Female Mass Shooters on the Rise ‘in Conjunction with the Rise of Transgenderism’: Expert

“Up until recently,” mass shootings were “almost exclusively men. But something’s changed,” said Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, host of “Washington Watch.” “Something’s changed,” agreed Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, director of the Center for Family Studies at FRC, “and it’s been in conjunction with the rise of transgenderism.”

“This is an alarming trend,” Bauwens added, “that we’re seeing these young women who don’t fit the profile … commit these heinous acts.” On Sunday, a 36-year-old woman opened fire at Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. In March 2023, a 28-year-old woman killed six people at Covenant School in Nashville, Tenn. A female shot nine people at a Colorado charter school in May 2019, and another female shot three people at her Maryland workplace in September 2018. In all four cases, the female shooter identified as transgender.

“A good researcher would say, ‘What is going on here? And why is it that these women are also connected in some way to the transgender ideology?’” suggested Bauwens.

One factor is the presence of mental health issues. Bauwens acknowledged that there was “a mental illness issue with shootings across the board.” Police revealed almost immediately that the Lakewood Church shooter was mentally ill, and the Covenant School shooter wanted to die.

However, Bauwens added, in the case of the Lakewood Church shooter, “You have to wonder, was there more going on than just her baseline mental health distress?”

Mental health issues are often caused by “adverse childhood events,” said Bauwens, and as a result they have unprocessed trauma. As a former clinical researcher of trauma patients, Bauwens has studied how trauma can manifest in other areas of a person’s life. Whether recognized or not, childhood trauma can often lead to the mental health issues so often linked both with people with gender dysphoria and those with a propensity toward mass shooting, Bauwens explained.

Another overlap between the two groups is a “susceptibility to suicidal ideation or committing suicide,” Bauwens continued. She was “not saying that everyone who has a suicidal ideation is going to commit mass murder,” she clarified, but anyone with suicidal ideation is already fantasizing about “committing murder of yourself,” making the leap to contemplate the killing of others that much more likely.

While these relationships have been well established by research, Bauwens contended, the recent change, which corresponds to the rising trend of trans-identifying female mass shooters, is the advent of cross-sex hormones and a worldview of victimhood. If “there’s already mental health distress, and now you’re going to throw the wild card of hormones into the mix,” Bauwens observed, “it’s a recipe for disaster.”

“We’re not talking about, in some cases, [a female] just identifying as a male,” Perkins agreed, but the increasingly widespread “experimental use of drugs and surgery. So, if you’re a female and you are wanting to identify as a male, you take male hormones. And if you have an underlying mental illness, … this is like a concoction that is just so volatile and dangerous.”

Even a healthy person would be negatively impacted by hormone treatments, Bauwens contended. “If you take someone who has great mental health, and then you pump them with higher levels of male or female hormones,” she posited, “how can you expect a good outcome? … That’s not rocket science. It’s not normal.”

If you “take a woman and you pump her full of testosterone,” Bauwens argued, it would introduce even more psychological variables. “Now she’s having to socially adjust to the fact that her body is changing to look more like a male,” she said. “That’s introducing all kinds of other mental health issues with the possibility of greater levels of bullying, etc.” On top of that, Bauwens added, the woman would “have all these new emotions to deal with,” such as rage, an increased sexual drive, and other effects of testosterone.

Bauwens pointed out the absurdity of mental health professionals affirming a woman that this volatile situation is normal. If a woman takes testosterone because she wants to identify as a man, said Bauwens, she will “have a mental health community that’s surrounding her saying, ‘This is great. This is the answer to all your problems.’”

Bauwens also warned about the influence of Marxist ideology that encourages a person with gender dysphoria to adopt an identity of victimhood as a member of an oppressed minority. “You have this framework that says, ‘You are a victim, and there are these other people — Christians, others who believe that sex is binary — [who] are keeping this vital treatment from you,’” said Bauwens.

“So, you can see,” Bauwens concluded, “just how some of the circumstances in our society have set up the belief system that Christians are the problem.” Police have not officially released the motive for the shootings at either Lakewood Church or Covenant School, but both incidents involved female shooters who identified or may have identified as transgender, and who attempted to inflict mass casualties associated with Christianity.

“There is a convergence of transgenderism, drug treatments, and violence,” Perkins summarized, at a time when “both mental health [problems] and attacks on churches continue to rise.”