CORRECTION -- STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Made-Up Data

Does a viral social media chart correctly represent the portion of the transgender population that had committed a mass shooting or the share of mass shootings according to gender identification between 2015 and 2025? No, that's not true: The charts supply no source for those numbers. Organizations that professionally track mass shootings using police records and public information had not, as of August 2025, published data matching the numbers in the social media charts and one gun violence archive operator said there have only been 5 confirmed transgender persons among the hundreds of mass shooting perpetrators.

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on August 28, 2025, on X.com. It began:

Time for a conversation about this...
Hope this helps

The post shared a chart with a title:

MASS SHOOTING RATES BY DEMOGRAPHIC (2015 - 2025).

Public incident with 4 or more fatalities, expressed as rates per million population.

This is what it looked like on X at the time of writing:

(Source: screenshot of a post by the EndWokeness account on X.com)

Other entries on social media - for example, here (archived here) - shared a slightly different set of similar figures, in which, nevertheless, the trans/nonbinary category was represented as disproportionately large in the data chart:

(Image source: Screenshot of a post by the buddydawg77 account on X.com)

The tables started to circulate on social media in the aftermath of the shooting (archived here) that had taken place one day earlier at a Minneapolis Catholic school's church. The suspected attacker found dead at the scene was identified as 20-year-old Robin Westman, whose mother applied (archived here) for a name change on her child's behalf three years earlier, noting that a "minor child identifies as female and wants her name to reflect that identification."

Viral posts implied the charts showed the prevalence of specific races and genders among the perpetrators of such attacks. Those posts, however, did not name the source of the data. A search on Google for the table's exact title (archived here) did not show a single result that wouldn't be a social media post.

Mark Bryant (archived here), the founding executive director at Gun Violence Archive, told Lead Stories via email on August 28, 2025:

I have no clue where their numbers come from but they are painfully inaccurate across the board.

According to the data he shared with Lead Stories, between January 1, 2013, and August 28, 2025, there were 5,729 shootings with four or more victims shot and/or killed (excluding the shooter). Out of that number of cases, only five attackers were transgender people.

Bryant continued:

As a percentage of MASS SHOOTINGS, Transgender shooters account for .0872% -- 5/5729. In the more restrictive MASS MURDER, the percentage is 0.94 - 3/319 incidents...

The main statistic to come from this...there are far more false claims than transgender shooters.

Another database -- The Violence Prevention Project (archived here) holds case data from 1966 through 2024. Out of the hundreds of mass shootings in that database, just one attacker was confirmed to have been a transgender person.

The social media charts misrepresented other data as well. According to the 2022 analysis by the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice (archived here) and the Violence Prevention Project (archived here), it was white men who made up the biggest share of mass shooters -- not any other race, nor transgender/nonbinary people.