Debunking chart that falsely suggests transgender people are more likely to commit mass shootings

Conservative social media influencers and public figures frequently turn their ire against transgender and nonbinary communities in the wake of mass shootings. As part of this, they often claim that transgender people are disproportionately violent and more likely to commit mass shootings than the rest of the U.S. population.

One chart often used to make this claim originated from an Aug. 27, 2025, post to X (archived). 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 (archived) and others like it (archived) have been shared after multiple different mass shooting events and across multiple (archived) platforms (archived), while many popular figures in the conservative social media sphere, such as Libs of TikTok (archived) and Donald Trump Jr. (archived), claim transgender people are more likely to commit mass violence.

In short, the chart is incorrect, and the available evidence shows that the wider claim that transgender people are more likely to commit mass shootings than cisgender people is false. No matter how the terms are reasonably defined, cisgender men — that is, men assigned male at birth — most disproportionately commit mass shootings.

Fact-checking the chart

The simplest way to fact-check the “Mass shooting rates by demographic” chart is to first calculate the data ourselves. 

The Violence Prevention Project defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are fatally shot, excluding the shooter, in a public location, with no connection to underlying criminal activity such as gangs or drugs. Because the chart limits its definition of mass shooting to public attacks with four or more fatalities, the Violence Prevention Project’s definition seems to match the chart’s definition.

As of the Violence Prevention Project’s January 2026 update, there were 202 mass shootings committed by 207 people in the U.S. between 1966 and 2025. Of those 207 mass shooters, the Violence Prevention Project identified only one perpetrator as transgender: the 2023 Nashville shooter.

According to U.S. Census estimates from 2025, there are 269,763,509 resident adults in the United States. USA Facts, which uses Census data itself, estimated in February 2025 that 0.95% of U.S. adults identified as transgender, 47.09% of adults identified as cisgender men and 50.26% identified as cisgender women. Based on Snopes’ math, that means there were about 2,562,753 transgender adults in 2025, as well as 127,031,636 cisgender men and 135,583,140 cisgender women.

Between 2015 and 2025, the Violence Prevention Project listed 66 shooters in its database: Sixty-three of those shooters were cisgender men, two were cisgender women and one was a transgender person, the only such person in the entire database. If we were to turn that data into people per million committing massing shootings during that time, we’d find 0.496 per million cisgender men were mass shooters, 0.390 per million transgender people were mass shooters and 0.015 cisgender women were mass shooters.

How were our numbers for transgender people so much lower and why didn’t we divide groups the same way the creator of the chart did? That’s where we get into the issues with the chart and its data.

The creator of the chart later said that he included 32 perpetrators, two of whom were transgender or nonbinary. Already, 32 is too small of a sample size to make inferences about the general population. On top of that, the creator included the perpetrator behind the 2022 attack on a Colorado Springs LGBTQ+ nightclub as nonbinary; although the perpetrator claimed in court that he was nonbinary, there was doubt as to the authenticity to this claim considering there was no evidence he identified as such prior to being charged and was eventually convicted of hate crimes targeting LGBTQ+ people. The Violence Prevention Project identified him as a cisgender man.

The original chart compared the transgender population as a whole to groups divided by both race and gender, which is like comparing apples to oranges. If the original 32-person dataset also divided transgender people by race, the Black, Asian and Hispanic transgender people who commit mass shootings per million people at that time would have been 0.000, the lowest on the chart.

This helps highlight the issues with using per capita data from such a small sample size, especially when one group far outnumbers another. It’d be unusual to claim that something is a pattern because it happened once. Yet, if we were to go back to our 66 mass shooters from between 2015 and 2025, the 65 cisgender people would amount to 0.248 mass shooters per million cisgender people, a lower per capita value than the 0.390 per million value mentioned above for transgender people, even though just a single perpetrator was transgender.

What other data says

Beyond the Violence Prevention Project Research Center, other major databases of mass shootings in the U.S. include those run by the Gun Violence Archive, the one maintained by USA Today, Northeastern University and The Associated Press and another maintained by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. The latter two databases did not track gender-identity data.

As a reminder, USA Facts estimated 0.95% of the U.S. adult population identified as transgender, which was similar to other credible estimates such as an August 2025 report from the UCLA School of Law Williams Institute. USA Facts estimated about 47.09% of the adult population were cisgender men.

Of those 207 mass shooters previously mentioned in the Violence Protection Project’s database, only the 2023 Nashville shooter was identified as transgender. That’s 0.48% of all the shooters in the database. The database said 202 of the shooters were cisgender male, which was 97.6% of all shooters.

The Gun Violence Archive has a broader definition of a mass shooting: a shooting in which at least four victims are shot and either injured or killed, not including the shooter. The Gun Violence Archive does not separate other underlying criminal activity, such as gang activity, from its definition.

Snopes reached out to the Gun Violence Archive by email in August 2025 because its public database did not include the gender identity of the perpetrators. Mark Bryant, its founding executive director, replied with gender-identity data for mass shootings and mass murders (in which four or more people are killed) between Jan. 1, 2013 and August 2025.

Of 5,729 mass shootings in the Gun Violence Archive’s database, there were five confirmed transgender shooters. If including a few incidents in which the gender identity of the shooter was not confirmed, the Gun Violence Archive estimated that there may have been eight transgender mass shooters since 2013. That’s between 0.09% and 0.14% of all mass shooters in the database.

Bryant said 319 of those shootings qualified as mass murders, by the group’s definition. There were three proven transgender shooters among those 319 incidents, Bryant said. That’s 0.94% of all mass murders since 2013.

A January 2023 Secret Service report on mass attacks — attacks in which three or more people, not including the attacker(s), were harmed — between 2016 and 2020 found three of the 180 attackers from the time period were transgender men. Of the remaining 177 attackers, five were cisgender women and 172 were cisgender men.

That means about 1.67% of attackers in the Secret Service report were transgender and 95.56% of attackers were men who were not transgender.

For further reading, Snopes has previously fact-checked false claims insinuating transgender people commit mass shootings at rates higher than the rest of the population.