Two high-profile shootings carried out by transgender individuals in the span of less than a week have sparked fears about a perceived uptick in violence from the community.
On February 10th, an 18-year-old transgender shooter, Jesse Van Rootselaar, gunned down his mother and stepbrother before killing six others at a school in British Columbia, Canada.
Then on Monday, Robert Dorgan, who also identified as Roberta Esposito, opened fire at a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, ice rink where his son was playing hockey, killing two family members and then himself.
Before his attack, Dorgan wrote online, “I’m a gun fanatic transwoman; i use tampons for the hell of it. Don’t light my fuse,” according to reporting by Andy Ngo.
The shooter also tweeted, “Keep bashing us. But do not wonder why we Go BESERK.”
Online communities have sprung up, encouraging transgender people to arm themselves and show off their weapons.
The Post investigated a popular Reddit community, r/transguns, where users post images of themselves with their firearms. The subreddit boasts 11,000 weekly visitors.
Redditors swap images of their guns and paraphernalia, often decorated in the pink, white, and blue colors of the transgender flag. One user’s case for their gun showed an LGBT flag patch overlaid with a machine gun and the words “DEFEND EQUALITY.”
Another user posted an image of themselves armed and saluting, covered in AR-15 magazines.
“You like shooting fascists don’t you,” a commenter responded. “There is no need to salute. We are all equal in the war against fascism,” another said.
“Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or a queer person how many guns they own,” a meme shared on the subreddit reads. “Don’t underestimate how armed the trans community has become,” another said.
A video attributed to the group “Pink Pistols Pittsburgh” showed a trans person loading a pistol at a firing range and saying: “I was inspired to no longer just be prey.”
The founders of the group speak in the video, saying: “After the election in November, things started to feel a bit more urgent, when we realized that we couldn’t necessarily rely on the government to enforce laws to protect our safety.
“The concept of pink pistol clubs … started popping up all over the country that would deter bigots, extremists, and people who might be motivated to commit a hate crime from attacking LGBT people. Armed queers don’t get bashed.”
Despite the recent flurry of violence, trans people still make up a small minority of mass shooters overall. However, there have been several high-profile examples in North America involving transgender perpetrators, attracting scrutiny and attention.
In August 2025, male-to-female identifying Robin Westman killed two children and wounded 18 more at a Minneapolis church. And in March 2023, female-to-male identifying Aiden Hale killed six at a Nashville Christian school.
There is no evidence any of the shooters were affiliated with any of the aforementioned groups in this story.
Trans people posing with guns has also become more prominent in the media.
An op-ed in the University of Utah’s student newspaper argued that trans people should arm themselves back in 2023.
“Our situation is becoming extremely dangerous,” a student argued. “Trans people currently have the full rights of the Constitution, but that might not be the case forever. While they still can, trans people should arm themselves.”
Eugene Weekly, a local alternative newspaper from Eugene, Oregon, ran a cover story in June 2025 featuring a trans person holding an AR-15 style weapon titled “Are you triggered?” The caption read, “As the Trump administration attacks trans people, some queer folks are armed and ready to bash back.”
Such rhetoric has led to unsubstantiatedspeculation the trans-identified community is disproportionately violent.
“Trans people are the most dangerous and unstable group in existence and it’s not close,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh tweeted earlierthis month. “The entire gender transition industry must be forcibly shut down immediately.”
The exact proportion of trans shooters is difficult to ascertain, due to differing definitions of mass shootings.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as incidents with four or more casualties not including the shooter, five out of 5,748 shootings between January 1, 2013, and September 15, 2025 were perpetrated by transgender shooters,representing less than one tenth of one per cent of shootings.
The total number of trans shooters during this time period could be as high as eight, but the other three perpetrators’ gender identities have not been confirmed. This definition of mass shootings may also include gang-related violence.
Still, there has been a push in the trans community to get armed, often citing fears of legislative action taken to roll back gender-affirming care, which some have conflated with a “genocide” of trans people.
Trans people and allies have also gathered for shooting practice, sometimes under the moniker Stone Wall Underground, a group that is “dedicated to supporting intersectional communities and our allies through mutual aid, self-defense education, and empowering folks to get better trained and organized.”
This fall, the Trump administration reportedly considered restricting transgender gun ownership following the Minneapolis shooting.
The NRA almost immediately came out in opposition to the move, writing on X that the organization “does not and will not support any policy proposals that implement sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.”