Tuberville and Britt relaunch attacks on transgender Americans

What actually happened this week

On Tuesday, Tuberville gave a speech calling for doctors who provide gender-affirming care to be arrested and for transgender people to be placed in "mental institutions." He described trans people as "gender confused" and framed care as a form of cruelty. On Wednesday, Britt participated in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on transgender athletes, criticising Democratic colleagues for not attending. The hearing focused on a problem that, by the admission of the NCAA's own president, involves fewer than ten athletes out of more than half a million competing in college sport.

These are not spontaneous remarks. They are a relaunch, timed to an election cycle in which Tuberville is running for Alabama governor and in which Donald Trump's approval ratings are falling. Tuberville has not mentioned Donald Trump in his two most recent campaign advertisements. He has, however, found time to call for the imprisonment of paediatricians.

Let's look at the claims

Tuberville invoked suicide rates among transgender people, framing them as evidence of mental illness. The Williams Institute at UCLA found in 2023 that 81% of transgender adults have thought about suicide and 42% have attempted it. Those numbers are real and they are devastating. But the Centre for Suicide Prevention is equally clear on what drives them: discrimination, stigma, barriers to care, and the specific stress of living under exactly the kind of political targeting Tuberville engaged in this week. The research does not support his framing. It directly contradicts it.

He also claimed that mass shootings are disproportionately committed by transgender people. The Gun Violence Archive, which tracks mass shootings in the United States, recorded 5,748 between January 2013 and September 2025. Of those, five shooters were confirmed to be transgender. Five. That is fewer than 0.1%. The claim Tuberville repeated is not a contested interpretation of ambiguous data. It is false.

He then alleged that Thomas Crooks, who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in 2024, was involved in "online transgender furry culture." The basis for this appears to be a New York Post report noting that Crooks had "two possible accounts" on DeviantArt, a platform the Post described as popular with furries. The article did not claim Crooks identified with that community or participated in it. A widely shared photo in the aftermath of the assassination attempt falsely identified Crooks as transgender. None of this stopped Tuberville from doubling down the following day with a post warning of an "alarming number" of "deranged" furries in the airline industry, illustrated with a report about pilots making animal noises on an emergency frequency as pranks. It had no connection to furry culture whatsoever.

This pattern is not a politician with strong views on a contested topic. It is a series of claims, each demonstrably false or unsupported, stacked together and delivered as political rhetoric. The transgender people of Alabama, and everywhere else, are being used as props in a campaign that has run out of better material.

The sports hearing and the numbers that tell the real story

Britt's contribution was a Senate hearing on transgender athletes in women's sport. The Alabama State High School Athletic Association told reporters it has no records of transgender athletes playing state sports. The NCAA's own president said in 2024 he was aware of fewer than ten transgender athletes out of 500,000. By this week the NCAA reported over 550,000 student athletes competing in its championship sports during the current academic year.

When Senator Dick Durbin pointed out that the hearing was being held about a population of fewer than ten people, he was accused of not caring about women. The Alabama Trans Rights Action Coalition made the same observation: only 0.5% of adults and 1.4% of young people aged 13 to 17 identify as transgender, and of those, a small fraction are trans women, and a smaller fraction still are competitive athletes. The legislation and the rhetoric are wildly disproportionate to any problem being described.

Meanwhile, Alabama's minimum wage has not moved in 25 years. Its rural health system is described by its own advocates as collapsing. Gas prices are rising. This is the week its two senators chose for this.

What it costs real people

Alabama has made it a felony to prescribe puberty blockers or hormones to transgender young people since April 2022. It has banned transgender youth from school and college sports. The state is not waiting for a problem to materialise. It criminalised the doctors first and invented the justifications later.

The Alabama Trans Rights Action Coalition put something plainly in their statement this week that I think deserves to be repeated without editing: "Transgender people exist in Alabama, and many are born here. We just want to be free to participate in society like everyone else."

That is not a complicated ask, and it is not a radical position. The response to it, this week, was a senator calling for the arrest of their doctors and another holding a hearing about a problem that, by every available measure, barely exists.

The timing is the story. When a political party's numbers fall, when the economy turns against it, when its association with an unpopular president becomes a liability, it reaches for the playbook it knows. Trans people did not create that playbook. They pay for it.

The suicide data Tuberville cited is real. What creates it is exactly what he and Britt are doing.

If there is a news story you would like me to cover then just let Sammy know.

Dr Helen Webberley is a gender expert, medical educator, and founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives of trans people and their families.