Misinformation Spreading Around Identity of Lakewood Shooter (Not Trans!)

A woman with no known trans history opened fire in a Houston megachurch. Thankfully, Genesse Moreno did not kill anyone, but her identity is at the center of right-wing rumors desperate to portray the trans community as violent.

by Evan Urquhart

There is no reason to believe Lakewood shooter was transgender, despite false news stories and widespread rumors to that effect. 

It’s unclear why Genesse Moreno entered the Houston megachurch during a Spanish-language service on Sunday armed with an AR-15 with the word “Palestine” on it. She exchanged gunfire with two off-duty police officers working security at the church, and was shot dead. Moreno’s 7-year-old child, who she brought with her to the scene, sustained serious injuries (most likely after having been shot by one of the officers), and is reportedly in the hospital and “fighting for his life,” according to reporting on Chron, a news and culture website operated by the Houston Chronicle.

The belief that Moreno was transgender seems to have stemmed in part from reports that she had at times used the name “Jeffrey” or “Jeffrey Escalante,” which has been described as a “male alias.” This alias, which seems to have been mistaken for her birth name, was combined with an ongoing far-right narrative that paints the trans community as dangerous, and the result was several false stories claiming Moreno was or was likely to have been a transgender woman. This included stories on Fox News’ website and even on the website of the LGBTQ+ Washington Blade, which have subsequently been changed.

Here’s a screenshot of the Fox News headline as it appeared before the change:

screenshot from Fox News on Monday, February 12

An archived version of the original Fox News story included multiple references to Moreno having once been "a man” including, “As a man, the 36-year-old Moreno has a criminal history including convictions for assaulting a police officer in 2009 and forgery in 2010.” Police have clarified that, despite Moreno using a male-sounding alias, they have no information that Moreno identified as a man at any time in her life.

The Fox News and Washington Blade stories, and others, were quietly changed as more information emerged, generally without explanation or any official correction being made. Even after the change the Washington Blade’s reporting of the rumors, which it sourced to local media outlets in Houston, remains the source for a story still up on the right-leaning Washington Times that continues to falsely claim the shooter was “reportedly” a transgender woman as of this writing.

screenshot from the Washington Times

Even as most outlets updated their stories, false claims, rumors, and insinuations that Moreno was transgender have continued to spread online, helped along by media outlets associated with the far right such as the Daily Wire and the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal site. Online troll accounts such as Libs of TikTok have used the shooting to further the narrative that transgender people are unusually likely to commit mass shootings, though this is also false. In light of evidence that this shooter was female-assigned and has consistently used she/her pronouns these far-right rumors have begun cohering around ungrounded speculations that Moreno was transmasculine and on testosterone therapy.

The Daily Signal’s story has been the closest thing to a respectable face of this false narrative, using the word “testosterone” six times in their story, and linked it to a Nashville school shooting in 2023 where a transgender man who was a former student killed six people, including three children, but has never been reported to have taken testosterone.

This belief that transgender men are more likely to be violent criminals due to testosterone therapy would seem to be a somewhat uneasy fit for an anti-trans movement that more frequently pushes the notion that sex-linked traits that cannot be changed. Anti-trans actors relentlessly portray transgender women as aggressive due to their sex-assigned at birth, and it is more common for them to refer to transgender men as “lost daughters,” who can never measure up to maleness. However, the strain of thinking that testosterone causes violence isn’t entirely outside of the far-right thought, harkening to false ideas about the hormone that have been used by proponents of racist pseudoscience (h/t to Assigned contributor Mira Lazine for first mentioning this in a private chat).

In reality, there are no racial differences in testosterone levels and testosterone is naturally abundant in people of all sexes/genders, although of course it is higher in cis men as well as transmasculine people who supplement it into the male range. That said, there may be some link between aggression and violent crime and higher-than-average testosterone levels, including among cis women. One hypothesis for this is that feelings of aggression increase testosterone levels in the body to prime muscle growth, rather than testosterone causing the aggression itself.

The efforts by the right to force a narrative that transgender people are unusually likely to perpetrate mass shootings has been thoroughly debunked before, so we won’t bother reiterating the evidence that most mass shootings are committed by young cis men with far right views. However the growing attempt to link cross-sex hormones with criminality are worth watching, as this argument may well be used to support calls to ban these therapies for transgender adults.