The 14-year-old shooter who killed two students and two teachers on Wednesday at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia is facing accusations of being transgender by some right-wingers online.
But there are two problems with that.
First, the suspect himself posted his dislike of transgender people online, according to CNN.
CNN obtained documents about a Discord account that the FBI had linked to Gray last year. On Discord, Gray reportedly wrote “im committing a mass shooting and im waiting a good 2-3 years” and separately expressed frustration with the acceptance of transgender people.
Second, one image that some right-wingers are circulating as evidence of their transgender claim is not an image of the suspect, Colt Gray. Rather, it’s a digitally altered photo of a Fortnite streamer known as Batman Bugha.
The false image was amplified by a right-wing influencer whose post racked up more than one million views.
The post also included a correct image of Gray.
“The bottom right photo isn’t colt gray. the picture is a digitally altered image of a well known Fortnite bro that goes by the name BatmanBugha and is @BatmanBugha on X,” reads a Community Note under the post.
But the edited image of Batman Bugha is still bolstering some right-winger posters’ baseless claims Gray is transgender.
“Was Colt Gray Trans?” asked one account.
“trans are at it again,” one account that posted the Batman Bugha image concluded.
The incorrect image was also shared by Andy Ngo, which prompted a reply from Batman Bugha himself.
“Just found this from my memories 2 years ago lit,” he replied along with the original version of the image, in which he had shorter hair.
Batman Bugha’s similar reply to another prompted the post to be deleted, including Ngo’s, but the image is now out there and continues to be shared by some posters.
The controversy and fake images come as some on the right continue to espouse their belief that there is an “epidemic” of shootings perpetrated by transgender shooters.
As some on the right have pushed a narrative that there has been an incredible rise in transgender-perpetrated shootings, multiple fact checks including by the Associated Press, Washington Post, and Reuters have found no statistical outliers and affirmed that the vast majority of mass shooters are cisgender males.
“There are a lot of mass shootings, hundreds of mass shootings, and to cherry-pick four of them and say here’s a trend, that’s wrong,” statistician James Alan Fox told the AP. “You can’t make a conclusion that that’s significant. It is not significant in any statistical sense.”
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