Fact Check: Are transgender people more likely to commit mass shootings?

WASHINGTON, DC: In the wake of mass shootings in the country, a claim has been circulating on social media platforms that transgender people are more likely to commit mass shootings compared to any other group of people in the US. The claim has led to increased hate against transgender and nonbinary communities. Let us fact-check the claim.

Claim: Transgender people are more likely to commit mass shootings

After recent mass shootings, some conservative influencers and public figures have often blamed transgender and nonbinary communities, claiming these groups are more likely to commit violence and carry out attacks than the general US population.

One chart used to support this claim first appeared in an August 2025 post on X. 

That chart was titled 'Mass shooting rates by demographic (2015-2025).' The chart's data was narrowed to public incidents with four or more fatalities and expressed rates per million population for Asian men, white men, Black men, Hispanic men, Asian women, and two categories for transgender people.

'Trans/Non-Binary (Biological Male)' and 'Trans/Non-Binary (Biological Female)' -- the graph depicted rates for the transgender groups as higher than those for the other groups.

This chart has been shared after multiple mass shooting events and across multiple platforms.

At the same time, many popular figures in the conservative social media sphere, including Donald Trump Jr., claim transgender people are more likely to commit mass violence.

Fact Check: The claim is false and lacks evidence

However, the chart claiming that transgender people are more likely to commit mass shootings than cisgender people is false.

In fact, cisgender men, that is, men assigned male at birth, most disproportionately commit mass shootings.

According to the Violence Prevention Project's January 2026 update, between 1966 and 2025, 207 individuals carried out 202 mass shootings in the United States. Only one of those assailants, the shooter in Nashville in 2023, was recognised as transgender.

The Violence Prevention Project documented 66 mass shootings between 2015 and 2025. Of them, one was transgender, the only transgender person found in the entire database; two were cisgender women, and sixty-three were cisgender men.

Other significant mass shooting databases in the United States are those operated by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, USA Today, Northeastern University, and The Associated Press, as well as the Gun Violence Archive. Gender identity data is not tracked by the last two.