Aug 29, 2025, 01:15 PM EDT | Updated 4 hours ago
I registered my 9-year-old at a new school on Wednesday. In the elevator up to the fifth-floor lobby, which required the security guard to swipe her ID before we could press the elevator button, I thought: She’ll be safe up here. And then: I can’t believe I still have to think about this.
A breaking news alert had popped up on our walk there. Another horrific shooting at a school, this time in Minneapolis, where two young children were killed and 18 others injured. So it was fresher in my mind than usual — the terror all too many parents share that one day their child will not come home.
Recently, I’ve been preoccupied with a more specific threat to my children. My 11-year-old son is trans, which — for some inexplicable reason — makes him a target. Over the past year, the president has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and ranted at many a rally to stoke the flames of anti-trans sentiment among his MAGA legions. The most salient example was his blockbuster — and quite brilliant — ad, which stated, “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Donald Trump is for you.”
Since taking office, Trump has issued one executive order after another denigrating trans Americans and curtailing their rights. Hospitals in red and blue states alike have shuttered gender-affirming-care clinics. Democrats like Gavin Newsom, Rahm Emmanuel and even Pete Buttigieg have walked back support for trans Americans or made problematic comments regarding the community, Party strategists have blamed the Democrats’ championship of trans rights for the loss of the White House, and recent polling shows increased support among Democrats for restrictions on trans rights.
Vulnerable communities make for convenient scapegoats. Nothing new there. But the attacks on my son’s community have added thick, new layers to my fears about his safety. Will he be bullied relentlessly again? (We already had to switch schools to protect him.) Will his access to therapy and puberty blockers be cut off? (Gender-affirming care is critical to his mental health and well-being.) Will our family have to flee the very country his ancestors fled to? (Like I said: persecuting minorities and demonizing them for an inextricable aspect of their being — ethnicity, religion, race, disability, sexuality, gender identity, you get the idea — is an old and very boring story.)
This is why the news from Minneapolis shook me to my core: the perpetrator at Annunciation Catholic School was reportedly a trans woman. Trans people and those of us who love them grieved the victims — and then sucked in our breath.
Some of the loudest conservative voices, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk, have been promulgating the invented phenomenon of “trans terrorism” since as far back as 2015, claiming falsely that perpetrators of shootings in Colorado Springs, Uvalde, Philadelphia and Houston were trans.
“Another act of trans terrorism,” activist Chaya Raichik posted on her X account, “Libs of TikTok,” in the wake of one incident. “We need to have a national conversation about the LGBTQ movement turning youth into violent extremists.”
Trump Jr. posted, “Per capita is there a more violent group of people anywhere in the world than radicalized trans activists?” In December, minutes after a school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones weighed in on X: “If the statistical trend continues with this tragic event, there is a 98% chance the shooting is trans or gang related.”
None of these murderers were trans, but the false accusations still bounce around the far-right echo chamber. In 2023, when a trans man actually was responsible for a school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, they seized the opportunity to support their baseless theory.
So I was far from surprised to see the MAGA-sphere pounce again this week.
“Today’s evil church school shooter was a trans who was likely groomed and transitioned as a teenager,” Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X. In a headline touting the shooter’s confession that she was “tired of being trans” and “wish[ed she had] never brain-washed herself,” The New York Post described her in the first sentence as a “transgender mass shooter” and misgendered her throughout its coverage.
I can promise you not even the most sensational news outlet has ever identified someone as a “cisgender mass shooter,” despite — or because of — the fact that the overwhelming majority of school shooters have been cisgender (and white) males.
No matter what the far right wants us to believe, databases maintained by the Gun Violence Archive and Mother Jones demonstrate that, in one significant way, mass shootings reflect the same patterns as overall violence in America: Trans people are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.
Data from The Violence Prevention Project shows 97% of mass shootings are committed by men, with just a single trans shooter before the Annunciation attack. Even in the absence of malicious intent, however, the actions of any individual in a minority group are all too easily used to condemn the group as a whole. It’s how our brains are wired — and it traps innocent children like my son not just in the crosshairs of the culture wars but in the crossfire.
Twelve years ago, when a gunman massacred first-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, I expected it to catalyze real change. How can a human being look at the faces of those murdered 6- and 7-year-olds and not be moved to act?
I was pregnant at the time, and I wept for my unborn child alongside the 20 babies who didn’t make it home that day. But Newtown was not enough for us as a society to say, “Never again.” Neither was Uvalde, Texas. Or the countless other mass shootings.
My children have never known a world without active shooter drills. I don’t have much hope they ever will, since our government not only allows these preventable tragedies to keep occurring but does little to nothing to stop them. Now layer onto that the right’s twisted obsession with trans people, which steals the focus from the young lives lost and distracts from any meaningful conversation about ending this epidemic of violence.
It would be easy to sink under the weight of the double despair of this unspeakable tragedy and how it is being used to malign the trans community. Instead, I find hope in brave and principled allies like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who made space in his speech at Wednesday night’s vigil to defend the trans community.
“Anyone who is using this opportunity to villainize our trans community,” Frey said, “has lost their sense of common humanity.”
As the mother of a trans child, it often feels like most people have lost that humanity. Yet I still hope they will find it again. I mean, how can anyone seriously argue that my wide-smiled, sparkling-eyed, empathetic, loving 11-year-old son is dangerous?
Ali Moss (she/her) is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker working on a book about raising a trans child in the Trump era.
Source (Archive)
