Only 38 minutes after a Madison, Wisconsin, teacher called 911 to report Monday’s school shooting, the lies began to spread.
The first one, in a post on X, said simply: “Taking bets on another trans shooter.” The post didn’t pick up much traction.
But 57 minutes later, the false claims about the shooter’s gender identity found their footing.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who regularly spreads unfounded claims after shootings, posted on X: “If the statistical trend continues with this tragic event, there is a 98% chance the shooting is trans or gang related.” Jones has 3.4 million followers on the site, and his post was viewed 282,000 times in a day.
Jones was tapping into a trend on the conservative internet that now plays out after many high-profile crimes: People hunt for clues to try to connect a given crime to transgender people, or they jump to the conclusion that a suspect is transgender regardless of whether evidence points that way or is relevant to the crime.
Conservative news website Townhall followed one minute after Jones, posting a clip of Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes giving a hurried initial news conference. “I don’t know if it’s a male or female,” he said in the clip.
The Townhall clip was eight seconds long and did not show the context of Barnes’ comment. Reporters had asked him several questions and he didn’t know the answer to many of them, such as what type of gun the shooter used. It wasn’t clear from the clip whether the shooter’s gender was ambiguous or whether the chief simply didn’t have the information.
Without the context, dozens of X accounts used the Townhall video to speculate that the shooter was transgender. The video received more than 650,000 views, and, after other accounts reshared the video with speculation of their own, the number of views ballooned to more than 1.5 million. For hours afterward, other conservative accounts with millions of followers, including @EndWokeness and Ian Miles Cheong, joined in the speculation about the shooter’s gender and whether it might be nonconforming.
But the speculation was wrong: Police eventually identified the shooting suspect as a 15-year-old girl, with no evidence that she was transgender.
At a subsequent news conference Monday night, hours after his initial remarks, Barnes was asked by a reporter about the transgender rumors. He said he didn’t know how she identified and that he believed the answer was inconsequential.
“I don’t think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she or he or they may have wanted to identify,” he said. “And I wish people would kind of leave their own personal biases out of this.”
Later, the EndWokeness account said in a direct message on X that they shared the video of Barnes’ initial news conference because they found his statement about not knowing the gender hard to believe.