Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old accused of killing anti-LGBTQ+ Christian Nationalist activist Charlie Kirk at a campus speaking event in September, reportedly said little to friends about transgender issues in the year leading up to Kirk’s assassination.

On Wednesday, The Washington Post published a report based on interviews with 21 people who knew Robinson and hundreds of online messages from the past five years, in which there is little to corroborate the Trump administration’s narrative that Robinson had been radicalized by left-wing extremists. According to the Post, friends described a quiet young man who seemed disillusioned with both political parties. Only one person quoted in the Post’s story recalled Robinson ever mentioning transgender issues.  

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As the Post reports, Robinson grew up in a conservative family in predominantly Mormon St. George, Utah. Friends told the paper that as a 17-year-old high school senior in 2020, Robinson took an interest in current events, including the presidential race, but indicated that he felt that both political parties had failed to help regular people in the U.S. High school classmate Xander Luke recalled that Robinson didn’t like “hateful people” and bullies “because they looked down on people for just living their lives.”

Friends also cast Robinson as something of a loner who, according to the Post, “made himself hard to know,” and seemed to prefer to spend time with friends online even before the Covid 19 lockdowns of spring 2020. The Post’s analysis of three Discord chat archives dating back to January 2020 turned up no references to Kirk in messages sent by Robinson, though the paper notes that it is possible for Discord users to delete their own messages and that the archives did not preserve all videos and images that had been posted in the chats.

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Former co-workers who worked with Robinson as electrical contractors around St. George after he dropped out of Utah State University following his first semester in the fall of 2021 also spoke with the publication. They said he rarely interacted with them, though he showed interest in one conversation about a co-worker’s new pistol. At least two friends told the Post that Robinson liked guns.

Friends who played the card game Magic: The Gathering with him at his St. George apartment beginning in early 2024 said Robinson came across as libertarian or conservative. “He loved his guns, he loved his beer, he hated the government. That’s the impression that I got,” one friend told the Post.

According to the Post, while Robinson never discussed his sexuality with anyone the paper spoke to, several friends said that he grew close to one of his two roommates, who had been assigned male at birth, around this time, and the two were seen cuddling and kissing around their apartment. “My bf is the best, luv u,” the roommate reportedly captioned a photo of the two posted to Instagram.

Around this same time, the roommate reportedly began coming out as trans to various friends and speaking out about anti-trans sentiment in Utah. They also became increasingly distraught following Donald Trump’s reelection in 2024, which they saw as “a loss for trans rights.”

As has been widely reported, this roommate has not been charged in relation to Kirk’s death and has been cooperating with authorities in the investigation.

As the Post notes, according to prosecutors, Robinson’s mother has said that he “had started to lean more to the left” prior to Kirk’s assassination and had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”

But of the 21 people the Post spoke with, only one said that Robinson had begun to criticize right-wing fear-mongering over trans rights after he started dating his roommate. According to the Post, other friends said they noticed no change in his politics and do not recall him ever talking about trans issues.

According to the paper, over the course of four video calls from the Utah County Jail, Robinson did not react to or comment on any of the Post’s reporting, nor did he respond to messages sent via email.

The Post’s report somewhat undercuts the narrative that emerged among MAGA influencers and talking heads online in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s death that the assassin was motivated by so-called “radical transgender ideology.” That false narrative quickly spawned an anti-trans disinformation campaign as President Trump and his allies signaled their intention to use Kirk’s death as a pretext to crack down on organizations that fund progressive causes. The Trump administration has also reportedly discussed a plan in which the FBI would consider transgender suspects as a subset of its “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” threat category, giving the administration political and media cover to target trans people.

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