Who is More Dangerous? Transgender people or ICE?

“Your chances of being murdered by a transgender person are way higher than your changes of being shot by ICE!!”

-deep breath in-

-deep breath out-

Okay.

In a recent rabbit hole deep-dive into extreme right-wing territory (Note: different from Republican – Republicans are not all like this), I encountered this actual statement:

“When ICE kills someone, everyody freaks out. When trannies do it, nobody bats an eye”

I take this corruption of a perfectly good meme personally, so I decided to look into the statistics behind the different demographics.

Ya’ll ready for this?

Mass Shootings vs. (Unfortunately) Regular Shootings

Here’s a level-set for the contents of this post. Mass shootings have a specific definition and must meet a certain threshold to apply. The psychology of a mass shooter and a run-of-the-mill ICEhole are very different, and they act for different reasons.

So before I even start citing stats, I want you to understand: I’m comparing apples to oranges. The argument I’m exploring demands that I do. The real apples-to-apples comparison hidden deeper than my Irish emotions is the comparison of cis males and females to trans males and trans females when it comes to committing mass shootings.

Without further ado, let’s do that number thang.

Diving In

For the sake of discussion, I’m going to look at statistics in the U.S. only. I’m going to use statistics from 1982 until present. The first step was finding the statistics of male vs. female shooters. I found this data from Statistica.

The next step was finding out the history of shooters where the perpetrator was transgender, and if so, how they identified. This led to the following individuals:

• Snochia Moseley, identified as female
• Aiden Hales, identified as male
• Maya McKinney, identified as female
• Anderson Lee Aldrich, non-binary
• Robin Westman, identified as female

When comparing the cis-male and cis-female population to the trans community, here’s the results:

Oh, gee willikers! I forgot to mention, ICE shootings are averaged out also.

Cutting off the last bar on the right, we see something of potential value. Transgender females, as in those who are born as XY and identify as XX, are more likely to be mass shooters then their cis counterparts (XY who identify as XY). The demographics with the highest parity fall between “XX who identify as XY” and “cis-XX”.

The outliers fall far, far between the two comparables. Individuals who are XY and identify as XX are more likely be mass shooters. Cis-Females are the least likely shooters by far.

To put this another way, I might ask, one in how-many would be a shooter based on stats?

Welp:

• 1 in 36,250,000 cis females
• 1 in 952,000 cis males
• 1 in 952,000 trans males (XX ID as XY)
• 1 in 308,000 trans females (XY ID as XX)

Oh, darn, I almost forgot about ICE.

• 1 in 1,571 ICE Officers will be involved in a shooting.

Alright, time to talk about the elephant in the room. ICE is an overachiever when it comes to pullin’ that trigger. So, why?

Apples to Oranges

ICE shootings and mass shootings are so, so fundamentally different that comparing them has statistically little value. Mass shooters are typically motivated a sense of rejection from society and overwhelming anger. ICE shootings seem to happen when poorly trained agents get spooked like an untrained horse and forget their trigger discipline. Apples to oranges does not a good comparison make.

The next thing down this same path I’ll look into is officer involved shootings versus ICE agent shootings, as those are more comparable!

Parting Thoughts

I interpret the finding that XY individuals who identify as XX are more likely to be mass shooters with a grain of salt. The population of transgender individuals is relatively small – less than one percent of the population. If one percent of the one percent commits a mass shooting, that’s all it takes to populate a chart that shows them as more likely to be violent.

Some future research to look forward to: ICE agent vs. Other officer involved shooting rates, and a deeper dive into the point of transition the transgender shooters were at when they did the unthinkable. Had they been on HRT? Had they undergone gender-affirmed surgery?

For now, thanks for reading!