Early Tuesday afternoon, three people were wounded in a shooting at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, CA. The suspect has been identified as Nasim Najafi Aghdam, a 38-year-old Iranian refugee who had taken her own life by the time police arrived at the scene. Many media outlets and the San Bruno police department have identified Aghdam as a woman. Soon after she was identified, several fringe websites, alt-right and conservative critics, and radical feminists began suggesting that the shooter was a trans woman.

“The youtube shooter was a man. This was male violence,” tweeted Jennifer James, a former UK Labor Party member who spearheaded a campaign to keep UK trans women out of office. Conservative journalist Laura Loomer pointed out Aghdam’s “very muscular thighs” and “buff arms”, and claimed that “Nasim” is a boy’s name in Iran. Writer Kaeley Thriller-Haver also cited Iran’s permissive gender transition laws to bolster the claim that Aghdam is trans.

This isn’t the first time internet conspiracies have painted a violent person as transgender — in 2015, alt right outlet The Gateway Pundit reported that Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Dear was registered to vote as female, a rumor even Ted Cruz ran with before it was debunked. And no evidence exists to suggest that Aghdam is transgender. A representative of the San Mateo Coroner’s office confirmed by phone that Aghdam is registered there as “biologically female.” A California probate record search for Aghdam’s name returned without result, indicating that a court order required to change one’s name or legal gender in the state was not filed. And in images and videos from her now-scrubbed social media accounts, Aghdam is seen as a child in a black and teal ruffled dress, indicating she was raised as a young girl.

But whether the shooter is trans is beside the point. Such claims are dangerous because they play into the false, transphobic rumors that trans women are violent by nature — and ignore the fact that trans women themselves are subject to endemic levels of violence in the US.

More transphobic strains of radical feminism often claim that trans women are men who display male patterns of violence and aggression, leading to exaggerated claims of trans violence. Last year, the UK group Fair Play for Women released a study purporting that up to half of all incarcerated trans women in the UK were sex offenders, a claim that was later debunked. Studies like these are often weaponized to perpetuate transphobia and instill transphobic beliefs in the public at large — beliefs which may have led to the assumptions about Aghdam. And even if Aghdam were trans, it doesn't prove that trans women as a whole are more violent than cis women, or that an individual trans woman should be denied womanhood.

The inevitable result of transphobic radical feminist ideology is to separate people into those who “look like women” and those who don’t, a form of gender policing which ends up disproportionately hurting women who don’t fit traditional feminine stereotypes. Muscular women of color sometimes have their womanhood called into question; Aghdam, a reported “vegan bodybuilder,” is a likely victim of these toxic beliefs as well.

In the end, these claims end up causing untold damage to the lives of trans women everywhere, perpetuating dangerous, discriminatory ideas about gender identity. And those ideas directly perpetuate transphobia, leading to more anti-trans violence. At least 28 trans women were murdered in the US last year; so far in 2018, eight more have died, an epidemic experts often attribute to toxic masculinity and the precise strain of conservative political rhetoric that the alt-right and anti-trans conservative pundits perpetuate every day.

When people assume that cis women are incapable of horrific acts of violence, and that trans women are really just violent men, it only perpetuates the sexist stereotypes at the heart of transphobia. These assumptions have led to trans women being up to twice as likely to be unemployed than the general population. The spectre of transfeminine violence is also central to the policy decision to house trans women in male prisons.

We live in a country more divided than ever, where transphobic stereotypes can put trans lives in direct danger. The YouTube shooting was already a tragedy, and perpetuating rumors to advance a political agenda isn’t only wrong — in many ways, it obscures the shooter’s true identity and further stigmatizes the trans community. And that, sadly, may have been the point all along.

Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist and trans woman. Her other work has been featured for The Washington Post, VICE, Elle, Esquire, and Playboy, among others. She lives in Maine with her two young children.