Barely a day after the shooting, right-wing politicians and pundits lined up to claim Moreno was a deranged trans woman.

The suspect in the Texas megachurch shooting on Sunday was not transgender, officials have confirmed. But that hasn’t stopped Republican politicians and conservative media from pushing yet another “trans mass shooter” conspiracy theory.

The shooting occurred on February 11, when 36-year-old Genesse Ivonne Moreno allegedly opened fire in Lakewood Church, a large evangelical megachurch in Houston where Joel Osteen serves as senior pastor. Police say they shot and killed Moreno in the ensuing gunfight, during which two others were also “shot in the crossfire” and wounded, including Moreno’s seven-year-old son, according to the Associated Press.

Barely a day after the shooting, right-wing politicians and pundits lined up to claim Moreno was a deranged trans woman, based only on now-debunked evidence. On X, formerly Twitter, anti-LGBTQ+ propagandist Chaya “Libs of TikTok” Raichik claimed that the Lakewood shooting was “[a]nother act of trans terrorism,” and accused “the LGBTQ movement [of] turning youth into violent extremists.” Others swiftly followed suit: Missouri Rep. Josh Hawley wrote Moreno was “a transgender, pro-Palestine radical,” and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene simply called her “a trans from El Salvador.” Donald Trump Jr. and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz also boosted the claims on social media this week.

As The Advocate also noted, a Fox News article on Tuesday also claimed Moreno was transgender, but the article was later edited to walk back that claim, after police clarified there was no evidence to support it. (Raichik, Greene, and Cruz’s posts were still online at time of writing.)

The notion that Moreno was trans may have come from confusion over aliases police said Moreno used, as well as names under which she was previously charged. Analysis by the watchdog group Media Matters found that MSNBC also reported Moreno was trans on Tuesday, appearing to draw their information from initial police reports.

Multiple court records dating back as far as 2005 indicate that Moreno always identified herself as a woman regardless of her name, the AP reported, and an attorney who previously represented her said there was “no indication” she was trans. During a press conference this week, police also confirmed that Moreno was the biological mother of the seven-year-old who was critically injured in the shooting.

read more: https://www.them.us/story/the-right-is-once-again-spreading-a-rumor-that-the-lakewood-church-shooter-is-trans

    • thefartographer@lemm.ee
      39·
      9 months ago

      Their point is to try to prove that transexual personality can be defined as psychologically disturbed. They’re pedophiles, they’re mass shooters, they rape women in the bathroom… Any straw they can grasp at to build their bullshit narrative.

      • jaemo@sh.itjust.works
        20·
        9 months ago

        They’re pedophiles, they’re mass shooters, they rape women in the bathroom…

        This description ironically fits a cisgender republican with very little coloring outside the lines.

      • Jimmyeatsausage@lemmy.world
        4·
        9 months ago

        Well, if they were arguing in good faith using that standard, it sounds like we’d need to start rounding up cishet guys across the board…by far the most pedophilia, mass shootings and rape are committed by my fellow cishet guys. Send us all to the camps!

        • thefartographer@lemm.ee
          2·
          9 months ago

          WE GET TO GO CAMPING??? Being a straight, white male is THE BEST!!! I hope there’ren’t bears out there. Bears are scary…

    • motorwerks@sopuli.xyz
      122·
      9 months ago

      Regardless of the number, & % of total, I still don’t understand the point. What does gender identification have to do w/ mass murder?

      • NovaPrime@lemmy.ml
        232·
        9 months ago

        Gender self-identification is politicized in the US because a not insignificant percentage of the population believes those who self-identify and orient themselves as anything other than strictly hetero-cis-normative are deserving of legal subjugation, otherization, and dehumanization.

      • FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world
        9·
        9 months ago

        Because the conservative Right needs to grasp at literally anything to scare their voters into submission, otherwise they might start wondering what the Republicans are actually bringing to the table.

    • moitoi@feddit.de
      2·
      9 months ago

      It’s advertisement. They use the same strategy as advertisers. They don’t care it it’s true or false. They want that people read and speak about them and to do so they need to target a minority. The advantage of targeting a minority is that they will create a sense of common among some people. And, to maintain and have new follower, they need to advertise the BS on a regular basis.

      And, they will repeat the same process with an other minority once the previous doesn’t work anymore. It’s working because it’s an easy answer to issues of the people.

  • GluWu@lemm.ee
    57·
    9 months ago

    While neither talks about how the only fatalities other than the shooter were by the cops shooting a 7 year old in the head.

      • GluWu@lemm.ee
        1·
        9 months ago

        So it’s okay to murder children as long as their parents are a threat. Great take beehaw.

    • CableMonster@lemmy.ml
      16·
      9 months ago

      I understand your gripe, but if it was a situation where they are in a crowded room and she starts shooting, what are the cops/security supposed to do? I am assuming that is what happened, I dont know the paticulars.

        • CableMonster@lemmy.ml
          1·
          9 months ago

          Thats not what I did. What action would you think the police or security should take if someone starts shooting?

  • Billiam@lemmy.world
    294·
    9 months ago

    Right-wingers downplay and deny the end-results of their rhetoric. News at 11.

  • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
    203·
    9 months ago

    Lest we get bogged down with the notion cis or trans this only happens at this frequency in America.

  • ULS@lemmy.ml
    171·
    9 months ago

    Oh thank got her gender and sexuality has been decided. I for one couldn’t sleep until I knew.

    • SpeakingColors@beehaw.org
      1·
      9 months ago

      I gather that the “conversation” point is whether being trans has an impact on judgement or something? Because differing from a perceived social norm is an incorrect choice people make…

      I wonder if they would feel better if they found out the zodiac killer was cis?

    • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
      34·
      9 months ago

      See this is the kind of stuff that makes leftists look bad. Sex is also determined during birth, so does that make doctors rightwingers?

      Rightwingers are not checking genitals to take pictures (you are weaponising pedophilia and harming actual victims), and the conversation around this stuff is extremely complicated if you bring public washrooms into the conversation. There are people who abuse gender change to gain access to the opposite sex, both in washrooms and jails, and do bad things.

      • Jordan_U@lemmy.ml
        8·
        9 months ago

        Multiple school officials in the U.S. have asked children to pee in front of them to prove that they’re “actually a boy”.

        One principle literally kicked in the door of a highschool bathroom stall that a trans kid was actively using (to fucking pee / poop).

        Genital inspections have been asked for (I hope not actually done) in children’s sports competitions.

        This is really happening, and transphobic rhetoric is driving it.

        Every woman friend I have would feel much safer being in a bathroom with a trans woman than with a trasphobe; Especially the butch lesbians.

        • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
          23·
          9 months ago

          Nobody really feels safe with a transphobe, and even cis people find they are just sugarcoated jerks, but that is not the point. More discourse needs to happen without intentional distortion or targeting of anyone, based on hard evidence.

          I found Jubilee’s trans liberals versus trans conservatives Middle Ground debate really good. It highlights most of the unhinged issues in discourse currently.

        • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
          42·
          9 months ago

          Most conservatives are pedophiles or other abusers. Abuse is what they are conserving.

          Is your mental state okay? WTF?

          • Jazzy Vidalia@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            41·
            9 months ago

            If it isn’t pedophilia it’s something else: beating their wives, their children, other forms of abuse such as neglect. The GOP literally has attempted numerous times to revoke age of consent laws, laws against child marriage, and child labor laws.

            Conservative parents are outspoken about their “right” to abuse their kids through depriving them of necessity or beating them.

            The GOP is a party of domestic abusers.

            • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
              23·
              9 months ago

              The world does NOT revolve around Uhmerican politics or whatever the fuck your ideology or beliefs are. It is hard to take you seriously after that one. Your statement is so generalised that I need to take issue with that. You cannot even generalise Republicans altogether, because Democrats engage in similar things, looking from Epstein and Ghislaine’s friends. And you are hurting pedophilia victims by being so liberal with your statement…

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
                21·
                9 months ago

                Yeah, OP sounds like they’re taking the SM rhetoric literally and running with it. That’s unhealthy, and why I also push against such rhetoric myself.

                I, too, like to poke fun at politicians, but at the end of the day, I know a lot of people on both sides of the aisle (most of my family are conservatives, many of my coworkers are progressives), and none exhibit any of the signs OP is talking about.

                Pedophiles et al are a tiny portion of the public, Republicans are at most half, so the numbers just will not add up. Also, it turns out most people don’t agree with the rhetoric prominent people in their party spew, they’re just there because they think their party’s policies are the direction the nation should go. My family held their noses and voted for Trump, my coworkers held theirs and voted for Clinton/Biden, neither group actually likes their representatives…

                • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
                  22·
                  9 months ago

                  I believe pedophiles exist more among liberal “centrists” than rightwingers, because liberals always weasel around sexual liberty and freedom to think whatever they want. Too much freedom and privilege allows for never denying such perversions, and engaging in them freely. This is also observable with a suspicious number of pornstars and Onlyfans women engaging in zoophilia, and those surely are not rightwingers. Every perversion is not equally bad, and nothing matches pedophilia, but most can disgust people at varying degrees.

                  Anyway, that part aside, calling every “enemy” X or Y thing is really bullshit. I will never side with people that do it, and anyone with critical thinking and a few braincells should also refuse to participate in such unhinged rhetoric rituals.