White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the administration is investigating what she claimed were the many reasons that transgender people are turning to “domestic terrorism,” even though there is no proof of that happening, at a White House press briefing today. She said that anyone who denies that trans people are getting more violent is “willfully ignorant.”

Mary Olohan of the anti-LGBTQ+ website Daily Wire asked Leavitt about the “uptick in specifically transgender violence” and what the administration is doing to combat it.

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Olohan pointed to no statistics to prove her point (because there aren’t any). Transgender people are much more likely to be the victims of violence than cisgender people, and no studies have found trans people to be a threat to others. There is no statistical reason, either, to believe that there has been a recent increase in violence committed by transgender people.

Anti-transgender activists often point to two mass shootings in the past several years – the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minnesota last month and the Covenant School shooting in Tennessee in 2023 – that were allegedly committed by people who were either transgender or who had questioned their gender identities in the past, but cisgender men still commit the overwhelming majority of mass shootings.

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And while the right initially attempted to blame the death of rightwing podcaster Charlie Kirk on transgender people, the only suspect in that shooting is a cisgender man.

Leavitt, though, not only accepted the premise of Olohan’s question, she said that anyone who “denies” that trans people are committing more violence now than before “is being willfully ignorant.”

“The administration is taking it seriously, all causes of violence, and why these people would be driven to such evil and such hatred,” she said.

Leavitt said there are “probably many answers to that question, but the administration is really focused on all of them.”

She then accused trans people of “domestic terrorism” and said that designating “antifa as a domestic terrorist organization” is the first step to stopping transgender people. Antifa is short for “anti-fascism” and is the idea of opposing fascism. It is not an organization but a political movement.

Conservatives have been using the death of Charlie Kirk to attack transgender people, even though the only trans person connected to that story is reportedly the suspect’s roommate, a person who authorities said was shocked to hear about the shooting and who is cooperating with their investigation.

Last week, Vice President JD Vance said that “the militant transgender movement” is a “domestic terrorist threat.”

The FBI is also reportedly working on a plan to consider transgender suspects a subset of its “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” threat category, a designation that would give the administration political and media cover to target trans people.

“They are cynically targeting trans people because the shooter’s lover was trans,” one intelligence source said. “The administration has convinced itself that the Charlie Kirk murder exposes some dark conspiracy.”

The current administration has been attacking transgender people’s rights since it started in January.

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