On September 4, 14-year-old Colt Gray opened fire on Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, killing students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo and teachers Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie and injuring nine others. Colt was taken into custody and charged as an adult with four counts of murder, and his father, Colin Gray, was also taken into custody and charged with providing the firearm used in the murders. Colt is facing a life sentence.
Two years earlier, police visited Colin to investigate a report that Colt had threatened similar gun violence on a Discord server, according to the National Desk. During this visit, Colin defended his son to police, telling them Colt had been bullied and accused of being gay by classmates.
“It was just very difficult for him to go to school and not get picked on by, you know it went from one thing to another to, you know, he was talking to a couple of friends he has,” Colin told investigators in 2023, according to transcripts obtained by the National Desk. “I was trying to get him on the golf team. Like, ‘Oh look, Colt’s gay. He’s dating that guy.’ Just ridiculed him day after day after day.”
Following news of the shooting, conservatives started spreading conspiracies that Colt was transgender, with one Facebook post falsely claiming that “every single mass shooting in the last two years has been carried out by a transgender individual.”
As a Reuters fact check points out, transgender individuals actually represent less than one percent of perpetrators in all mass shootings over the past decade. In 2023, Mark Bryant, the executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, told Reuters that trans suspects accounted for only 0.11 percent of all U.S. mass shootings in the last ten years.
Furthermore, while there is no evidence that Colt was trans, there is evidence that he may have been transphobic. According to the Washington Post, Discord posts traced to Colt’s email address show a user threatening a mass shooting against the LGBTQ community. The user posted an image of a family being supportive of their transgender daughter on Discord, saying he needed “to put an end to that. … im on the edge of a lgbtq massacre.” However, when police questioned Colt and Colin about these posts in May 2023, Colin said neither he nor Colt was familiar with the email address. Colt added that he had deleted his Discord account because people had hacked into his account. Local police determined at the time that the allegation the account belonged to Colt could not be substantiated.
The theory that Colt was trans was spread by right-wing Internet figures who misinterpreted language from a since-edited CNN article stating that Colt “expressed frustration with the acceptance of transgender people.” Figures like Andy Ngo, who has been deemed a “right-wing troll” by Media Matters, took that to mean that Colt was transgender and frustrated that trans people weren’t accepted — something quietly clarified by CNN when its article was edited to say that Colt “expressed frustration that transgender people were being accepted in society.” While Ngo deleted his tweet and apologized for incorrectly inferring the meaning, other far-right figures like Laura Loomer and Matt Wallace have yet to correct these claims, according to the Advocate.