In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Republican policy apparatus went immediately to work. The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, and its spinoff, the Oversight Project, issued a call for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to designate “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” or TIVE, as a domestic terrorism threat category. The push comes as President Donald Trump just signed an executive order that seeks to mobilize federal law enforcement against vaguely defined domestic terror networks.

The Heritage Foundation and Oversight Project document, which defines “transgender ideology” as “a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable,” grounds its policy recommendations in a startling claim: “Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology.”

When WIRED asked for the data behind this claim, the Oversight Project did not respond; the Heritage Foundation pointed to a tweet from one of its vice presidents, Roger Severino, claiming that “50% of major (non-gang) school shootings since 2015” involve a transgender shooter or trans-related motive. Severino also lays out what appears to be his entire dataset: eight shootings, four of which, he claims, involve “a trans-identifying shooter and/or a likely trans-ideology related motivation.”

The data tell a different story.

Since 2015, at least four dozen shootings have taken place on school grounds, according to data from the K-12 School Shooting Database, which has tracked every incident involving a gun on school grounds since 1966. Only three perpetrators in the database—the 2019 shooter at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado and the Covenant School shooter in Nashville in 2023 among them—have been credibly identified in public reporting as transgender or undergoing gender-affirming care. Nashville police concluded the shooter there was not motivated by a clear political or ideological agenda, but prioritized notoriety and infamy. In Colorado, investigators say one of the shooters, a transgender boy, cited bullying and long-standing mental health struggles as motivations.

In an August shooting, a 23-year-old individual opened fire outside Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. The shooter had legally changed their name and written about conflict over gender identity, but there is no public evidence they consistently identified as transgender, making classification uncertain. Police say the attack was fueled by hostility toward Jews, Christians, and minorities, along with a quest for notoriety. Prosecutors added the animus was sweeping, saying the shooter “expressed hate towards almost every group imaginable.”

The K-12 database, the most comprehensive of its kind, does not include gender data for about 12.5 percent of school shooters since 2015, which only makes it more difficult to draw firm conclusions about broader patterns.

Other mass shootings at schools, including Parkland in 2018 and Uvalde in 2022, were carried out by young men with histories of grievance, misogyny, or violent ideation. None were tied to “transgender ideology.”

The larger pattern, researchers say, points in the opposite direction: White supremacist, anti-government, and misogynist beliefs account for the lion’s share of ideologically motivated gun violence. Targeting “transgender ideology” as a terrorism category, they warn, confuses identity with ideology, risks licensing violence against anyone who defies gender norms, and shifts attention away from the real drivers of schoolyard violence.

“There are no legitimate studies that suggest that a majority of school shootings since 2015 involve trangender people,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas and R. G. Cravens of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project in an email. “Trans people are far more likely to be victimized by gun violence than to perpetrate it.”

The FBI defines a “mass shooting” as an incident in which four or more victims are killed by gunfire, not including the shooter or shooters. However, other less restrictive definitions are more widely accepted. The Gun Violence Archive, which has tracked gun violence in the US since 2013, includes incidents in which four or more victims are killed or injured in its “mass shooting” definition. There is no consensus on the definition of a “major” shooting, as described by the Heritage Foundation’s Severino.

Severino did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to a WIRED analysis of data provided by data scientist David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, there have been 48 school shootings with four or more victims—injured or killed—since the start of 2015. (Just six of those meet the FBI’s definition of a mass shooting.) Of the 48 shootings, 45 have no known connection to gang activity. Three were by shooters identified in public reporting as being or having been transgender or having undergone gender-affirming care. Six of the 48 shootings since 2015 do not list the gender of the shooter, primarily because their identity was unknown to authorities.

There have been 74 total active school shooter incidents since 2015; of those, three of the perpetrators have identified as transgender, according to Riedman’s data. Data collected by the Gun Violence Archive shows that there were 5,748 mass shootings at any location in the US between January 1, 2013, and September 15, 2025; of those, five of the shooters identified as transgender people, nonbinary, or having undergone gender-affirming care—less than 0.087 percent.

In other words, Heritage’s “50 percent” claim is not just unsupported, it appears misleading by design, arbitrary in scope, and unscientific at its core.

“A methodology that limits the pool of potential observations in this way suggests researchers have a predetermined outcome in mind,” Cravens and Carroll Rivas say. “It’s a method that suggests the researchers are committing an error called selecting on the dependent variable—choosing a sample that ensures the study will produce the desired outcome. In combination with the use of ‘trans ideology,’ this suggests that the desired outcome is the further scapegoating and demonization of transgender people.”

Heritage reaches its 50 percent figure by shrinking the universe of school shootings to a hand-picked few. Severino first rules out incidents rooted in crime, personal disputes, or workplace grievances. He then defines “major” school shootings as those he says are intended to “send a public message.” Applying those filters, Heritage crops down decades’ worth of incidents into fewer than 10 cases—a sample small enough that even a few shooters with one or two shared traits can be made to look like half. Broader databases, which count school shootings by more consistent criteria, show dozens of incidents each year and make clear that Heritage’s figures rest on a frame built to exaggerate, not measure—to reflect a narrative, not reality.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to questions about the discrepancies between Severino’s conclusions and those of other researchers.

Experts say Heritage’s push not only distorts the data but also diverts attention from the extremist movements actually driving violence: nihilistic violent extremist networks, accelerationist neo-fascist movements, and lone actors motivated by any number of far-right culture war grievances. Jonathan Lewis, a researcher at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, tells WIRED: “There is no academic publication I am aware of which has found any causal relationship between an individual’s gender identity and their radicalization or mobilization, nor which establishes any basis for such an argument.”

“Any definitional framework that only includes eight of the hundreds of school shootings in the last decade,” he adds, “is certainly of questionable analytic value.”

Civil rights advocates see the proposal and Trump’s executive order as working hand in hand—moves that redefine political opposition as extremism and open the door to targeting marginalized communities. “Today we saw this administration’s latest attempt to divide, scare, and intimidate those who work to advance freedom and equality,” says Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign. She called the effort to label opponents as extremists “dangerous, unconstitutional, and un-American,” and part of a broader escalation by the administration to turn people’s identity into suspicious characteristics and grounds for targeting.

The timing is also notable, as federal resources for countering domestic terrorism are being steadily cut back.

The FBI has consistently diverted resources away from domestic terrorism investigations this year, pulling staff from specialized units and discounting tools long used to track extremist cases. By May, agents in field offices had been ordered to devote at least a third of their time to immigration enforcement instead, moving national security specialists into work far outside the bureau’s traditional role. Some counterterrorism agents were abruptly recalled to their posts after a US strike on Iranian nuclear facilities—a reversal that only underscored the chaos created by constant shifts in priorities.

The administration previously gutted tens of millions of dollars from federal terrorism-prevention grants at the same time, shuttering key programs at the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called it a “broad institutional pullback” from investigating domestic terrorism, even as, he noted, “experts continue to warn about intensifying danger.”

Other experts say the retreat amounts to abandoning the fight against homegrown extremism altogether—at one of the worst possible moments.

The Heritage Foundation, whose Project 2025 policy recommendations have been widely adopted by the Trump administration, is urging the FBI to create the “TIVE” terrorism designation amid increasingly fervent anti-trans propaganda from right-wing groups.

A super PAC associated with the American Principles Project, a socially conservative group often aligned with Heritage on cultural and transgender policy, has rolled out aggressive campaign ads this week targeting, for example, US representative Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat of New Jersey, over her support for transgender rights. The spot portrays Sherrill’s positions, and trans people, in lurid, grotesque terms—a hallmark of APP’s approach in recent years as it seeks to turn transgender issues into a wedge in congressional races.

The group, led by Terry Schilling, has made opposition to trans rights central to its political strategy, running provocative ads in multiple states with the aim of stirring backlash among voters who reject transgender people’s right to exist. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment.