There is no science to back up this claim, but it could be used to further restrict access to health care.

An administration official is now blaming hormone replacement therapy for the mass shooting earlier this week in Minneapolis, even though there’s no evidence that the shooter was even receiving gender affirming care, much less hormone replacement therapy.

“One of the factors that is not getting discussed is that pumping a child full of drugs that purport to change their gender identity has numerous side effects, it has permanent side effects,” said Harmeet Dhillon, the U.S. attorney general for the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. She was speaking about Robin Westman, the sole suspect in a shooting that resulted in two children dying and fourteen other people being injured while on Eric Bolling’s “Real America’s Voice” show.

“I have represented four young people who have had this done to them, lied to, and manipulated by adults. They are permanently crippled in many ways,” Dhillon, who has a history of anti-transgender activism, said. “In this case, it’s led to a shooting.”

She then brought up an assault in a case in Portland, Oregon, that she worked on where she claimed that “many” of the attackers were trans. “They were young, disaffected people in their early 20s who were lied to by adults, pumped full of drugs, and those drugs have side effects,” she said.

Dhillon then said that, while “adults need to be held accountable” for what happened, guns do not.

“Of course, politicians are immediately running to the cameras and talking about guns and banning guns,” she said. “You know, Minnesota has a lot of big problems; they should all go look in the mirror before they run to the cameras.”

Conservatives have spent the days since the shooting attacking transgender people because the shooter may have been transgender, while often saying explicitly that easy access to guns should not be blamed for the shooting. There is a name-change request from 2020 that was filed in the state for someone changing their name to Robin Westman because the person “identifies as a female and wants her name to reflect that identification.”