anyone’s work or flight safety.

Other figures in the speech

“In 2024… more than 300,000 teenagers ages 13 to 17” matches the Williams Institute’s 2022 estimate of about 300,000 trans youth.^[22] Its 2025 update puts the figure at about 724,000, 3.3% of that age group.^[17] His number is outdated and low; his point, that the group is sizeable, stands.

“61% of gender-confused students have thought about suicide and 30% have attempted.” We could not find his source. The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the federal benchmark, found 52.9% of transgender high school students seriously considered suicide in the past year and 25.9% attempted it, against 12.1% and 5.3% for cisgender boys.^[21] His figures run high, but the gap he describes is real and large.

What the speech implies

Implied: trans people are overrepresented among mass shooters (False)

“Sitting ducks until the next gender-confused person” shows up at a church or school tells listeners that trans people are a leading source of such attacks. In the Violence Project’s case-by-case database, trans shooters are 0.5% of perpetrators against about 1% of the population; in the Gun Violence Archive they are fewer than 1 in 1,000 incidents.^[15][17] Even counting the 2025 and 2026 cases, no database we found shows trans people above their population share.

Implied: trans people commit violent crime at a higher rate than the general population (Unproven)

This is the question the reader asked, and the answer is that the US does not collect the data. NIBRS records offenders’ sex, not gender identity.^[26] The only population-registry evidence, from Sweden, points to trans women offending at rates similar to men’s, not to a trans-specific excess, and its adjusted estimate for violent crime among all trans people was not statistically significant.^[20] Nothing we found supports Tuberville’s version; nothing we found would settle the question either way for the United States. What would settle it: offender data that record gender identity, or a large US cohort study linking identity to conviction records.

Implied: the public faces a distinct transgender threat (Misleading)

The speech closes by urging a return of mental institutions so that the public is no longer “sitting ducks.” The measured risks run the other way. Mass shooters in the Violence Project data are 97.5% cisgender men, and the federal victimization survey shows trans people attacked at 2.5 times the rate of cisgender people.^[15][19] The HHS report published this month, which LGBTQ Nation suggests may have informed the speech, surveyed 1,208 adults’ attitudes; its critics note it has not been peer reviewed and that correlation cannot establish cause. It measured opinions about political violence, not acts of violence by trans people.^[2][27]

Implications

The evidence base is shrinking. The federal survey that produced the only national victimization figures for trans people dropped its gender identity question in 2025.^[23] Offender data never had one. Arguments on both sides of this debate will increasingly rest on individual cases, which is the ground on which Tuberville’s speech was built and on which two of his five cases failed.

The policy he proposed rests on the weakest part. His call to “bring back mental institutions” for transgender people depends on the premise that they are a distinct violent threat. That premise is the implied claim rated Misleading above.

What to watch. Final arguments in Robinson’s preliminary hearing were scheduled for 1 September, after which a judge decides whether the case goes to trial; any evidence about his own identity or motive would come out there.^[8] In Pawtucket, police said they were still seeking medical records to establish motive.^[12] Neither case has produced an official finding that gender identity caused the attack.

What survives from the speech: the Nashville case, a cluster of high-profile attacks by trans shooters since 2019, and a real overlap between the furry fandom and trans identity. What does not: two misidentified attackers, a radicalization study that measured opinions, and any statistical basis for calling trans people more violent than anyone else.