Online Hate Targets Transgender Community Following Tumbler Ridge Shooting

Following Tuesday’s deadly mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., a wave of anti-transgender rhetoric has spread across social media, raising concerns about targeted hate and misinformation campaigns against the transgender community.

On Wednesday, RCMP identified the shooter as an 18-year-old transgender woman who lived in the community and had a history of mental health issues. However, even before authorities released this information, speculation about the shooter’s gender identity had already proliferated online, triggered by an initial RCMP emergency alert describing the suspect as a “female in a dress with brown hair.”

The incident quickly became fodder for prominent right-wing influencers and social media accounts in the United States. Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter), shared multiple posts with his 234 million followers falsely claiming that transgender people are most likely to commit mass shootings. Other accounts, including LibsofTikTok, an anti-LGBTQ account with 4.6 million followers, posted numerous transphobic messages and memes.

Conservative commentators Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire and Andy Ngo, editor at The Post Millennial, also published inflammatory content focusing on the shooter’s gender identity rather than the tragedy itself. In response to these posts, some users shared photos of transgender individuals completely unrelated to the shooting.

“The unfortunate reality is that there’s this targeted misinformation campaign that’s been unfolding for years,” said Tre’vell Anderson, executive director of the Trans Journalists Association.

Data consistently contradicts the narrative being pushed online. According to the Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University in Minnesota, fewer than 1 percent of mass shooters are transgender individuals. The overwhelming majority of such incidents are perpetrated by cisgender men.

Research from the Williams Institute at the University of California further highlights that transgender people are four times more likely to be victims of crimes, including sexual assault, than cisgender individuals.

This pattern of scapegoating the transgender community following mass shootings isn’t new. Ari Drennan, a Seattle-based researcher who monitors right-wing media and anti-LGBTQ disinformation, traces the trend back to the 2022 Uvalde school shooting in Texas, where right-wing influencers falsely claimed the shooter was transgender – a rumor that originated on 4chan.

The phenomenon intensified following the 2025 assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, when government reports suggested the shooter’s bullet casings contained pro-transgender messages.

“It became a huge inflection point where it really reached a boiling point and started being heavily embraced by not only the media, but the United States government,” Drennan explained. “It pushed this narrative as an excuse for increased political repression, increased online surveillance and even measures targeting the gun rights of trans Americans, something that would normally be the anathema to the right in the U.S.”

Experts warn that such targeted misinformation campaigns have real-world consequences. In the United States, where transgender rights have become a central battleground in culture wars, politicians have used such incidents to call for restrictions on gender-affirming care and other transgender rights.

“There’s a fear that incidents like this could be seized upon by politicians who are trying to use culture war issues as a way to increase societal repression, take away rights more broadly, and restrict the medical access of a population that is really dependent on medical care,” Drennan said.

Anderson emphasized that social media has become a powerful tool for those with political agendas aimed at marginalizing transgender people. “People with political motivation will use whatever they can in service of that political motivation. There is no care for the local community when people are amplifying these unfounded allegations,” they said. “It turns into a witch hunt.”

When asked at Wednesday’s press conference about potential connections between transgender identity and mass shootings, RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald emphasized that the investigation remains in its early stages. “It’s too early to say whether that has any correlation in this investigation,” he stated.

As communities in Tumbler Ridge mourn the victims and begin their healing process, many worry that online hatred could spread further and potentially incite violence against an already vulnerable population.