In issue five, TSL published an opinion piece titled “We’re not discussing February’s shootings. That has to change.” While the article rightfully addresses the normalization of gun violence, it risks misrepresenting a marginalized population — trans women.
In the modern media landscape, our society is complicit in the spread of both harmful dogwhistles and disinformation about transgender people in everyday discourse. A dogwhistle refers to subtly coded language that would seem neutral at first glance but is meant to signal a hidden message or viewpoint to a specific audience. In the context of trans rights, anti-trans dogwhistles are meant to signal transphobia to both trans people and transphobic people; the coded language allows the words to have this effect without stoking outrage from others who would normally scrutinize bigoted messaging.
For instance, when people use the phrase “protecting women” while discussing bathrooms or sports, it may not initially seem obvious that this is a transphobic dogwhistle. What that phrase communicates, however, is that cisgender women must be “protected” from trans women. Furthermore, the term “gender exploratory therapy” has developed as an alternate phrase to inconspicuously promote conversion therapy, which is widely condemned as torture. More recently, a myth framing trans people as the majority of school shooters has run rampant among conservative circles.
In the aforementioned opinion piece, the author writes, “The stock figure of a school shooter is a white, straight, conservative, cisgender Southerner, yet February reveals a more complicated truth … Two of the last month’s shootings were carried out by trans women.” The author claims that us students in “liberal California” may feel invulnerable to the present threat of shootings because of the demographics of the 5C population.
Despite this, last year’s swatting incident reminded us how quickly our bubble can burst. This “stock figure” of a school shooter that the author presents does not falsely shield us from the reality of gun violence in the United States, as the author claimed in her piece. Instead, framing rare incidents involving trans women as a “more complicated truth” heedlessly functions as its own dogwhistle, echoing the tone of popular conservative myths about the disproportionate violence supposedly perpetrated by trans individuals.
To put the author’s quote into context, transgender individuals make up 1.6 percent of the U.S. adult population, yet as of 2025, they were attributed to only 0.1 percent to 0.5 percent of American mass shootings, while 98 percent were committed by cisgender men. In other words, transgender people actually commit disproportionately fewer mass shootings.
I don’t mean to say that the author intentionally misrepresented trans people. Instead, the problem lies in a failure to recognize far-right dogwhistles concerning marginalized communities, which leads people, like the author, to unintentionally legitimize those messages in public spaces.
When misinformation appears on fringe podcasts or anonymous forums, many of us instinctively recognize it as unreliable. However, the danger arises when the same narratives are repeated — perhaps unintentionally — in mainstream commentary, classrooms or opinion pieces. In these spaces, claims gain legitimacy not because they are accurate, but because they are presented by trusted personalities and sources as reasonable contributions to debate. But, when certain rhetoric or messaging tiptoes into accepted discourse, it threatens to subconsciously bypass our critical lens and change how we think about different issues.
While these narratives contribute to a growing intolerance against the trans community, they don’t stop there. Instead, they evolve into public, carceral, legally excused violence, and the emergence of legislative bills, passed laws and executive mandates which flatten civil rights and marginalize trans people.
For example, after Trump’s 2025 reinauguration, one of his first executive orders banned transgender people from the military. Last December, the Department of Justice — in line with Trump’s slew of executive orders — instructed inspectors to stop using standards designed to protect LGBTQIA+ people from sexual violence to evaluate prisons. Last month, the Bureau of Federal Prisons also implemented a policy denying incarcerated individuals access to hormone replacement therapy and social transition. Then, there is Kansas’ newly passed law, which invalidated all transgender residents’ IDs — even of those who had never changed their gender marker — and let cis people sue any trans person they found in the restroom for at least $1,000 in damages.
The ongoing development of anti-trans policies intended to erase trans people from society positions the United States to meet sufficient conditions for fulfilling certain stages of genocide such as discrimination, dehumanization and persecution, according to widely used genocide frameworks such as Gregory Stanton’s model.
When talking with fellow students, I have been struck by how many are unaware not only of these policies, but also of the rhetorical patterns shaping conservative discourse on trans people — a disconnect that signifies apathy toward harmful commentary. This lack of awareness is not benign. When people struggle to spot hateful tropes, especially in seemingly good-faith contexts or popular media sources, they also fail to connect these narratives to broader implications such as the risk of genocide or state-sponsored violence. This inability or unwillingness to recognize far-right dogwhistles leaves people primed to accept repackaged rhetoric as fact, giving a green light to the current regime as they escalate their maltreatment of the trans community on a national scale.
Conversations addressing sensitive topics involving or centering transgender people carry real, extreme stakes for how they’re perceived and regarded by law. While the author of the op-ed intended to find a link between school shooting discourse and the article’s audience — California liberal arts students — the piece unfortunately fell short of accurate and responsible representation.
As political narratives become more vicious and aim to prey on the unaware, it is no longer acceptable for us students — authors and readers, to be silent or ignorant about the narratives and legislative wars that trans people face. It’s true that examining media and rhetoric with a critical lens and corroborating statements we hear or read with evidence will not end the scapegoating of marginalized communities on its own. But, it is negligent to navigate life as though mainstream or academic sources are devoid of harmful narratives, and we must make an attempt to be better informed and more aware of sly messaging or biases in the media and discourse that we engage with.
When trans people are being targeted by the government and the broader American conservative movement, silence and negligence come off as tacit acceptance, and the unintentional perpetuation of anti-trans narratives leads to the normalization of bigoted ideas. In light of this, I urge you: Become familiar with tropes and dogwhistles weaponized in the pursuit of radical political agendas, and then combat them. If we continue to let deceptive and harmful narratives pass without scrutiny, then we are no longer bystanders to their consequences — we are participants in them.
Aria Wang PO ’27 is currently devising strategies to use the women’s bathroom twice in Idaho without being sentenced to five years in prison (after H.B. 752 takes effect on July 1, 2026).
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