The Heritage Foundation, a Christian Nationalist think-tank that was behind Project 2025, is using the influx of anti-trans hate after the assassination of Charlie Kirk to push for new government attacks on the transgender community. Specifically, they are asking the FBI to create a new domestic terror threat category for “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Extremism” (TIVE), which would tie in with Trump’s recent executive order pushing for greater federal law enforcement action against domestic terror networks.

By selecting data samples that support their argument, the Heritage Foundation claims that “Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology.”

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That claim appears to be derived from a skewed analysis. Roger Severino, a vice president at the Heritage Foundation, defended the claim on X/Twitter by providing information from a dataset of only eight shootings, cherry-picked from Gun Violence Archive, an online archive on gun violence which draws data from law enforcement, media, government and commercial sources.

The Gun Violence Archive has data for 4,147 mass shootings that took place in the United States between 2018 and 2025. Severino said that he only picked eight of the shootings because they’re “major shootings,” a term that has no strict definition.

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Jonathan Lewis, a researcher at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, told Wired, “Any definitional framework that only includes eight of the hundreds of school shootings in the last decade is certainly of questionable analytic value.”

Of the 5,748 mass shootings that the Gun Violence Archive has tracked since 2013, only five shooters have been identified as trans, nonbinary, or having received gender-affirming care. Far from Severino’s 50%, that would mean that less than 0.087% of mass shooters were trans. In comparison, a recent study suggests that at least 0.82% of people in the United States identify as trans (that number is likely an underestimate).

Hamline University’s Violence Prevention Project has a mass shooter database and defines a mass shooting as an incident where “four or more people [are] shot and killed, excluding the shooter, in a public location, with no connection to underlying criminal activity, such as gangs or drugs.” Their analysis of 200 mass shootings found that 98% of mass shooters are men, with only 1 shooter identified as trans.

The Heritage Foundation has a long history of pushing anti-LGBTQ+ hate. Before curating a push against DEI, LGBTQ+ protections, and inclusive language as part of Project 2025, the think tank opposed same-sex marriage when Obergefell v. Hodges went to the Supreme Court. They have also opposed conversion therapy bans and pushed legislation to restrict access to gender-affirming care for minors.

The phrase “transgender ideology” in TIVE is a dog-whistle of its own that has been used increasingly by anti-trans activists. One notable example includes the president’s Day 1 executive order on gender, which sought to “defend” women from “gender ideology.” The phrase hopes to instill the idea that trans people have subscribed to a way of thinking and have an agenda rather than simply being people living their true gender identity.

Recently, false reports claimed that Charlie Kirk’s shooter used bullets inscribed with “transgender ideology.”

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