Despite right-wing media and politicians shamelessly exploiting the recent Tumbler Ridge tragedy to continue their transphobic disinformation campaigns, transgender and gender-diverse people are the least likely population to commit mass shootings.
It’s no surprise that these influencers are looking for a scapegoat to distract from the real problem: Their own policies and practices increase systemic discrimination and inequities –especially in the United States, with its loose access to guns – making society more dangerous for everyone.
While mass shootings are too rare in Canada to calculate accurate trends, of the more than 5,700 mass shootings in the U.S. in the past 12 years, only five – that’s under 0.1 per cent – were committed by transgender or nonbinary individuals, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Cisgender women represent under one per cent of mass shooters, leaving 99 per cent of mass shootings committed by cisgender men.
Since the proportion of U.S. adults who identify as transgender or non-binary is at approximately 1.2 per cent according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau, trans and gender-diverse people are far less likely to commit a mass shooting.
However, transgender and gender diverse folks are at much higher risk of being victims of violence, especially from those fuelled by transphobic disinformation.
A large 2026 systemic review of violence against transgender and gender-diverse adults globally found that 60 per cent had experienced recent physical or sexual violence. In the U.S., a crime victimization survey for 2017-2018 showed that transgender people experienced more than four times more acts of violence against them than cisgender people. Other studies have shown that these rates are greater than the high levels of violence against cisgender women.
While it’s tempting to point fingers, the top two individual risk factors for violence – substance use disorders and prior exposure to violence (especially in childhood) – are intertwined with systemic causes.
Instead, we must look at the larger imbalances in society that are making the world less safe for everyone. Systems-level risk factors for violence include exposure to easily accessible guns, underfunded education systems, limited employment opportunities, poor access to mental health services and health care, patriarchal constructions of masculinity, discriminatory policies that perpetuate inequities, structural racism, income inequality, high-crime neighbourhoods and child poverty
These systemic risks create self-perpetuating cycles in which violence within our communities creates more violence as communities adapt by developing survival-based norms and oppressive policies, escalating civil unrest, a group of researchers concluded in their 2021 study.
When Université de Montréal researcher Marc Ouimet studied the homicide rates in 165 countries, he found income inequality to be the most robust indicator of violence across middle and high-income countries.
Similarly, after studying the health and social problems of countries for decades, British social epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett concluded that the usual suspects of individual behaviours didn’t determine why some countries fare so differently than others. Instead, they found that health and social problems are most impacted by social factors at a population level. The biggest culprit was social inequities.
Simone Schenkman and Aylene Bousquat, researchers at the School of Public Health at the University of Sao Paulo, included mid- and low-income countries in their review and found the same thing – policies that lead to inequality are “a disastrous political choice for society.”
The studies found that social inequities not only lead to higher rates of violence, crime, incarceration, disrespect and social distrust, but also high rates of substance use, mental illness, and stress, and poor physical health outcomes, innovation and social cohesion.
While right-wing influencers continue to distract us from these systemic problems by scapegoating marginalized groups, researchers around the world consistently link right-wing governments themselves to increased suicides, homicides, and violent crime, largely because their policies and practices increase both the discrimination against marginalized communities and systemic inequities that make society more violent and unhealthy for everyone.
To drive home the point, a U.S. study of the past 110 years found that both suicides and homicides doubled under Republican administrations, attributing the violence not only to Republicans’ economic policies that worsened unemployment, gross domestic product and inequality, but also the Republicans’ culture of dysregulation and divisive rhetoric.
Australian researchers similarly found that suicide rates shot up whenever Conservatives held power in a 100-year longitudinal study, with men 17 per cent more likely and women 40 per cent more likely to kill themselves under those governments.
So, rather than worsening our society’s health and safety by spewing hate and disinformation as we grieve the murders of members of our collective, we need to respond compassionately to our national tragedies by coming together to care for everyone and fix the societal imbalances that will keep harming us all.
This article has been updated.
