On a grey Tuesday afternoon in the quietCanadian town of Tumbler Ridge, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar aimed a gun at his mother Jennifer and his brother, Emmett. He killed them both, then headed to the local secondary school and opened fire before turning the weapon on himself. By nightfall, at least six were dead and 25 more were wounded.
At the time of writing,twelve-year-old Maya Gebala, shot in the head and neck, remains in hospital, fighting for her life. As the authorities were scrambling to respond, police issued an active-shooter alert describing the suspect as a “female with brown hair in a dress”. Early reports from theBBCto Reuters repeated the description.
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But there’s a crucial detail that has since come to light. Jesse wasn’t like the other girls.Because Jesse was male.An omertà seems to have descended on officialdom; few are willing to say aloud that, far from the traditional portrayal of trans people as eternal and exclusive victims, an opposite-sex identity is, in some troubled young men at least, a warning sign.
Local police chief Dwayne McDonald certainly seemed reluctant to acknowledge it. At a hastily arranged press conference, a journalist asked whether the suspect was known to police and if there was a history of mental health problems. When she referred to the shooter as “he”, McDonald pointedly corrected her to say that “the suspect identified as female”.
Only when another reporter asked whether police were hiding the suspect’s trans identity did he admit: “We identified the suspect as they chose to be identified in public and on social media. I can say that Jesse was born a biological male.” He added that the suspect had begun transitioning about six years earlier.
When it comes to violent crime, sex matters. No mass shooting in Canada has ever been carried out by a woman, and broader research indicates around 98% of mass shootings are committed by men.
For a public trying to make sense of an atrocity, official reluctance to state a basic fact is telling. It suggests that even the police are scared to face the truth.
That squeamishness is not surprising. Across much of the Western world, public servants have been schooled to treat gender identity as untouchable, even when it collides with material facts. Police, civil servants and journalists alike now operate in a culture where a misplaced pronoun can end a career. Canada has been at the forefront of embedding gender identity into law and policy.
Source: Daily Express :: World Feed
