On January 29, a Blackhawk helicopter crashed into a commercial airliner in the skies over Washington, DC. The collision killed all 67 people on board both aircraft, including the pilots. But online, a different pilot—one that wasn’t even present—was being blamed for the tragedy.
Within two days, the rumor spread like wildfire. The morning of January 31, Jo Ellis, a part-time pilot with the Virginia Army National Guard, woke up to messages from a friend warning that she was being named online as the pilot who killed innocent passengers in the deadly crash. At first, Ellis thought it was an isolated claim—someone erroneously connected her to the crash, because just days earlier she had written an essay on being a transgender pilot from Virginia. But once she logged in to Facebook, she realized she was wrong.
“I opened my Facebook messages to see hundreds of message requests asking me “Are you alive?” or saying things like ‘I know you’re the tranny who did it?” Ellis told me in April, almost three months after the incident, as she sipped her coffee at a café in Richmond, Virginia. “I was shocked and immediately concerned for the safety of my loved ones.”
The piece of disinformation traveled through different platforms just days after President Donald Trump issued an executive order barring transgender people from serving and enlisting in the military. “A transgender Blackhawk helicopter pilot for the military wrote a long letter about ‘Gender Dysphoria’ and depression 1 day before the fatal crash!” read a since-deleted post on X by right-wing influencer Matt Wallace, who has 2.3 million followers. “What happened may have been another trans terror attack …” This post was viewed at least 4.8 million times. Ann Vandersteel, a Qanon promoter with more than 360,000 X followers, also spread false information about Ellis in since-deleted posts. Vandersteel later published a retraction. (She did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.) In a few cases, people asked X’s AI chatbot Grok, which also named Ellis as the pilot responsible for the crash, making people further believe this rumor. She was the second most trending topic on the platform, with more than 90,000 posts.
Ellis immediately sprang into action to defend herself and released a “proof of life” video. In April, she also filed a defamation suit against Wallace, alleging he concocted a “destructive and irresponsible defamation campaign.” Wallace and his lawyer did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. However, after Ellis released her proof-of-life video, Wallace updated his X posts saying the pilot is alive and was not responsible for the crash. He also shifted the blame to an X account called @FakeGayPolitics, which has since then been suspended, according to the lawsuit.
Ellis’ experience is the latest in a rising trend on the conservative internet: right-wing accounts blaming transgender people for a national tragedy or a violent incident, scouring for pictures and unverified clues to falsely connect them as perpetrators of tragedies without any evidence.
A review of news reports and fact-checking database ClaimReview shows that since 2022 there have been a dozen incidents when a transgender person was wrongly blamed for a tragedy or a violent incident. In December there were false claims that a Madison, Wisconsin, school shooter, who killed two people, was transgender. Six months prior to that, a trans woman was erroneously identified as the person who tried to shoot Trump at an open-air rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the Minnesota shootings in June, in which Melissa Hortman, a Democrat in the state’s House of Representatives, and her husband were assassinated and state senator John Hoffman and his wife were shot, Donald Trump Jr. said that the "radical transgender movement is per capita the most violent domestic terror threat if not in America, probably the entire world.” (The alleged shooter in the Minnesota attacks runs an armed security company and has been linked to at least one evangelical group.) On X, Elon Musk has been suggesting that transgender people are vandalizing Teslas around the country.
“Whenever there’s a school shooting or a mass tragedy, if I search for that along with the city name and the word trans, I will get pretty immediate hits on that,” said Grace Abels, an LGBTQ fact-checker with PolitiFact, who has been tracking transgender-related mis- and disinformation and debunking it for two years. “This has become a consistent pattern of rumor.”
Researchers and trans advocacy groups say that as this pattern of dehumanizing trans people continues, it not only distracts the public from the real issues but also results in real-life harms, including violence against and harassment of LGBTQ people. Research shows that trans people are four times more likely to be victims of violence compared to cisgender people. According to LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, between May 2024 and May 2025 there have been at least 26 injuries and one death reported among trans and gender-nonconforming people, a 14 percent jump from the previous year. Meanwhile, claims that trans people are behind mass shootings doesn’t add up: Per the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 4,400 mass shootings in the past decade, of which fewer than 10 known suspects were trans: 0.11 percent.
One reason people could be portraying transgender people as a force behind mass shootings and other violent acts is to justify discrimination against them, researchers say. “Spreading false claims about trans people being mass shooters [or causing other violence] fits the pattern of dehumanizing trans people to justify this bigotry against them,” said Kayla Gogarty, a research director at Media Matters, an organization that’s been tracking online hate against transgender people. “This is part of a larger pattern that we see within the right-wing-media echo chamber.”
Experts say the falsehoods about trans people following violent events range from misinformation, where people genuinely believe the wrong information, to deliberately disseminated disinformation, which includes Ellis’ case. Disinformation “is something where the goal is to deliberately lie in order to stoke hatred,” says Thomas Billard, an associate professor at Northwestern University who specializes in transgender studies. “These are people who either know that the person involved isn’t trans and are saying that they are anyways or have no idea who the school shooter or the pilot is; the purpose is just to make other people hate them.”
Even as transgender people form less than 1 percent of the country’s population, Trump has made them one of his primary targets, signing a host of executive orders, including ones that revoke funding and support for youth gender-affirming care and barring trans women and girls from participating in women’s sports, along with the aforementioned military ban. So far, there have been at least 116 state anti-trans bills passed this year. Moreover, several words including “trans” and “transgender” have been purged from federal agency websites.
Targeting transgender communities is part of a “tired playbook” that continues to be recycled, said a GLAAD spokesperson, adding that similar smear campaigns have played out for other sections of communities, including Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs), immigrants, and Black Americans. “People will always look for an easy scapegoat for tragedies,” said Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise, Poynter’s digital media project for digital literacy. “And it’s usually the most underserved groups who get targeted, because political operatives know they can easily exploit those situations for political gains.” He adds that the past two years have been marked by all sorts of falsehoods about trans people.
Days after the disinformation storm weren’t easy for Ellis. Someone collected all of her past and current social media accounts and listed them in a post along with her legal name, nicknames, and pictures of her and her cousin. Flooded with hateful messages and death threats on Facebook, she said she feared for her life and the safety of her family. She requested her employer—a retail company—to have armed security guards stationed outside her home that day. “I had moments where I was breaking down from the stress and pressure of it all, because I just didn’t know what was going to happen,” Ellis said, adding that she went into hiding for the weekend at a friend’s place to escape it all. Even as she smiled during our conversation, the strain of the incident was evident. Dressed in jeans and a blue button-up shirt, Ellis pointed to her purse telling me that she has been carrying a firearm with her at all times because this incident has made her cautious. “I am always looking over my back,” she said.
Weeks after being blamed for the crash, Ellis started to get recognized on the streets, especially when she visited DC. Her life went from living in oblivion to one of recognition. She said that whenever she’s in a public space, people either look at her with familiarity or come and ask her directly if she is “that pilot.” “Three months ago, I was nobody,” Ellis said in April. She was shocked how far this news had reached when one of her friends who owns a bar in Amsterdam messaged her asking if she’s OK and said people at the bar were discussing the fact that she was being falsely blamed for the crash. “It was just so crazy how far it went,” Ellis added.
The lawsuit against Wallace, filed in the US District Court in Colorado, was a way for Ellis to seek damages for the harm caused to her “reputation, privacy, safety.” Ellis said Wallace hasn’t counter-filed. The lawsuit was filed by the Equality Legal Action Fund, a group of volunteer attorneys and advocates who help members of the LGBTQ community fight online defamation.
Meg Phelan, a lawyer with the Equality Legal Action Fund, said there are legal precedences to the lawsuit, including when conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was ordered to pay $965 million in damages to families of eight victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting; Jones claimed that the shooting, in which a gunman killed 20 kids and six adults, was a hoax. In another similar case, Fox News settled out of court with Dominion Voting Systems for election fraud allegations tied to Trump’s 2020 loss. “People are scared, and they are scared to bring these suits to bring more attention to themselves and any repercussions that may come from filing these lawsuits,” said Phelan, who is handling four cases including Ellis’. “I think once we get a couple of these cases resolved, people will be more inclined to file these suits, assuming they play out the way that we think they will.”
One of the early instances our review found of a trans person being falsely blamed for a tragedy happened after the May 2022 Uvalde school shooting, during which a male gunman killed 19 children and two adults. Some social media trolls started using images of Sam, a trans woman from Georgia, and photos of two other trans women, to connect them to the shooting ; there was no proof these women were connected to the horrific crime. This rumor originated on anonymous online message forum 4Chan, then was echoed by prominent social media accounts, giving the rumor attention and ammunition. In this case, Arizona congressman Paul Gosar, a Republican, and conspiracy theorist Jones repeated that the suspect was trans, further amplifying the rumor. Gosar and Jones did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
In response, Sam posted her image on Reddit with a caption that read, “It’s not me. I don’t even live in Texas.” She also told NBC that while she has been harassed before, this was the first time she was being accused of murder.
Two months later, on July 4, 2022, a gunman shot and killed seven people in Highland Park, Illinois. In this case, the shooter was dressed in women’s clothing, giving ammunition to right-wing accounts to classify him as trans, even as he reportedly wore women’s clothes and makeup to deflect attention from his facial tattoos.
An account that routinely seems to amplify the anti-trans agenda is LibsofTikTok, which is run by Chaya Raichik and has 4.3 million followers on X. In January 2024, Raichik shared a meme claiming that five mass shootings—dating back to 2018—were done either by transgender or nonbinary people. While three instances mentioned in this meme are reportedly true, one isn’t, and the other is unclear. “Those posts from LibsofTikTok are still active on social media even though she has admitted that it wasn’t true,” said Gogarty. Raichik did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Wallace, who Ellis has filed suit against, also regularly posts content about trans people, including making false claims on X in 2024 that “100% of mass school shootings this year have been carried out by LGBTQ activists.” This post was viewed 1.8 million times. A month later, in the aftermath of the Lakewood church shooting in Texas, Wallace posted an image of the shooter claiming she’s transgender even as fact-checkers and news outlets clarified the shooter was a cis woman. Wallace seems to have “an overarching homophonic, anti-trans” theme to his social media, claimed Ellis’ lawyer Phelan, adding that it is obvious that both Ellis and the community at large were the target.
Another internet trend that regularly shows up during a mass-scale tragedy is the “Sam Hyde” meme, through which people pair images of far-right comedian Sam Hyde in a wig—often referring to him as “Samantha Hyde”—and portray him as the perpetrator of shootings. “Sam Hyde or Samatha Hyde is a larger internet and social media meme that emerges every time there’s a school shooting,” said Abels. “I believe it is intended to be a joke, but people fall for it.”
Within the right-wing media ecosystem, fringe rumors can become mainstream quickly. “It’s a very large apparatus they have built via cable news personalities, politicians, online media figures,” said Gogarty. “And that apparatus is really prime to spread fear-mongering and narratives, particularly when it involves vulnerable communities.” This becomes a bigger problem as algorithms amplify harmful content while platforms such as Facebook and X scrap fact-checking. Earlier this year, Facebook also loosened its rules around hate speech and abuse.
It’s not just the Uvalde shooting. There are several other cases where a random hoax circulating on 4Chan accusing somebody trans of being a shooter is picked up by a larger right-wing media personality or a politician. “It’s a really clear example of how that apparatus works and how quickly and efficiently they are able to spread misinformation across that ecosystem to really whatever narrative helps them in that moment,” added Gogarty.
Ellis said that while it’s unclear who started the rumor first, it was Wallace who connected her likeness to the incident, and due to his large following he was able to amplify the reach of the rumor. “Free speech is great, but if you cause damage to somebody or it causes harm or threats, I think you have to have accountability,” said Ellis. “I am not looking to regulate speech, but there’s some clear cases that shouldn’t be allowed.”
Prior to this incident, Ellis barely had an online presence and didn’t even have an X account. But “now I am everywhere,” she said. “I didn’t want to be public, but now that I am, I am trying to take advantage of it, because it’s important to stand up for the everyday trans person getting attacked.” She has been giving interviews and becoming an advocate for trans issues. “There’s such a need for a moderate, pragmatic trans voice in the debate right now,” she said. “I think that’s the direction I am going to go: As long as people keep listening to me, I’ll keep saying things.”
She believes that the right has weaponized the “edge cases” into painting a scary picture of how all trans people are, and because most people may not personally know a trans person, they believe the narrative. “There’s not enough everyday trans people showing up visibly as an example, because they want to integrate and assimilate versus stand out and make a fuss,” she said. “There’s a middle ground somewhere, but right now the political stance is either extreme right or left, and neither is good for any of us.”
