It didn’t take long for the speculation to begin. In the hours after the shocking, livestreamed assassination of Charlie Kirk, the posts on social media came thick and fast.
“ANOTHER TRANSGENDER ANTIFA TERRORIST?” one person posted on X. “Willing to bet the shooter of Charlie Kirk was trans. Has to be,” another declared. Kirk had been answering a question about transgender people when he was shot, prompting feverish and baseless online speculation that a transgender militant cell had ordered his killing.
The viral frenzy grew the next morning, first from a right-wing influencer who posted a screenshot of a leaked internal message from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives alleging that law enforcement officials found gun cartridges at the scene engraved with “transgender and antifascist ideology.” The post was viewed millions of times. Two hours later it moved fully into the mainstream, when The Wall Street Journal published a story that purported to confirm the post, quoting the same internal bulletin.
Early that afternoon my colleagues in the Times newsroom published a report that threw cold water on the bulletin. Citing a senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation, they wrote that such reports are usually not made public because of potentially inaccurate information. The bulletin had not been verified and did not match other summaries of the evidence.
My cautious colleagues were right: There is no evidence that the markings on the shell casings had any connection to transgender people at all. Tyler Robinson, the man charged with killing Kirk, is quoted in court records saying that the engravings “are mostly a big meme.”
But that did not matter. The initial impulse to blame Kirk’s assassination on transgender people had gained enough heft to become fixed in the right-wing imagination. Even now, with a suspect who is not transgender in custody, the insinuation that trans people orchestrated the plot to kill Kirk persists. The evidence driving these dark suspicions? Robinson, the 22-year-old son of conservative Utah parents, was in a romantic relationship with a transgender person. That, it seems, is taint enough.
This fixation on finding a transgender connection to Kirk’s horrific murder is as awful as it is dangerous. But it does reveal two psychological truths about Trumpism.
First, for all of MAGA’s reverence for masculine self-determination, one of its central tenets is the blamelessness of its adherents. Whatever is going wrong in this country, it is not their fault.
If you can’t find a job or a house, it is because immigrants took them all and filled your community with crime to boot. If your business is failing, it is because foreign countries are ripping off America by selling us their goods and not buying enough of ours. If your child has health problems, it is because greedy pharmaceutical companies and scheming scientists gave toxic chemicals to your baby in the form of vaccines. And if your child is murdered while cowering in a chapel or at school, the problem is not the surfeit of easily accessible guns in America; it is transgender people.
The insistence that something President Trump and his supporters call “transgender ideology” was behind the killing lays bare another core belief of theirs: They are obsessed with contamination and contagion, seeing it as the site of despicable difference. Again and again they deploy metaphors of disease and disfigurement.
Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump declared on the campaign trail in 2023. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his health secretary, has claimed that vaccines “butchered” and “poisoned an entire generation of American children.” Americans have apparently been infected with the “woke mind virus,” a phrase popularized by Trump’s ally and rival, Ron DeSantis.
Transgender people, in this universe, represent the fusion of sick body and mind. Trump has repeatedly referred to gender-affirming care for transgender people as “mutilation.” Kirk himself spoke of transgender people as mentally ill. “Trans is a mental delusion,” Kirk wrote on social media.
Working in tandem, these two psychological reflexes — to disavow blame and project it completely onto the polluting other — transform trans people, a tiny, embattled and increasingly isolated minority in the United States, into a biological threat to the national body politic.
The notion that transgender people are a sinister threat to society is hardly new. But anti-trans hysteria on the right reached a fever pitch last month, when a 23-year-old trans woman named Robin Westman attacked a Catholic school in Minneapolis, opening fire during an all-school Mass. She killed two children and wounded around 20 others before turning a gun on herself.
“Statistically, the trans population has been prone to violence,” the Fox News host Jesse Watters declared after the shooting. “That’s not villainizing. That’s reality.”
I hesitate to dignify this obvious falsity with a response. It is utterly baseless. The independent nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings involving four or more victims, injured or killed, found that of 5,748 incidents since 2013, just five perpetrators were confirmed to be transgender.
The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University examined mass shootings between 1966 and 2024 under a narrower definition: public killing sprees unconnected to other crime. It found just one such killing spree that was carried out by a transgender person. In more than 97 percent of the mass killings, the perpetrator was a cisgender man. Analyzing crime data, researchers at the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law found that trans people are four times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime than a cisgender person.
And yet they remain ready scapegoats for the right. In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, Spencer Cox, Utah’s governor, expressed the telltale desire to cast blame elsewhere. “For 33 hours I was praying that if this had to happen here, that it wouldn’t be one of us,” Cox said when he announced Robinson’s arrest. “Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for.”
Some were quick to conclude that Cox was hoping the shooter would be an immigrant — an illegal one, ideally. But I took his meaning differently. He did not want the perpetrator of this terrible crime to be from Utah, a native-born product of its deeply conservative and devout culture. And yet everything we know so far about Robinson tells us that is exactly who he is — the son of a religious, gun-loving Republican family. Court records suggest that the bolt-action rifle he is suspected of using to kill Kirk once belonged to his grandfather.
It is early days in the investigation, so we know little about Robinson’s motives. His family says that he had become more fixated on politics of late. Prosecutors paraphrased his mother, who told them that her son had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” In messages to his partner released to the police, he allegedly confessed to assassinating Kirk. “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” he wrote.
I understand the urge to pin down why someone would commit such a senseless crime. But it’s possible that it is not something that can be known. Like those offered by other assassins, Robinson’s own explanation of his motives, should he ever offer it in full, would almost certainly be confused, contradictory and highly specific to his own strange mind.
One thing we know so far is that the only trans person in the orbit of this awful tragedy, Robinson’s partner, reacted with disbelief and horror to his alleged confession. She did not accede to Robinson’s request to destroy their text messages, according to prosecutors, or the note he left under her keyboard that reads, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.” Cox said she had been “incredibly cooperative” in helping with the investigation, and that Robinson appeared to act alone.
That cooperation has not stopped the speculation. Online would-be detectives put the chat transcript between Robinson and his partner through A.I. detection software and claimed the messages had been faked. Matt Walsh, a prominent right-wing influencer and provocateur, spun out his strange theory in a social media post.
“I am leaning very strongly towards the theory that this text exchange was scripted as a way to absolve the boyfriend,” he wrote, referring to Robinson’s transgender partner as a man, a common practice in anti-trans circles. “It’s almost exactly what Walter White did at the end of Breaking Bad. This feels like a strategy they cooked up from watching too much TV.”
The truth is that Kirk and Robinson have quite a bit in common. Born nine years apart, both are products of conservative American families. Neither graduated from college, despite having ample opportunity and aptitude for academic success. Both marinated in and were influenced by strange and dark corners of online culture. In another life, Robinson could quite easily have been an enthusiastic recruit in Kirk’s army of conservative youth.
The divergence of their natural paths as young, white American men requires some explanation. For Trumpists, the only acceptable one is the intercession of some alien intervention — contamination, pollution, infestation. In this fantasy, Robinson is a blameless dupe deserving our prayers and the diabolical agent can be only a trans person, who seeded and steered a heinous crime. Except, of course, it wasn’t.
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Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist.
The post We’re Seeing Two Truths of Trumpism Laid Bare appeared first on New York Times.
