Tanis Cortens,
Feature Writer:
U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s Cincinnati, Ohio, residence was broken into on Jan. 5. The Vance family was not at home at the time, having returned to Washington, D.C. The man accused of the crime, 26-year-old William D. DeFoor, is facing both local and federal charges. DeFoor has a history of mental health-related legal issues, beginning in 2023 when he was charged with trespssing at the University of Cincinnati Health Psychiatric Emergency Services. His case was dismissed when the judge ruled him not mentally competent to stand trial. The following year, he was sentenced to two years of mental health treatment for two counts of vandalism at a local company. Hamilton County Court granted his mother legal guardianship that same year, again owing to his mental incompetence.
According to The New York Post, police listed his name as William and his gender as male in connection with the Vance break-in. When he was arrested, however, he demanded authorities call him “Julia,” Federal Bureau of Investigation sources told Fox News. He has profiles on Instagram and Facebook under that name, the former including the pronouns “she/her.” This is the latest entry in a series of violent acts committed by gender-confused individuals. In June 2022, for instance, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s would-be assassin was a trans-identified male named Nicholas “Sophie” Roske, who had previously struggled with depression and suicidality.
Both the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville and the 2025 Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis were carried out by transgender people. In the case of the 2023 shooting, former student Audrey Hale, who identified as a man, killed three children and three adults. Hale had hidden her mental health issues from family and therapists, and Nashville police told NBC News she may have harboured “some resentment for having to go to that (Christian) school.”
In the case of the 2025 shooting, two children were killed and many others wounded by Robin (previously Robert) Westman, a former student at Annunciation Catholic School. FBI Director Kash Patel said Westman “left multiple anti-Catholic, anti-religious references both in his manifesto and written on his firearms,” as well as “an explicit call for violence against President Trump on a firearm magazine.”
Another recent example is Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Though not gender-confused himself, Robinson was in a romantic relationship with a man who was “transitioning” to female, and the two lived together. When asked by his roommate why he committed the act, Robinson said, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” (It is worth noting that Kirk was shot while answering a question about transgender mass shooters in America.)
One common factor in many of these incidents is the mental health struggles of those perpetrating the violent deeds. In connection with their September 2025 petition to the FBI to designate transgender ideology violent extremism (TIVE) as domestic terrorism, The Oversight Project posted on X (formerly Twitter) that “TIVEs … (typically) feature mental illness, self-harm, (and) suicidal tendencies.”
A June 2023 study from Denmark found that “transgender individuals … had significantly higher rates of suicide attempt … (and) suicide mortality” than non-transgender individuals. Furthermore, transgender study participants were more than six times likelier than non-transgender participants to have at least one psychiatric comorbidity (42.9 per cent versus 7.1 per cent). Gender identity disorder itself was a recognized mental health condition until the World Health Organization released its most recent International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) in June of 2018, redefining it as “Gender incongruence” under “Conditions related to sexual health.”
Besides mental illness, the violence may also be due to life imitating art: Michael Weingrad, writing for The Federalist, decried the media world’s celebration of such disturbing stories as Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin and Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White. In a Sept. 12, 2025 article entitled “Murders Rise as Publishing Houses Sell Violent LGBT Fantasies To Kids,” Weingrad wrote, “What is most disturbing … is not the seething hatred, fashionable alienation, or end-of-the-world fantasies of one or another author, but the accompanying celebration and amplification in media and publishing: rhapsodies in The New York Times, starred recommendations by library journals, and contracts with major publishing houses—and film production companies.” He concluded, transgenderism’s “raging campaign of surgical and chemical mutilation, targeting young people, is a nihilistic death wish—currently widely celebrated by media and publishing as art and fun.”
A third possible reason is the left’s victim mentality. Case in point: Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan (D) recently went viral on social media wearing a T-shirt with the message “Protect Trans Kids” and an image of a knife. Former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines, who lost a fifth-place medal to trans-identifying male Lia Thomas at the National Collegiate Athletic Association Championships, posted the following on X: “They constantly lecture about rhetoric inciting violence, then turn around and wear shirts with A KNIFE on them.
Remarkable.”
Katelyn Burns, writing a March 3, 2022 opinion piece for MSNBC, described restrictions on adolescent “gender-affirming care” as an act of genocide. “If you legitimately believed that there is an ‘epidemic’ of murder against people like you, that opposition to your agenda is a form of ‘genocide,’ and that Christians’ disagreement with transgender identity is fueling this,” observed Tyler O’Neil of The Daily Signal, “you might be tempted to lash out.”
Shortly after the Covenant School shooting, Jason Rantz wrote an article for The Federalist in which he criticized Amazon’s “tasteless” message in support of the LGBT community. “Amazon joined a growing chorus of voices pretending transgender pople, not Christians, were the actual victims of the mass shooting,” he said. “When leftists do mention the shooter’s transgender identity, it’s to either justify the violence or present the community as under assault from religious conservatives, which is the very message that may have inspired the mass shooting to begin with.” An NBC article covering the situation had the headline “Fear pervades Tennessee’s trans community amid focus on Nashville shooter’s gender identity.”
“One transgender shooter doesn’t mean all transgender people are dangerous — though that’s the logic of voices on the left,” wrote Rantz. “They refuse to discuss the Nashville shooter the way they tackle right-wing or police violence because they know what that kind of framing can do to communities. They intend to demonize conservatives and the police. If they treated the Nashville shooter the same way, they know it would inadvertently telegraph to the audience that transgender people can be mentally ill, even dangerous.”
The victim mentality and “genocide” rhetoric not only lead to violence, but fail to hold up when confronted with the facts. According to the data of the Human Rights Campaign, the homicide rate per 100,000 individuals is no more than 2.3 for transgender people and could be as low as 1.29. In addition to being less than or equal to the homicide rate for females, that number pales in comparison to the rates for males (7.9), blacks (17.5), Hispanics (4.2), Washington, DC (27.3), Boston (3.7), and the U.S. overall (5.6). “Every murder is horrific, and Americans should mourn when lives are taken too soon,” O’Neil wrote. “But a few isolated instances do not justify claiming an ‘epidemic of violence.’ It’s time for the Human Rights Campaign to dial down the hyperbole.”
In an April 6, 2023 Daily Signal commentary piece, Douglas Blair wrote, “often, accusations of hatred and bigotry against transgender people are in actuality just refusals to completely acquiesce to the activists’ insane demands.” Blair explained, “Won’t use she/her pronouns for a bearded man in a dress or think that women’s sports should be for actual women? Well, that’s basically Hitlerian, and you’re engaging in trans genocide. The trans genocide rhetoric is all a lie. But even if it’s untrue, it’s the kind of rhetoric that leads inevitably to violence. If trans activists genuinely believe what is happening is equivalent to genocide, they have a moral responsibility to stop it by any means necessary. And that includes violence.”
Desister Simon Amaya Price, writing for Genspect on Oct. 21, 2025, suggested a reason for why some in the transgender movement resort to physical attacks rather than engaging in dialogue: “Most, if not all, transgender people construct an understanding of the world not based on empiricism and scientific thinking, but instead on standpoint epistemology. There is little point in talking to someone if the ability to possess certain knowledge is predicated on an immutable identity. A transgender activist’s debate with someone who disagrees then becomes not a good-faith attempt to change his mind, but instead a performance for the camera – and more importantly, an act of loyalty to the ideology. This creates a situation where transgender people can say what they want, and to be a ‘good person,’ you must always take them at their word. This unearned trust is constantly abused. When surr unded by yes-men, thinking inevitably degrades, into emotion first, reason second. Rationality is replaced with rationalization.”
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