Trans activism has a murderous streak

In January 2026, trans activist Darren Rigby spent a week threatening massacres at three all-girls schools across Merseyside, UK. One email warned he was on his way with ‘a revolver and a machete’ to ‘shoot and stab all of your girls’. Another claimed he was hiding inside a school armed with a crossbow and sword. At the Belvedere Academy, he promised to ‘kill every girl and woman staff member I come across’.

These were not random threats. Rigby chose girls’ schools as his targets and trans grievance as his justification. According to evidence reported from court, Rigby demanded apologies for ‘transwomen’, accused his intended victims of being ‘TERFs’, and threatened violence in response to what he described as the mistreatment of trans people. One email sent to Greenbank High School in Southport left little doubt as to his motivation:

‘I am on my way to the school with a revolver and a machete and I’m going to shoot and stab all of your girls. You TERFs are going to learn to stop mocking, deadnaming and misgendering transwomen like me. If anyone attempts to stop me, they will be shot and I will release a blood agent into the school which will poison you.’

The threats were made less than six months after Axel Rudakubana murdered three young girls at a dance class in Southport. Staff, pupils and families had no way of knowing whether Rigby was a fantasist or another killer. Schools were forced into lockdown, parents rushed to the gates and girls were left crying and shaking. On 1 June, he was sentenced to 28 months in custody, for the threats but also for possession of a weapon and cannabis.

Had a young man threatened to butcher schoolgirls while invoking Andrew Tate or any of the other manosphere grievance goblins, the ideological dimension would have dominated headlines. Instead, despite targeting female-only schools and justifying his threats with references to ‘trans women’, ‘misgendering’ and ‘TERFs’, those details were expunged from mainstream coverage.

Only Reduxx and Jamie Lopez of the Southport Lead appear to have treated the motive aired in court as a fact worth reporting. Readers of the BBC News, Liverpool Echo or Irish Mirror would have struggled to discover why Rigby chose his targets. Merseyside Police, which proudly advertises its ‘Navajo LGBTI’ accreditation, likewise omitted any reference to Rigby’s hostility towards ‘TERFs’ or his stated grievances about the treatment of ‘trans women’.

Unhinged misogynists have a habit of attaching themselves to whatever ideology happens to legitimise their hatred of women. The man who murdered 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989, and whose name is often omitted out of respect for survivors, blamed feminism for his failures. In his suicide note, he wrote: ‘I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker.’ Serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, meanwhile, justified his murder spree as a divine mission to rid the streets of prostitutes, whom he regarded as morally corrupt. More recently, Plymouth gunman Jake Davison immersed himself in the fatalistic worldview of the incel and ‘blackpill’ subcultures, where female choice is treated as a form of oppression and male sexual failure as evidence of a rigged system.

The idea that trans zealots pose a threat to public safety is no longer confined to social media; the link has become so apparent that US president Donald Trump has publicly called for an investigation into whether transgender ideology plays a role in some acts of mass violence.

One of the earliest high-profile cases involving women associated with so-called trans exclusion was the 2016 murder of lesbian couple Charlotte Reed and Patricia Wright, and their adopted son, Benny Toto Diambu-Wright. Their killer, a man called Dana Rivers, had spent years campaigning against female-only spaces through Camp Trans, the movement established to challenge Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s ‘women born’ policy.

The ideology of woman hate changes through the decades, but the pattern remains remarkably consistent. Whether the grievance is feminism, prostitution, sexual rejection, or gender identity, the underlying belief of misogynists is the same: women are to blame, and violence is justified retaliation.

Had Rigby cited Andrew Tate, there’s little doubt police forces, charities and journalists would still be discussing the case. Conferences would be convened, funding allocated and safeguarding guidance updated. But instead, he threatened schoolgirls in the language of trans activists, with the same complaints about misgendering and exclusion that still pepper the policies of many British institutions. Is it any surprise that, from the BBC to Merseyside Police, there was such reluctance to join the dots? To do so would have meant confronting the uncomfortable possibility that an ideology they regard as inclusive had supplied a misogynist with both his grievance and his justification.

This time, we got lucky, and Rigby was jailed. But when the police and the media treat trans grievance as uniquely exempt from scrutiny, they do not make the threat disappear. They merely ensure that, when somebody eventually acts on those beliefs, they will once again insist that nobody could have seen it coming.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.