- The Washington Times - Monday, February 23, 2026

After two public shootings in one week carried out by transgender suspects, calls for addressing the nexus between gender identity and violence are on the rise — but only on one side of the political divide.

While Democrats stuck to the script by blaming “gun violence” following last week’s incidents, a rising chorus of voices on the right is pushing for a public conversation on transgender mental health, including whether the affirmation model of treating gender dysphoria is doing more harm than good.

Rhode Island House Minority Leader Mike Chippendale urged political leaders to stop “tap-dancing” around the transgender issue after a female-identifying male shooter killed two and injured three at a Pawtucket ice rink before dying by suicide.



“It’s time that we start to tackle the very difficult issues that we are seeing now on a regular, recurring basis,” Mr. Chippendale, a Republican, said in a Feb. 17 interview with WPRO-AM/FM in Providence.

The Feb. 16 attack came six days after another male-to-female transgender perpetrator shot and killed eight and injured 27 in Tumbler Ridge, Canada. That shooter also died by suicide.

Even so, Mr. Chippendale said, “You will not see in Canada any acknowledgement of that, of the fact that this was a trans shooter.”

“In fact, anyone who calls the shooter a ’he’ or a ’she’ or the opposite or whatever is being chastised for misgendering the dead murderer,” he said. “We’ve lost focus on what we really need to be focused on, and that is, what is causing this?”

Mr. Chippendale isn’t alone. A slew of conservative commentators blasted the medical and psychiatric establishment’s practice of affirming an individual’s opposite-sex gender identity through counseling, drugs and surgeries.

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“It’s pretty simple that someone who believes themselves to be the incorrect gender has a severe mental illness, and it’s frustrating to me as someone who’s covered this for 15 years that we’re still on the affirming train,” said author Bethany Mandel on Fox News Channel. “We wouldn’t do this with any other form of mental illness.”

Penny Nance, president and CEO of Concerned Women for America, said more research is needed to find out how cross-sex hormones affect those taking them to switch genders.

“They’re dealing with mental-health issues, and often it’s a multitude of issues. So the same people are often on psychotropic drugs and other kinds of medications, in addition to cross-sex hormones,” Ms. Nance said. “My question is, why does the medical community not have more curiosity about this? They should all be saying, what’s going on? This is a new phenomenon, and why is it happening? But they’re not.”

Recent headlines in conservative media include “Two More Trans Killers Carry Out Atrocities” (National Review), “Trans School Shooter in Canada is Latest in Growing Epidemic of Transgender Violence” (The Federalist) and “Another Day, Another Homicidal Trans Maniac” (Rod Dreher’s Diary).

“I don’t know how we can have an honest society if we’re not willing to ask very basic questions on this,” said Clay Travis, who co-hosts a popular conservative podcast with Buck Sexton. “What drugs are these people on? Is it making them more violent? Why [are] off-the-charts now mass shootings being committed by trans people?”

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Such questions aren’t being asked on the left.

Major LGBTQ groups have been tight-lipped on the shootings. Democrats renewed calls for gun control without referencing the gender identity of the perpetrators or accused critics of leveraging the shootings to demonize transgender individuals.

The Massachusetts Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence said it was “appalled about the truly hateful rhetoric we have seen” after the deadly Pawtucket shooting.

The suspect, 56-year-old Robert Dorgan, who also went by Roberta Esposito and Roberta Dorgano, shot and killed his ex-wife and one of their sons before turning the gun on himself.

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The Pawtucket attack came six days after Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, a male who began transitioning to female about six years ago, killed two family members before going on a rampage at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.

“Being trans is not a root cause of gun violence — nor is it a mental illness,” said the coalition in a Wednesday statement. “Trans people are far less likely than the general population to commit gun violence, with fewer than 0.1% of U.S. mass shootings involving confirmed transgender shooters.”

Rhode Island state Rep. Enrique Sanchez, a Democrat, warned on X that the Pawtucket attack “shouldn’t be an excuse for people to be transphobic or homophobic.”

Downplaying the gender angle has becoming an increasingly tough sell, however, given the number of high-profile attacks since a transgender shooter killed three at a Rite Aid warehouse in Aberdeen, Maryland, in 2018.

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They include the deadly shootings at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis (2025), Covenant School in Nashville (2023), and STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado (2019). The 2022 Club Q massacre in Colorado Springs was carried out by a gunman who identifies as nonbinary and uses “they/them” pronouns.

Mark Bryant, founding executive director of Gun Violence Archive, said that there have been nine confirmed mass shootings by a transgender perpetrator out of more than 5,000 total incidents since 2013, putting the percentage at under 1%.

The archive defines mass shootings as incidents in which four or more people are killed or injured, not including the perpetrator, which includes gang violence.

“We have really not seen an increase since Nashville,” he said in an email, referring to the 2023 Covenant School shooting, which saw a male-identifying female shooter kill seven.

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The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University defines a mass shooting as four or more people shot and killed in a public venue, excluding the shooter, with no link to gangs, drugs or other underlying criminal activity.

By that definition, there were 45 mass shootings from 2018-24. Of those, an analysis by the conservative group Concerned Women for America found that eight were carried out by transgender or gender non-conforming perpetrators, or 18%.

Ms. Nance accused leftists of seeking to “ignore and obfuscate” the threat of transgender violence.

“It’s an absolute lack of intellectual integrity,” she said. “They absolutely refuse to look at what’s obvious.”

Mr. Chippendale called for strengthening the state’s mental-health intervention system, including reviewing standards on involuntary commitment, and “commit to an honest, evidence-based review of current treatment models and outcomes.”

“We must start to take these things seriously,” he said. “It’s time to stop tap-dancing around this politically uncomfortable conversation that, in general and a large swath of Americans believe this, that there is an element of mental illness inside the transgenderism circles.”

He also emphasized that “not all transgender people are violent killers just like all violent killers are not transgender people. That’s a ridiculous assertion.”

The back-and-forth comes with the medical community under pressure to move away from “gender-affirming care.”

Earlier this month, New York detransitioner Fox Varian won a $2 million settlement against her medical providers after undergoing a double mastectomy at age 16 as part of her treatment for gender dysphoria.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued guidelines Feb. 3 recommending that surgeons delay gender-affirming surgeries until after the patient turns 19.

“There’s finally starting to be some acknowledgement that this area is something that we’re going into without a whole lot of real understanding or research on what’s going on,” said Mr. Chippendale.

• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.

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