A July 3 shooting that left five people dead and two children injured is stirring up anti-trans rhetoric on the right.
Around 8:30pm ET on Monday, a 40-year-old shooter killed four people on the street, chased and killed one man in a home, and wounded a 2-year-old and 13-year-old, who police say are in stable condition at a hospital.
The suspect has not been named publicly by police, but multiple news outlets have identified him as 40-year-old Kimbrady Carriker. He was taken into custody by police and was denied bail on Wednesday.
There is scant evidence Carriker is transgender, but right-wing commentators have seized on a few images posted on social media showing the gunman cross-dressing to fuel the false narrative that transgender people disproportionately commit acts of violence.
Cross-dressing is not synonymous with being transgender and the shooter reportedly did not (at least publicly) identify as a woman.
“Another trans shooter,” firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) commented.
The creator of the controversial account Libs of Tiktok and other right-wing figures posted similar tweets.
Some conservatives have sought to link transitioning genders to mass shootings, citing the transgender shooter who killed six people at a Christian elementary school in Nashville in March and the mass shooting at a Colorado Springs gay nightclub—though in the latter instance, there is some doubt about the veracity of the shooter’s assertion they are non-binary.
According to the Associated Press, there has been no incredible rise in mass shootings perpetrated by transgender shooters. On the contrary, transgender people are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime, according to a report from a think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Murders of transgender people nearly doubled between 2017 to 2021.
