The Epoch Times: A combination of ideology, social media, mental health disorders, and medication may be influencing recent trends in violence and radicalization among those who identify as transgender, according to experts.
“My general feeling is that we’re seeing more of it … not for any one factor, but because of several factors all convening, and they’re all amplified by the political rhetoric,” said C. Alan Hopewell, a Fort Worth neuropsychologist.
When people struggling with their sexual identity are prescribed hormones to change their bodies, it impacts the way they think, he told The Epoch Times.
Hopewell said that combining hormones, medication, and intense online pressure can create a dangerous situation.
Since 2018, there have been at least six high-profile shootings at schools and businesses involving individuals who identified as transgender or were described as gender-confused.
Two were mass shootings, which are defined by the Crime Prevention Research Center as the killing of four or more people in a single incident that’s not gang-related or related to some other crime.
Last year, Anderson Lee Aldrich, a man who identifies as nonbinary, was sentenced to 55 concurrent life sentences for the 2022 shooting of five people at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
In 2023, 28-year-old Audrey Hale, a woman who identified as a man, opened fire at the Covenant School in Nashville. Three 9-year-olds and three adults were gunned down before police shot and killed Hale.
Robert Westman, who changed his name to Robin, killed two children and wounded 21 others before killing himself at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis this August. The 23-year-old left a manifesto saying he “was tired of being trans” and scrawled anti-Christian messages and the words “kill Donald Trump” on weapons.
Likewise, members of the Zizians, described as a cult-like group largely made up of transgender individuals, have been mentioned in connection with the death of a woman during an attack on a California landlord in November 2022, the landlord’s subsequent killing, and the deaths of a Pennsylvania couple.
Most recently, the Zizians have been linked to a highway shootout in Vermont that left a U.S. Border Patrol agent dead.
In Texas, Cameron Arnold, also known as Autumn Hill, and Bradford Morris, also known as Meagan Morris, were charged with the attempted murder of federal agents in connection with an ambush of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer at the Prairieland ICE detention facility in July.
Both suspects were members of an Antifa-affiliated group and both identified as transgender, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Court proceedings recently revealed that the man arrested for allegedly plotting to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 identified as a woman.
Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, was romantically involved with a transgender partner whose picture in a “furry” suit has been widely distributed online.
Friends reported that Robinson delved into a “dark” internet culture, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said on Sept. 14.
Messages on the cartridges in a rifle found by police in a wooded area after Kirk’s shooting gave insight into the shooter’s motive.
According to court documents, the phrase on one cartridge contained a reference to online furry and roleplay culture. Another read “Hey fascist! Catch!” and featured arrow symbols that may have referred to a sequence of controller moves that unleash a bomb in the video game “Helldivers 2.”
Robinson’s mother told investigators that over the past year or so, Robinson’s political beliefs had been leaning to the left, “becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented,” according to the documents.
President Donald Trump said on Sept. 15, “It looks like he became radicalized on the internet.”
The FBI is investigating other possible accomplices in the assassination of the conservative influencer.
Ideology and Violence
When asked whether the FBI should be investigating transgender extremism, Trump told reporters on Sept. 21: “Something seems to be going on, but you can’t make that statement yet. We’re looking at it very closely.”
Groups such as Armed Queers of Salt Lake City, a militant anti-fascist group that wiped its social media presence after Kirk’s assassination, and Trans Army have come under public scrutiny.
Armed Queers spoke on “queer resistance” at the University of Utah in 2023. The group, which calls itself a revolutionary LGBT organization that defends “oppressed people,” is led by Ermiya Fanaeian, a transgender activist whose parents were Iranian immigrants. Fanaeian identifies as a “trans woman of color.”
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said in an X post that the socialist group is now under FBI investigation in connection with Kirk’s slaying. She noted alleged funding links between the group and the Chinese Communist Party.
The Trans Army, which offers “guides, toolkits, and counterinsurgency strategies to survive and fight back” denied the group was anything but peaceful, after journalist Andy Ngo posted on X that the organization was training for a “paramilitary insurrection against the U.S. government.”
The group said in an online statement, “The recent portrayal of the Trans Army initiative as a violent revolutionary force fundamentally misinterprets the organization’s intent, purpose, and advocacy.”
Trump designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist group on Sept. 22 and signed a presidential memorandum on Sept. 25 with the aim of dismantling left-wing terrorism networks in the United States.
The memorandum stated that recent political violence, including anti-ICE shootings and assassinations, did not have organic origins.
“Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society,” the president said.
The memorandum directed the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and people engaged in political violence and intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law.
Hormones and Mental Health
Dr. Lauren Schwartz, an Oklahoma psychiatrist, cautioned against the assumption that transgender individuals are inherently violent.
“I would be very cautious to link it directly to a violent act, of something like murdering someone or assassinating someone,” she told The Epoch Times.
Schwartz said individuals experiencing gender confusion are already vulnerable, and affirming their beliefs does not appear to improve their situation. Instead, she noted, their conditions may worsen.
“Steroids, and testosterone specifically … I do think all of them put these kids and young adults in horribly compromised medical situations, even if it has nothing to do with harm to others,” she said.
While the number of mass killings involving transgender individuals is small, some experts say that the proportion appears statistically high.
“If you look at mass public shootings since 2018, what you find is about 5 percent of the mass public shooters were trans individuals, and given that their share of the population is about 0.7 percent, they’re obviously overrepresented,” John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told The Epoch Times.
A 2022 report from the Williams Institute at the University of Southern California showed 1.6 million people aged 13 and older (or 0.6 percent) identify as transgender in the United States.
Hopewell said people with gender dysphoria may get caught up in online hysteria and be vulnerable to social media influences that affirm their beliefs.
He compared the surge in gender dysphoria, discussed obsessively in some online communities, to other mass-hysteria events such as the Salem witch trials.
In a recent paper submitted for publication, Hopewell mentioned the “cult type” influences involved in pressuring some children to believe they were born the wrong sex.
Those who announce that they identify as a different sex experience praise and “love bombing” from pro-transgender groups, Hopewell wrote. By contrast, those who decide to detransition are often subject to abuse and ostracization.
“In many cases, entire ‘gangs’ of students have suddenly decided that they ‘are the opposite sex’ and ‘come out,’ essentially together. In reality, this is no different from the hysterical events occasionally engulfing boarding schools,” he wrote.
Transgender patients often suffer from mental illness, such as depression and anxiety, Hopewell said in a past interview.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders previously classified what’s known as gender dysphoria as a mental health disorder. However, the World Health Organization removed it as a disorder and reclassified it as a sexual health condition in 2019.
‘There’s a Revolution Going On
’Trevor Loudon, author of “The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress,” told The Epoch Times that many far-left groups are recruiting transgender individuals.
Loudon, a filmmaker who has researched Marxist and communist movements, said Antifa, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization are examples of left-wing groups that have welcomed transgender members, many of whom see themselves as victims.
“The hard, violent left seems to be attracting and deliberately recruiting and targeting and elevating these people,” he said.
Groups based on communism and Marxist ideology have focused on using identity groups to drive a wedge between Americans, he said.
Traditional Marxist ideas of class struggle, involving workers, didn’t take hold in America. However, in the 1960s, groups such as the race-focused Black Panther Party, a communist organization, emerged.
In modern times, these groups have attempted to sow discord based on race, feminism, and sexual orientation, painting various groups as victims and America as an oppressor, Loudon said.
“They wanted to divide us [racially],” he said. “They want to divide us on gender lines, male versus female, then straight versus gay.
“The gender transgender thing is just the next step.”
Loudon said he spoke recently with Colorado parents who told him about teachers who deliberately recruit vulnerable young teenagers and indoctrinate them in transgender ideology.
Family friction can leave the door open for counselors and teachers to use their influence to create “a little class of embedded revolutionaries who just hate their society and want revenge.”
“That’s the pattern that we’re seeing—there’s a revolution going on,” he said.
Prophetic Link:
“Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.” Luke 17:28, 30