Tommy Tuberville gave an 18-minute speech on the Senate floor telling the country that transgender people are mentally ill and dangerous. His own office posted it to his official YouTube channel on September 22 under the title "Senator Tuberville Speaks on the Senate Floor to Discuss the Transgender Mental Disease."

He opened by saying he had come "to talk about the rise in violence coming from people who the left refers to as transgender." He gave the speech standing beside a big board with the pregnant-man emoji on it and the words "Transgenderism is a mental disease."

Near the end, he got to his fix:

"It is in the best interest of our country to bring back mental institutions as a normal part of our society instead of sweeping it under the rug. Otherwise, we're just sitting ducks until the next gender confused person decides to show up at our churches or our schools and start committing acts of violence. It's coming."

Tuberville is running for governor of Alabama. This is what he chose to do with his Senate time.

His two big examples fall apart

Tuberville's case for a "rise in violence" leaned on two famous attacks. Neither one says what he says it does.

Charlie Kirk. Tuberville told the Senate that "a gender confused person assassinated him." He was talking about Tyler Robinson, the man charged with Kirk's murder.

But in the same speech, Tuberville described Robinson as "living with a man, his lover," who was the one going by "she/her." That matches the charging documents. As NPR reported, prosecutors describe Robinson's roommate as "a biological male who was transitioning genders." Nothing in NPR's account of the charges describes Robinson himself that way.

Tuberville also claimed Robinson was "involved in transgender furry culture," and said the bullet casings carried engravings "associated with the transgender culture." The one engraving NPR tied to furries was a meme. A researcher told NPR it began on Tumblr about a decade ago as a way to make fun of furries. It's the kind of joke that gets passed around online, and "he could have bumped into that anywhere."

The Butler shooter. Tuberville said Thomas Crooks, who tried to kill Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, "was also in online transgender furry culture and apparently they used they and them pronouns."

Trump's own FBI has already looked into that exact claim. In a document titled "Correcting False Media Reporting on Thomas Crooks," the Bureau said:

• The "they/them" came from DeviantArt, an art site that sets new profiles to those pronouns by default unless the user changes it. The FBI found no evidence Crooks used them to describe himself.
• Crooks' father told the FBI his son had an "anti-woke" mentality. The FBI found "no indication Crooks was a transgender person."
• After going through his digital evidence and searching his home, the FBI found "no evidence of involvement" in the furry community.

Tuberville stood on the Senate floor and repeated a rumor the FBI had debunked in writing.

The "rise in violence" isn't there

Take away the two big examples and look at the numbers. PolitiFact looked at the data last year, after the Minneapolis Annunciation Catholic School shooting, when Fox News and other conservatives claimed trans people were more prone to gun violence:

• The Violence Project, which tracks mass shootings, found that men carried out 98% of them. Trans people accounted for less than 1%.
• Fox News and White House counterterrorism director Sebastian Gorka pointed to seven shooters going back to 2018 — and PolitiFact found only four of them identified as transgender. Even counting all seven, that is seven of 4,147 mass shootings from 2018 to 2025 in the Gun Violence Archive: 0.17%.
• About 1% of Americans 13 and older identify as transgender, according to the Williams Institute.

By the Gun Violence Archive's count, trans people show up among mass shooters less often than their share of the population would predict.

Where trans people do show up is on the other end. PolitiFact cited research finding trans people were more than four times as likely to be victims of violence as people who aren't trans.

Tuberville turned the victims into the threat. He is not the first Republican to do it. Hours after the Uvalde massacre, Paul Gosar told his followers the shooter was a "transsexual leftist illegal alien". He had the name wrong, the shooter was a U.S. citizen, and there was no evidence for the rest.

He wants doctors in prison for life

Tuberville told the Senate:

"In some cases, doctors don't even tell parents that their underage kids is going and undergoing these dangerous procedures and they go behind the parents' backs. How crazy is that? It is the highest form of medical malpractice. Every single one of these doctors should have their medical licenses revoked and should spend the rest of their lives in prison."

He didn't name a doctor, a hospital or a case.

When Donald Trump pushed his own version of this story in 2024 — schools sending kids for surgery without their parents' consent — CNN fact-checked it and called it false. Even in states where this surgery is legal for people under 18, CNN found, parents have to consent first. When CNN asked Trump's campaign and four conservative groups for evidence, none of them could produce any.

There is one state where a teenager can get this care without a parent's permission, and it isn't doctors sneaking around. It's the law: Oregon allows minors 15 and older "to consent to their own medical care, including gender-affirming treatment, without parental permission," according to the state's Justice Department.

And the surgery itself is rare in kids. A 2024 study in JAMA Network Open counted these surgeries in a national sample of insured patients in 2019:

• Kids 15 to 17: 2.1 per 100,000
• Kids 13 and 14: 0.1 per 100,000
• Kids 12 and under: zero

The researchers' conclusion: concerns about high rates of this surgery among trans minors "may be unwarranted."

Tuberville also said "it's common to see parents plagued with the woke mind virus forcing their young children" to transition, and called it "child abuse." He said it is "not kind to affirm the delusions of someone who is clearly struggling with mental illness." For young kids, "affirming" often just means letting them wear the clothes and go by the name they are comfortable with.

"Your pilot could be a furry"

Then came the line that got the headlines. Tuberville said the furry community "touts the fact that many, listen to this, that many airline pilots, flight attendants, and air traffic controllers are part of the furry community."

"Lord, help us. It's terrifying when you think about this. When you walk onto a commercial flight, it's possible that the pilot flying your plane could have a deranged fetish of dressing up like an animal. You can't make this up."

He didn't say who in the furry community "touts" this, or name a single incident. Dressing up as an animal is a hobby. It has nothing to do with being transgender, and nothing to do with how anyone flies a plane.

He has been saying this for years

This speech was not a one-off. It is the loudest version of something Tuberville has been doing for years.

• January 2025: After a bishop asked Trump to have mercy on scared LGBTQ+ kids, Tuberville wrote on X that "these 'trans children' should live in fear of their parents."
• July 2026: He signed on to a bill to ban federal money for any research on gender transition in minors. He says the care is dangerous — and wants to make sure federal money never pays to find out whether it is.
• 2023: He held up military promotions for months over a Pentagon policy on travel for abortion care, until the backlog grew to more than 450 people. He dropped the holds after 10 months.

What this means for Alabama

Tuberville wants to be Alabama's governor. The man who wants that job just stood on the Senate floor and told the country that trans people are the next threat to "our churches or our schools," using a shooter the FBI found no sign was trans and a killing where prosecutors describe the roommate, not the man charged, as transitioning. Trans kids in Alabama heard that. So did the parents who support them.

What the record shows

In a Senate floor speech his office posted on September 22 under the title "the Transgender Mental Disease," Tommy Tuberville called for bringing back mental institutions to stop what he called a "rise in violence" from trans people. His examples didn't hold up: the FBI found no sign that Butler shooter Thomas Crooks was trans or a furry, and prosecutors describe the roommate of Tyler Robinson, the man charged with killing Charlie Kirk, as the one who was transitioning. Trans people account for less than 1% of mass shooters and are more than four times as likely as other people to be victims of violence. Tuberville also said doctors who treat trans kids behind their parents' backs should spend life in prison, without naming a single case.

Source

Senator says "furry" pilots are taking over airlines because of trans people: "We're sitting ducks!" — LGBTQ Nation. Photo: Jack Gruber / USA TODAY NETWORK.