Wyoming’s U.S. House representative has co-signed a letter to the head of the IRS, urging the agency to remove transgender-related treatments from its roster of Affordable Care Act-covered medical services.
In doing so, Rep. Harriet Hageman and 35 of her Republican colleagues in Congress reference recent mass shootings perpetrated by transgender people, and a reported connection between a transgender person and the man accused of shooting conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
The Tuesday letter, spearheaded by Rep. Bob Onder, R-Missouri, and addressed to U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, calls for scrutiny of transgender-related medical procedures and the protection of children.
The leader of Wyoming’s top LGBTQ advocacy group countered, saying the letter weaponizes mass shootings and Kirk’s killing for political ends, and thrusts divisive language onto Wyomingites as a whole.
“I’m just disappointed to hear Congresswoman Hageman talk in such a polemic, such a political way,” Sara Burlingame, executive director of Wyoming Equality, told Cowboy State Daily in a Thursday phone interview.
Elected representatives should find ways to speak across a diverse spectrum of constituents, said Burlingame, rather than “pit neighbors against neighbors and make somebody, like, not just a villain — but a monster.”
Hageman’s office did not immediately respond to a request for additional comment emailed late Thursday.
The Statement
Hageman’s Wednesday statement to X (formerly Twitter) touting the letter sends a strongly worded message, however, about what she sees as the harms behind transgender-related medical treatments.
“I am proud to join my colleagues in a letter to the (U.S. Secretary of the Treasury) demanding that ‘gender-affirming care’ be removed from tax-advantaged medical expenses,” wrote Hageman in the post. “We cannot let Americans unknowingly subsidize dangerous, radical treatments, especially when political violence like the assassination of Charlie Kirk shows where this ideology leads.
“Our children deserve protection, not experimentation.”
And The Letter
Under current law, Americans subsidize transgender-related treatments through Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, with the IRS calling those treatments eligible for coverage, the letter says.
The letter says a mental health crisis exists in the United States, and “transgender ideology” is seeing a “dangerous normalization and rapid spread.”
It points to Tyler Robinson, who is accused of killing Kirk.
The FBI confirmed after Kirk’s Sept. 10 death by gunshot that Robinson, who remains in custody, was in a romantic relationship with his roommate Lance Twiggs, “a transgender individual.”
Twiggs has not been accused of wrongdoing, and officials say Twiggs was unaware of Robinson’s plans before the shooting, Newsweek reported.
“And while Charlie Kirk’s assassin was not transgender, substantial evidence indicates connections to the radical transgender political movement likely drove his actions,” says the letter.
“All political violence is wrong,” the document adds, “but it is impossible to diagnose the terrifying phenomenon our country is now experiencing if we lack the courage to address where this violence stems from.”
The Letter Gives Partial Data
The letter gives partial data from a broader study to support its point.
It cites data published in late September by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, showing that acts of leftwing terrorism in 2025 reached their highest rate since at least 1994.
The data show a huge 2025 spike in the proportion that leftwing terroristic ideology shares in all attacks and plots, up from 3% in 2023 and 20% in 2022, to 42% in 2025.
A bar graph showing overall proportionality, however, shows comparatively larger shares in terroristic attacks by rightwing actors in every year prior, from 1994 to 2024. The two fringes did not switch places until 2025, when the rightwing fringe launched one terroristic attack and the leftwing fringe launched five, the data say.
Other Studies
The letter cites other studies and media reports in detailing a massive surge in young people identifying as transgender in recent years, and a federal finding of “minimal evidence to support the benefits of sex-trait altering procedures.”
Many of these procedures end with infertility, sterility, impaired bone density, surgical complications, psychiatric disorders, and other serious health concerns, the letter says.
“This is one of the great scandals of modern history that many in the medical community view as subjecting young people to untested therapies that radically alter their physical and psychological makeup,” says the letter, “(while) willfully ignoring the devastating and life-altering repercussions.”
The letter indicates that the “disturbing rise in left-wing political violence” is linked to “these severe health consequences,” and it accuses pro-transgender-treatment activists of exploiting vulnerable individuals’ confusion.
Uptick In Transgender Mass Shooters
Five transgender people have perpetrated five recent mass shootings since 2018. The most recent of those was Robin Westman, who killed two children and injured 17 other people at the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Burlingame said all groups, including her own and, in a hypothetical she presented, a group of “politically radicalized white men” should acknowledge and condemn their peers’ share in political violence.
“Because I believe profoundly that there’s no such thing as a democracy that can withstand pockets of the country saying the solution to our problems is to kill people you disagree with,” she said. “I don’t see that (war cry) coming from LGBTQ advocacy.”
She pointed to a Cato Institute report saying that since 1975, terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology have perpetrated the most politically-motivated killings in the U.S. (Those numbers are comprised largely of fatalities from the 9/11 attacks.)
“Right wingers” drove the second highest proportion of politically motivated killings, says the report.
She also criticized what she called Hageman and the other delegates’ maneuver to use Kirk’s death for political ends.
“A young man was murdered. Whether I think he said good or bad things, he’s a fellow human. A fellow American who lost his life,” said Burlingame. “With like, Representative Hageman’s statement, the only way we have to talk about it is to weaponize it – to keep fighting each other with increasingly divisive and violent language.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
