Trans Lives are at Stake. Reporters Must do Better

Hope Pisoni | Uncloseted Media Weekly Newsletter

It’s been a scary week for me and my friends. Being trans in the U.S. in 2025, you build up a level of tolerance and desensitization to hate. Still, the past week has been on a different level. Not even 24 hours after the killing of Charlie Kirk, and before a suspect was even confirmed, many influential far-right voices were already using the assassination to justify calls for mass violence against trans people.

The following morning, political commentator Joey Mannarino said, “If the person who killed Charlie Kirk was a transgender, there can be no mercy for that species any longer.” Hours later, Donald Trump Jr. went on “The Megyn Kelly Show” to say that “I can’t name, including probably like al Qaeda and the Taliban, a group that is more violent per capita than the radical trans movement.” And over the weekend, far-right influencer and Trump ally Laura Loomer said, “It’s time to designate the transgender movement as a terrorist movement.”

The above claims aren’t just vile, they’re wrong: Between 1966 and 2024, just one out of about 200 mass shootings tracked by the Violence Prevention Project Research Center was perpetrated by a trans person. In contrast, over 90% of the perpetrators were cis men.

However, after the horrifying mass shooting perpetrated by a trans person at a Minneapolis school last month, Trump-appointed federal investigators are using this moment as a politically convenient opportunity to disarm and crack down on trans people and other political adversaries. That’s why they’ve made considerable efforts to tie the shooter to these groups.

The news media has helped peddle this false narrative. The day after the shooting, The Wall Street Journal uncritically published a now-disproven claim that the shooter’s bullets were engraved with so-called “transgender ideology,” spreading it to most mainstream news outlets in the primetime hours before the publication issued a too-little-too-late lengthy update on the claims’ unverified nature. In addition, journalists have shared investigators' obsession with finding a way to make this about trans people: Why publish headlines about how Kirk was discussing trans topics before he was shot or about the gender of the shooter’s roommate?

Charitably, some of these publications may genuinely believe that connections to trans people may help explain the perpetrator’s motivation, given Kirk’s aggressive animus toward the trans community. But I believe many editors and executives also recognize the convenience of this moment: If they can find a way to tie Kirk’s killing to trans people, then they can bring in the clicks from fearmongering headlines tied to hot-button topics.

There’s tons of research that shows that "angertainment” works, and the far right’s demonization of trans people riles up anger on all sides. It's no wonder, then, that Mother Jones found that multiple of the stories that made the media rounds originated from right-wing sources such as Steven Crowder and Fox News. Through all of this, we’ve been forced to listen to an endless stream of think pieces posthumously casting Kirk as a champion of civil dialogue.

Nobody deserves to die, and I understand the desire not to speak ill of the dead. But what about the living? What about the millions of trans people who not only face the blame for a crime we did not commit, but must now watch as media figureheads valorize a man who called us "abominations"; who called for “Nuremberg trials” for our doctors; and whose rhetoric spread constant hate not just towards us but towards just about every marginalized group, including gay people, Jews, Muslims, Black people, Palestinians and immigrants. Meanwhile, the same outlets that have given Kirk carte blanche for his hatred simply because he is no longer with us have turned around and fired contributors for daring to criticize Kirk’s racism or his violent rhetoric.

We have to be honest: The man was a demagogue, and while he absolutely should not have been killed, making a martyr of him only serves to further stoke violence and bigotry, as evidenced by the wave of threats against Black students and universities following the shooting.

The far right and the government have already shown that they want to use this event to attack my community. I fear that, if things continue like this, the news media will pave the way forward for them to succeed. If you take away one thing from this newsletter, let it be that lives are at stake.

It’s time for journalists to act like it.

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Every Recent Move That's Been Made in the New Fight to Overturn Gay Marriage

• If you are in the NYC area Sunday, stop by our phone booth at the Stonewall Inn to leave a message of hope for our community.

• Cuba's trans people see legal progress with new gender ID law (Context)

• If political promises matter, Guyana is about to repeal its anti-gay laws (Erasing 76 Crimes)

• DOJ Quietly Deletes Study on Politics of Domestic Terrorists (The New Republic)

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Hope Pisoni

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