The suspect in the Texas megachurch shooting on Sunday was not transgender, officials have confirmed. But that hasn’t stopped Republican politicians and conservative media from pushing yet another “trans mass shooter” conspiracy theory.
The shooting occurred on February 11, when 36-year-old Genesse Ivonne Moreno allegedly opened fire in Lakewood Church, a large evangelical megachurch in Houston where Joel Osteen serves as senior pastor. Police say they shot and killed Moreno in the ensuing gunfight, during which two others were also “shot in the crossfire” and wounded, including Moreno’s seven-year-old son, according to the Associated Press.
Barely a day after the shooting, right-wing politicians and pundits lined up to claim Moreno was a deranged trans woman, based only on now-debunked evidence. On X, formerly Twitter, anti-LGBTQ+ propagandist Chaya “Libs of TikTok” Raichik claimed that the Lakewood shooting was “[a]nother act of trans terrorism,” and accused “the LGBTQ movement [of] turning youth into violent extremists.” Others swiftly followed suit: Missouri Rep. Josh Hawley wrote Moreno was “a transgender, pro-Palestine radical,” and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene simply called her “a trans from El Salvador.” Donald Trump Jr. and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz also boosted the claims on social media this week.
As The Advocate also noted, a Fox News article on Tuesday also claimed Moreno was transgender, but the article was later edited to walk back that claim, after police clarified there was no evidence to support it. (Raichik, Greene, and Cruz’s posts were still online at time of writing.)
The notion that Moreno was trans may have come from confusion over aliases police said Moreno used, as well as names under which she was previously charged. Analysis by the watchdog group Media Matters found that MSNBC also reported Moreno was trans on Tuesday, appearing to draw their information from initial police reports.
Multiple court records dating back as far as 2005 indicate that Moreno always identified herself as a woman regardless of her name, the AP reported, and an attorney who previously represented her said there was “no indication” she was trans. During a press conference this week, police also confirmed that Moreno was the biological mother of the seven-year-old who was critically injured in the shooting.
Even if she WAS trans…what’s their fucking point? That makes what…2 trans shooters…total?
Their point is to try to prove that transexual personality can be defined as psychologically disturbed. They’re pedophiles, they’re mass shooters, they rape women in the bathroom… Any straw they can grasp at to build their bullshit narrative.
This description ironically fits a cisgender republican with very little coloring outside the lines.
Wait until these people hear about Christians
Well, if they were arguing in good faith using that standard, it sounds like we’d need to start rounding up cishet guys across the board…by far the most pedophilia, mass shootings and rape are committed by my fellow cishet guys. Send us all to the camps!
WE GET TO GO CAMPING??? Being a straight, white male is THE BEST!!! I hope there’ren’t bears out there. Bears are scary…
Regardless of the number, & % of total, I still don’t understand the point. What does gender identification have to do w/ mass murder?
Gender self-identification is politicized in the US because a not insignificant percentage of the population believes those who self-identify and orient themselves as anything other than strictly hetero-cis-normative are deserving of legal subjugation, otherization, and dehumanization.
Because the conservative Right needs to grasp at literally anything to scare their voters into submission, otherwise they might start wondering what the Republicans are actually bringing to the table.
It’s advertisement. They use the same strategy as advertisers. They don’t care it it’s true or false. They want that people read and speak about them and to do so they need to target a minority. The advantage of targeting a minority is that they will create a sense of common among some people. And, to maintain and have new follower, they need to advertise the BS on a regular basis.
And, they will repeat the same process with an other minority once the previous doesn’t work anymore. It’s working because it’s an easy answer to issues of the people.
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It’s modern “blood libel.”