Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes criticized transphobes who spread a false rumor that the teenage shooter who killed a student and a teacher and injured six others at Abundant Life Christian School on Monday was transgender.
The shooter, a 15-year-old girl identified during a press conference on Monday night, was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound when officers arrived at the school and died en route to the hospital.
In the aftermath, transphobic narratives have falsely linked school shooters to the transgender community as a means of portraying trans people as dangerous. This incident was no exception, despite police providing no information about the shooter’s gender identity or motive.
Unsubstantiated claims about the shooter’s gender identity have surfaced but were later deleted. These posts, including one from self-described January 6 "political prisoner" John Strand, offered no evidence to support their claims. The assertions were made shortly after the incident and lacked any additional context or verification.
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These claims were also amplified by the anti-LGBTQ+ group Moms for Liberty, and the group's dissemination of these rumors was the basis of the following question from a reporter who asked Barnes:
"Chief there's been a lot of misinformation online including from Moms for Liberty activists in Wisconsin claiming that the shooter was transgender, which is a reaction that we see across the country in the wake of mass shootings, to claim that trans people are dangerous. Can you respond to that directly?"
Barnes responded:
"Yeah I don't know whether [the shooter] was transgender or not and, quite frankly, I don't think that's even important. I don't think that's important at all."
"I don't think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she, or he, or they may have wanted to identify, and I wish people would leave their own personal biases out of this. We have people who showed up to work today, to help kids be better, who are not going home. And we have lost members of our community who are children, including the shooter."
"So whether or not she was, he was, they were, transgender is something that may come out later but for what we're doing right now today, literally eight hours after a mass shooting in a school in Madison, it is of no consequence at this time."
You can hear what he said in the video below.
Many have condemned the rumor.
Baseless rumors about shooters’ gender identity, often intended to provoke anti-trans sentiment, have become a recurring pattern online following shootings, even before verified details are available.
In 2022, misinformation spread claiming the Uvalde school shooter—who killed 19 children and two adults in Texas—was transgender. This included a false claim by Arizona Republican Representative Paul Gosar, who referenced unrelated photos that were inaccurately attributed to the shooter. No evidence supported the claim that the shooter was transgender.
According to CNN, there have been at least 83 school shootings in the U.S. this year. Following several of these incidents, figures such as Elon Musk, anti-LGBTQ+ activist Chaya Raichik, and other right-wing commentators have perpetuated misinformation about mass shooters identifying as trans.
In reality, the overwhelming majority of mass shooters in the U.S. are cisgender males. The fixation on blaming queer individuals or linking shootings to mental illness serves to stigmatize LGBTQ+ communities while deflecting attention from meaningful gun control reforms that could address the root causes of mass shootings.
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