A couple years ago, WorldNetDaily was obsessed with the alleged transgender identity of the Nashville school shooter and demanded the alleged manifesto she wrote be released to the public; when parts of if were leaked, WND used it to disparage all transgender people as violent psychopaths. WND’s Bob Unruh really wanted to go that same route with another school shooting in a Dec. 17 article:
The shooter who killed a teacher and a student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis., on Monday, and injured seven others now has been identified as Natalie Rupnow, 15, who went by the name “Samantha.”
“The shooter has now been identified as 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, who went by the name Samantha. She was a student at the school, and evidence suggests she died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Shon Barnes, Madison police chief, said in a statement. “The official cause of death will be released by the Dane County Medical Examiner pending the conclusion of their examination. She was pronounced deceased while in transport to a local hospital. A teacher and a teenage student were pronounced dead at the scene at that school.”
[…]Barnes said speculation over the shooter’s possible status as a transgender person was irrelevant.
“I don’t know whether Natalie was transgender or not. And quite frankly, I don’t think that’s important at all,” Barnes said. “I don’t think whatever happened today has anything to do with how she or he or they may want to identify.”
Unruh was pushing a lie. NBC detailed how false claims about the shooter’s identity spread through right-wing social media:
Only 38 minutes after a Madison, Wisconsin, teacher called 911 to report Monday’s school shooting, the lies began to spread.
The first one, in a post on X, said simply: “Taking bets on another trans shooter.” The post didn’t pick up much traction.
But 57 minutes later, the false claims about the shooter’s gender identity found their footing.
[…]Conservative news website Townhall followed one minute after [Alex] Jones, posting a clip of Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes giving a hurried initial news conference. “I don’t know if it’s a male or female,” he said in the clip.
The Townhall clip was eight seconds long and did not show the context of Barnes’ comment. Reporters had asked him several questions and he didn’t know the answer to many of them, such as what type of gun the shooter used. It wasn’t clear from the clip whether the shooter’s gender was ambiguous or whether the chief simply didn’t have the information.
Without the context, dozens of X accounts used the Townhall video to speculate that the shooter was transgender. The video received more than 650,000 views, and, after other accounts reshared the video with speculation of their own, the number of views ballooned to more than 1.5 million. For hours afterward, other conservative accounts with millions of followers, including @EndWokeness and Ian Miles Cheong, joined in the speculation about the shooter’s gender and whether it might be nonconforming.
But the speculation was wrong: Police eventually identified the shooting suspect as a 15-year-old girl, with no evidence that she was transgender.
Not only was the transgender speculation false in this case, it’s historically inaccurate, NBC went on to note:
The trend of trying to link crime to transgender people is a potential distraction and time-wasting exercise for law enforcement, the news media and social media users who, in the wake of a mass shooting, are trying to sort through fact from fiction. And LGBTQ advocates say the false claims spread irrational fear throughout the community.
A similar dynamic of falsely saying a mass-shooting suspect is transgender or nonbinary has played out before, including after shootings in Houston in February, in Philadelphia last year and in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022.
The Gun Violence Archive, which maintains a database of shootings, estimates that 0.11% of known suspects in mass shootings were transgender over the past decade, said Mark Bryant, the archive’s executive director. The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are injured or killed, not counting the shooter. There were many more instances in which trans people were victims, Bryant added.
[…]The attempts to connect trans people with criminal tendencies are not rooted in fact, experts say.
“There’s no evidence whatsoever that trans people are any more dangerous than cisgender people,” said Henry Fradella, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University who has studied the subject.
Because narrative comes before facts at WND, its readers will never know this. Transphobia is more important than the truth, after all. Indeed, a Dec. 19 article by Unruh noting that “A California man has been arrested in connection with this week’s school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin” refused to correct the record on Rupnow’s identity. Meanwhile, Unruh’s original article remains live and uncorrected.
UPDATE: A Dec. 18 article by Unruh stated that “Childhood trauma is being discussed as a possible contributor to Monday’s school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, in which Natalie Samantha Rupnow, 15, shot and killed another student and a teacher at a Christian school, and injured seven others. She then killed herself.” Unruh refused to retract his previous false assertions that Rupnow was transgender.