Let’s begin with the facts, because apparently we’re still living in the age where half-truths dressed up in ideological glitter can spread faster than the grief of parents who lost children in a church. On August 27, 2025, at 8:30 a.m. Central Daylight Time, a 23-year-old named Robin Westman opened fire through the stained-glass windows of Annunciation Catholic School’s church in Minneapolis during a school-wide Mass. Two children—eight and ten years old—were killed, and seventeen people were wounded, most of them children, some elderly parishioners. The attacker then died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.(Reuters)
Weapons used? A rifle, shotgun, and pistol—all legally purchased. Additional firearms were found at residences linked to Westman. The FBI is investigating the attack as domestic terrorism and a hate crime targeting Catholics.(Reuters) Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey warned against using Westman’s gender identity to villainize the transgender community.(Reuters)
Now, brace for the punch—this is where the right wing revs its engines. Somehow, in the maelstrom of grief, they pivot to call this “Trans violence.” The emerging rhetorical cartwheels seem to go like this: — “Trans person commits atrocity → therefore the entire trans community is violent.” (Drop mic.)
And leading the conga line of bad faith? Fox News, flanked by their perennial hype man Elon Musk, proclaiming there’s a “pattern” that most shooters are transgender.
1. The Faux Pattern of Choice
“Patterns” are a funny thing. A cherry-picked handful of incidents presented on chyron in 72-point font becomes proof of an epidemic. Fox anchors tilt their heads gravely; Musk sends off a late-night “just asking questions” tweet to 150 million followers. Suddenly, the claim is everywhere: Most shooters are trans.
Let’s cut the honey with vinegar: this is false. Trans people make up roughly 1% of the U.S. population, and in mass shooting statistics they don’t even register as a category. You know what does? White men.
According to data from The Violence Project and Mother Jones’ mass shooting database, the overwhelming majority of mass shooters are:
- Male (97%)
- White (54%)
- Often aligned with right-wing or misogynist ideology
In fact, if we play Fox’s game of “pattern association,” then the actual headline should read:
“Most mass shooters are white men, often conservative, often radicalized by online right-wing communities.”
But of course, that doesn’t make the evening rundown, because there’s no ratings in calling out the mirror.
2. Structural Irony: Blame Identity, Not Guns
It’s ironic—structurally ironic—that a crime so obviously about guns and deteriorating mental health is being rebranded as “trans violence.” When weapons are the variable, gender identity is noise, and yet the narrative gets hijacked by those invested in stoking culture war flames.
Meanwhile, the numbers tell the story:
- The U.S. has more guns than people.
- 2025 already saw over 140 school shootings before Minneapolis.
- The statistical fingerprint of the average shooter: cisgender, white, male, Republican-leaning.
Yet Elon Musk’s algorithm serves us the idea that “trans” is the pattern worth tracking. This is structural irony at its finest: blaming the statistically least represented group for the statistically most repeated crime.
3. Dry Sarcasm and Mock Formality
In the spirit of dry sarcasm, let’s formalize this.
Definition A: “Trans violence” — An ingenious rhetorical device by which any assault involving a transgender-identified person becomes evidence that being trans is itself a form of violence. Elegant in its illogic.
Definition B: “White conservative male violence” — A statistical reality so frequent that newsrooms euphemize it into “lone wolf” or “troubled young man.” An epidemic disguised as coincidence.
The difference? One becomes culture war fodder. The other becomes “thoughts and prayers.”
4. Reality Check: Trans Violence—By and Against
Let’s hold the receipts.
- Against trans people: Violence toward trans folks is epidemic. Trans women of color, especially Black and Latina trans women, are murdered at rates exponentially higher than the general population. Assault, workplace discrimination, suicide rates—these are the real statistics.
- By trans people: Virtually nonexistent as a category. Robin Westman’s atrocity is horrific, but it is not statistically representative. To claim otherwise is to inflate a singular tragedy into a fabricated trend.
5. The Sick Comedy of Culture Wars
So the script goes like this:
- Fox News: “It’s not guns—it’s trans ideology.”
- Elon Musk: “Pattern. Most shooters are trans. Just saying.”
- Audience: “Ah yes, it must be the hormones, not the high-capacity rifle.”
All while the real truth is so obvious it’s almost slapstick: guns enable violence, not gender identity.
If you were writing this as parody, an editor would send it back as too on the nose.
6. The Real Stakes
- The weapons killed those children.
- The narrative scapegoats a vulnerable group to avoid confronting the real culprit.
- The statistics prove Fox and Musk wrong: white, male, right-leaning shooters dominate the record.
- The culture’s refusal to regulate guns keeps setting the stage for the next tragedy.
7. Final, Haunting Observation
There will be more shootings. There will be more scapegoats. And Fox will still be on air with a chyron asking: “Is it hormones?”
The irony is not in the gender identity of one perpetrator. The irony is that we’ve normalized the demographic profile of the actual perpetrators into invisibility—cis, white, male, Republican—while turning a marginalized identity into the headline villain.
The pattern isn’t trans. The pattern is guns in the hands of men who already fit the profile America refuses to confront.