Day: September 3, 2025

Houston, Texas, Sep 3, 2025 / 18:00 pm (CNA).

A new report from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law estimates that 1.0% of individuals aged 13 and older in the United States — approximately 2.8 million people — now identify as transgender, with younger generations significantly more likely to identify as such compared to older age groups. 

According to the report, 0.8% of U.S. adults, or over 2.1 million people, identify as transgender, while 3.3% of youth aged 13 to 17, roughly 724,000 people, identify as transgender. 

The findings, drawn from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) 2021-2023 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and the 2021 and 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), provide the most comprehensive data yet on transgender youth, particularly from the 2023 YRBS.

The BRFSS, which began offering states the option to ask about transgender identity in 2014, saw 41 states include the question in at least one year from 2021 to 2023, up from 19 states in 2014. 

The gender identity distribution among transgender adults is roughly evenly split: about one-third identify as transgender women (biological men), one-third as transgender men (biological women), and one-third as transgender nonbinary. 

The study found the distribution to be consistent across U.S. regions and states, with no significant variations noted in the 2021-2023 data compared to earlier years.

Younger age groups more likely to identify as transgender

The data highlight an obvious generational trend: younger age groups are far more likely to identify as transgender than older ones, and individuals who identify as transgender are younger on average than the broader U.S. population. Among young adults aged 18 to 24, 2.7% identify as transgender, compared to just 0.3% of those aged 65 and older, a statistically significant difference.

Of those aged 13 and older who identify as transgender, 25.3% are youth aged 13 to 17 (up from 18.3% in prior estimates), 28.9% are young adults aged 18 to 24 (up from 24.4%), and 50.7% are aged 18 to 34. Overall, three-quarters (76.0%) of the transgender population aged 13 and older are under 35.

Gender ideology ‘isn’t going away’

Theresa Farnan, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPCC) focusing on the challenges of gender ideology through the Person and Identity Project, told CNA these numbers seem accurate and problematic.

“In some ways, these numbers are shocking,” Farnan said, “and others, they don’t shock me at all. They actually seem kind of low.”

She cited a 2021 study at an urban school district that found nearly ten percent of the students identified as transgender.

The numbers codify “significant problems,” Farnan says. 

“Gender ideology isn’t going away,” she continued. “There are 2.8 million people acting on this false anthropology; who have internalized it so much, they don’t think their body tells them anything about who they are.”

Executive orders banning transgender medical procedures on children, while good, will not solve what she calls a “youth-driven problem.” 

In addition, policies promoting transgender ideology “will be right back in full force when a Democrat becomes president again,” she said.

State laws in conservative states “might not have teeth.” She pointed out that while such procedures are banned in Georgia, the law exempts procedures that are “life-saving.”

“A doctor will just say these procedures are life saving!” she said.

“There are cultural factors pushing this” ideology, she said. “If we’re going to get serious at keeping people from these harms, we need to address it at all levels.”

Farnan cited a recent study that showed young people are still “reachable.” Almost 90% of college students surveyed said they felt pressured to say they held more progressive views than they actually did just to “virtue signal” in order to conform. Nearly 80% said they self-censored about their views on gender ideology.

Clear upward trend

The 2023 data shows a clear upward trend in transgender identification, particularly among youth (3.3% vs. 0.7% in 2017) and young adults (2.7% vs. 1.3% in 2016 for 18-24), compared to older adults (0.3% for 65+).

These numbers confirm a trend observed in Williams Institute reports since 2011, which have tracked the size and characteristics of the transgender population.

According to the report, the 2023 estimate of 1.0% (2.8 million) is a significant increase from 0.6% (1.4 million) in 2016 and 0.7% (1.8 million) in 2020. This represents a 100% increase from 2016 and a 56% increase from 2020 in the estimated number of transgender individuals. The rise is attributed to better data collection (e.g., 41 states in 2021-2023 BRFSS vs. 19 in 2014) and increased willingness to identify as transgender, particularly among youth, probably due to changing cultural norms.

Farnan told CNA there are many risk factors leading to the increase in transgender identification, particularly among youth. “It very often co-occurs with mental health issues like depression, anxiety, attachment disorders, and sexual trauma” as well as “autism, parents’ mental health issues, and broken families.”

“Pornography use also plays a huge role, especially for boys,” she said.

It is also very difficult to extricate oneself from the trangender community once a young person has entered it, Farnan said. She referred to Robin Westman, the Minnesota man who killed 2 children and injured 17 more people last week. “If you express any doubts, everyone in that community turns on you,” she said.

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CNA Staff, Sep 3, 2025 / 17:46 pm (CNA).

The shooter who killed two children and injured 21 others at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis blamed “gender and weed” for his mental health issues and discussed how his struggles with gender dysphoria contributed to his desire to commit the attack.

Robin Westman, the 23-year-old male shooter who self-identified as a transgender woman, made the admission in the manifesto he publicized on YouTube shortly before the shooting, according to a translation by the New York Post.

“Gender and weed [expletive] up my head,” Westman wrote in the manifesto, which was written in Cyrillic characters and phonetic English words. “I wish I never tried experimenting with either. Don’t let your kids smoke weed or change gender until they are like seventeen.”

Westman legally changed his first name from “Robert” to “Robin” when he was 17 years old to reflect his desire to present himself as a woman. He worked for a marijuana dispensary earlier this year, but was not working there when he carried out the Aug. 27 attack.

Although Westman’s mother gave parental consent for the name change, his writings claim she did not agree with the decision.

“When I was first out to my mother, she was VERY antagonistic,” he wrote. “She really made me hate myself and think I will never be good enough … I remember one day, she said something like, ‘In the future you will look back and feel ridiculous about who you feel like you are inside. You will regret this.’ Well guess what mom?! I regret being born.”

According to the Post’s translation, Westman claimed the way his mother handled his gender dysphoria “led me to wanting to kill so so many people.”

A previous translation of other sections of the manifesto by the Post revealed that Westman also expressed “regret” for “being trans” and wrote: “I wish I was a girl. I just know I cannot achieve that body with the technology we have today. I also can’t afford that.”

Even though he criticized how his mother handled his gender dysphoria, he also wrote that he wished “I never brainwashed myself” about gender, but maintained long hair “because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans.” He wrote that “I know I am not a woman, but I definitely don’t feel like a man.”

Westman appeared to partially contradict himself in an English-language letter he wrote to his family and friends, which he also published on YouTube. In the letter, he told his mother and father, “you didn’t fail me” and “I truly appreciate the love you have given me.” His writings expressed struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts, which were ongoing for years.

The shooter attended the school whose parish he targeted and his mother worked there until her retirement in 2021, about one year after the formal name change.

Westman’s plans and motivations

One video Westman posted to Youtube showed the parish as a pre-planned target.

In the video, he showed a detailed drawing of the layout of the church. A translation of some of his manifesto writings from CNN revealed that he visited the church and pretended he was interested in coming back to Catholicism. One entry discussed a visit to the parish, in which he wrote the teachers “will not be expecting an attack in the very first week of school.”

The CNN translation further shows that Westman had the desire to commit a mass shooting for much of his life, stating: “Every school I went to, I have some fantasy at some point or another of shooting up my school. Even every job.” He also describes being suspended when he was in seventh grade for asking a student “where would you hide” if there was a school shooting.

According to the translation, Westman also wrote “this is not a church or religion attack, that is not the message” and “the message is there is no message.”

However, videos he posted before the shooting suggested an anti-Catholic motivation along with an affinity for mass murderers, Satanism, racism, and antisemitism. He also conveyed threats to President Donald Trump.

In one video, Westman zoomed in on an image of Jesus Christ wearing a crown of thorns that he attached to the head of a human-shaped shooting target. He laughed before showing many anti-Christian messages written on the guns and magazines, including “take this all of you and eat it” on a rifle and “where is your God?” on a magazine.

Westman also drew an inverted pentagram on one of the magazines with the number “666” and an inverted cross on a rifle, both of which are symbols often co-opted by Satanists. A notebook he showed in one video included a drawing in which he was looking into a mirror with a rifle on his back and the reflection showed what appeared to be a demon looking back at him.

FBI Director Kash Patel announced the agency is investigating the attack as “an act of domestic terrorism and hate crime targeting Catholics.” Police have not stated a primary motive.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in an interview with Fox & Friends that the National Institutes of Health is looking into the role that psychiatric drugs could potentially play in shootings, noting that many contain warnings of “suicidal ideation.”  

“We’re launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence,” he said.

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National Catholic Register, Sep 3, 2025 / 17:16 pm (CNA).

Should Catholic churches make it harder to shoot through windows?

That question has taken on urgency this past week, after a gunman fired dozens of bullets through narrow stained-glass windows during an all-school daily Mass at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis on Aug. 27, killing two schoolchildren and wounding at least 21 other people, including pupils and elderly.

Security experts who spoke with the Register said windows are an obvious vulnerability for many churches, and they suggested that Church officials should pay more attention to making them more secure.

“Your glass is the weakest point,” said Joe Bockheim, account manager of West Michigan Glass Coatings, a company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that provides enhanced security measures for windows for schools and churches, among other clients.

Thomas Mynsberge, a former member of the Michigan State Police’s SWAT team and a security consultant, told the Register he often recommends that clients install break-proof films on their windows, some of which can prevent a bullet shot by a handgun from penetrating.

That’s not the case for high-velocity rifles, such as the one the shooter used in Minneapolis.

“But what it would do is maybe slow the speed down considerably and maybe make it less lethal,” said Mynsberge, founder and president of Critical Incident Management, Inc., of Grand Haven, Michigan.

Film vs. thicker stuff

As deadly as the mass shooting last Wednesday was, it could have been worse.

That’s because the shooter was unable to get into the church, authorities said.

“Annunciation Church had a practice that once Mass began, they locked the doors of the church. This incident occurred shortly after the Mass was beginning. So there’s no question that the fact that the doors were locked likely saved additional lives,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said during a press conference last Thursday.

“What’s particularly heinous and cowardly about this is these children were slaughtered by a shooter who could not see them. He was standing outside of the building firing through very narrow church windows on the level where they would line up with the pews,” O’Hara said. “And even ultimately when he got to the rear of the church, where there’s an entryway that’s basically all glass, and fired out the window where a person could walk it, ultimately did not walk in.”

It’s not clear whether Annunciation Church had strengthened its windows.

Security film for glass windows is typically made of polyethylene terephthalate polyester, although a newer version made of urethane has recently come on the market, said David Carson, chief operating officer of Michigan Glass Coatings, of Auburn Hills, which counts schools and churches among its clients.

The industry standard width for security film is 8 mills — meaning 8 one-thousandths of an inch — although thicker films are available, as is layering of films to provide more protection, Bockheim of West Michigan Glass Coatings told the Register.

The film was originally designed to keep glass from shattering upon impact from a sledgehammer or crowbar, in order to make it more difficult for an intruder to gain quick entry. Such film may slow down the velocity of a bullet, depending on its thickness and layers, and in some cases even prevent a bullet from getting to the other side, Bockheim said.

Yet stopping a bullet fired by a high-velocity rifle with confidence requires 1-inch-thick polycarbonate installed either inside or outside of existing glass windows and attached to the frame.

“The bullets just stick in it, almost like they’re gel,” Carson said.

“Film’s going to give you time. Film’s going to send a message that we’re not going to let you walk in,” Carson said. “And bullet-resistant glass is going to stop the bullets.”

The cost difference is sharp.

Both companies told the Register that installing film over glass typically costs about $20 to $25 a square foot, though the per-unit cost is usually less with larger jobs and more with smaller jobs.

As an example, Bockheim said his company provided security film for eight mostly glass doors and eight sidelights, which are doors that have smaller glass windows, for a Catholic church in Grand Rapids at a cost of about $2,000 to $2,500.

But the 1-inch polycarbonate can cost 15 to 18 times as much as the much thinner films, Bockheim said.

And even then, it may not provide as much security as needed.

“If the money’s there, this is the most cost-effective way to keep bullets from going through glass,” Bockheim said. “But there’s a whole security envelope that needs to be considered. And honestly — and I hate to say it — having somebody armed is going to be just as important as strengthening glass.”

Brian Eaton, an Arizona police officer and founder of Porters of St. Joseph, a Catholic men’s apostolate that trains ushers at 17 parishes in the state to provide security during Mass, noted that strengthening windows can be expensive, but he said every bit helps.

“If they can’t afford the bullet-proof then the break-proof is a good alternative,” Eaton told the Register by text. “Prevents bad guy from getting in, even if he can shoot through it.”

Taking needed steps

Security experts say they understand that many churches operate on thin budgets.

“I think what you have to consider most of the time is what is feasible — get the safety as high as you can as quick as you can without changing everything around you,” Carson said.

Even so, Carson, a former high-school physics teacher, said responsible decision-makers need to do more than they are doing now.

“We know who’s at risk. We need to put something toward it. It’s not being taken seriously enough,” Carson said. “There are ways to stop intruders. We’re not taking all those steps.”

Bockheim, a lifelong Catholic who attended local Catholic schools, lamented the condition of American society that makes discussions such as this one necessary.

Bockheim said, “Business aside, I want us to fix our people, not our windows.” 

This article was originally published in the National Catholic Register, CNA’s news partner, and has been adapted for CNA.

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