Advocates for the transgender community are quick to shut down that line of inquiry. “Trans people are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators,” Arline Isaacson, cochair of the Massachusetts GLBTQ Political Caucus, told me in an interview. “The overwhelming majority of mass shooters are straight, white cisgender men, and a subset of that. They tend to be ultraconservative, MAGA Trump supporters who hate women, gays, Blacks, Jews, etc.”
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A spokesperson for GLAD Law, a legal advocacy group, cited studies showing that transgender people were responsible for fewer than 0.1 percent of the 5,748 mass shootings tracked by the Gun Violence Archive between 2013 and 2025 — yet they are four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization and much more likely to experience domestic violence.
By the numbers, transgender perpetrators are clearly outliers. But when a mass shooting occurs, the focus, whether justified or not, is often on the religious or political views of the alleged offender — and in the Rhode Island case, on gender identification. Wishing it away as a topic of conversation doesn’t make it go away.
Dorgan, 56, also went by the names Roberta Esposito and Roberta Dorgano. According to The Washington Post, a day before the shooting, Dorgan responded on X to anti-transgender posts by actor Kevin Sorbo and Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones by saying such criticism is “why we go BERSERK.” The victims of the next day’s attack included Dorgan’s former wife and adult son. Dorgan’s former mother-in-law and father-in-law and a family friend were also injured before Dorgan died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Officials are calling this a case of domestic violence. But as various media outlets have reported, court documents indicate that Dorgan’s gender transition and mental illness were a source of family conflict. When Dorgan’s wife, Rhonda Dorgan, filed for divorce in 2020, she cited “gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic + personality traits” before changing the grounds for divorce to “irreconcilable differences.” The divorce was finalized in June 2021.
It is the second shooting incident perpetrated by a transgender person to make national headlines in less than a week. On Feb. 10 in Canada, Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, killed her mother and 11-year-old brother and then killed five students and one educator before killing herself. In that case, the shooter was raised as a boy and began transitioning to female about five years ago, according to The New York Times. Van Rootselaar also had a documented history of mental health issues.
Last May, an article in Commentary Magazine asked the question, “Do transgender Americans commit crime at higher rates or of different types than ‘cis-gender’ Americans?” The conclusion: “We have no idea.” While crime data regularly track race, age, and educational status, “we are not systematically collecting or analyzing stats for trans offenders,” wrote Hannah E. Meyers, who blamed that on left-leaning political sensibilities.
Among the incidents cited in the article is the March 2023 killing of three children and three adults at The Covenant School in Nashville by Aidan Hale, 28, who was born female but identified as a transgender man.
A report on the shooting that was filed by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department does not list gender identity as a factor. It instead identifies Hale’s quest for “notoriety” as the motive. Meanwhile, the report notes that it refers to Hale as a female because under Tennessee law, a person’s gender identity must correspond with their biological sex. Couldn’t societal pressures like that have contributed to Hale’s well-documented mental health issues? The report described Hale as “highly depressed and highly suicidal.”
These are extremely difficult times for the transgender community. The attacks of the 2024 presidential campaign — “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” — quickly morphed into executive orders that declared only two genders and banned transgender women and girls from competing with women’s sports teams at schools that receive federal funding. Threats to cut off funding to hospitals that treat transgender youth are now leading to the shutdown of such programs.
For sure, anti-trans sentiment is the red meat du jour for conservatives, just like anti-Trump sentiment is the red meat du jour for progressives. Of course, the transgender community is much more vulnerable than a president who thrives on the vicious bullying of marginalized groups.
But shutting down the conversation around incidents like the Rhode Island shooting because of how it energizes MAGA world does no one any good — especially not the transgender community. We need more conversation, not less, about the toll of society’s cruelty on a person’s mental health, no matter what their politics or gender identity.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.