A new study has confirmed that buying into transgender ideology and cheering on left-wing political violence tend to go hand in hand.
This shocks nobody who has been paying attention.
The report was conducted by researchers at Rutgers University, the Manhattan Institute, and the Network Contagion Research Institute and commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Researchers surveyed 1,208 U.S. adults, asking how important they considered affirming someone’s gender identity, how threatened they believed transgender people are by groups like “white supremacists, men, the Supreme Court, etc.,” and how willing they’d be to excuse anti-democratic behavior. Then came the real test: whether respondents would justify six specific acts of political violence, including killing Charlie Kirk, killing President Donald Trump, killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, setting fire to ICE buildings, vandalizing the property of wealthy people, and attacking police officers.
“These findings suggest that gender ideology is associated with LWA [left-wing authoritarianism] and willingness to justify political violence,” the study states. The researchers add that “experimental research is needed to determine causality.”
I’m going to go with mental illness.
To measure this, researchers built the survey on what they call “consensus positions” from the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, groups they insist are “not fringe organizations” but rather “the official scientific and clinical establishment on care for individuals who identify as transgender.” Responses were used to construct a new metric, the Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale, to measure the depth of a respondent’s support for gender ideology.
The report’s conclusion is where things get uncomfortable for the left. Gender ideology, the researchers write, “may function as an ideological accelerant, telling left-wing authoritarian psychology who the enemy is, why the situation is urgent, and—in those already disposed toward force—that violence is legitimate.” Researcher Colin Wright told The New York Post, “One of our study’s most interesting and perhaps shocking findings was that accepting gender ideology appeared to augment authoritarian attitudes on support for political violence.” Wright believes gender ideology plays a specific role in that radicalization. “We believe this may result from gender ideology defining specific oppressed classes and their oppressors, and the promotion of extreme narratives of harm for those who refuse to affirm transgender identities both socially and medically,” he said, though he cautioned the theory is “only speculative at this point” and will get a full workup in a follow-up report.
The study also assessed what researchers call “catastrophizing beliefs,” such as whether a respondent believes a transgender genocide is currently underway, along with “associate extremist responses,” like support for censoring or punishing people who oppose transgender ideology or who ignore Supreme Court rulings on gender issues. Researchers say they expect these new measures to predict broader support for anti-democratic beliefs, though they’re calling that an “empirical question” still under ongoing analysis.
The report also points to the 2022 assassination attempt on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh by Nicholas Roske, who later identified as a transgender woman, as well as school shootings in Minnesota and Tennessee carried out by trans-identifying individuals. None of this is coincidence, according to the study’s authors, and the pattern doesn’t stop at a handful of headline-grabbing cases.
Over at PJ Media, I crunched the numbers myself, and the pattern holds up. Between 1966 and 2024, trans-identifying individuals were responsible for at least 2% of all mass shootings in the U.S., despite making up just 0.6% of the population. That’s over three times their population share. Leftists will rush to point out that men commit the overwhelming majority of mass shootings, and they’re right. Men pull the trigger in roughly 98% of cases while making up about half the population, putting them at twice their population share. Trans-identifying shooters are still outpacing that.
Make no mistake about it, this is a mental health crisis, and there’s no doubt that the modern left’s obsession with gender ideology is only making it worse. Until Democrats stop treating it as sacred and start treating it as dangerous, the violence isn’t going away.