If initial reports had been true, this would have been the first time in Canadian history that a woman had gone on this kind of murderous rampage. But Jesse Van Rootselaar wasn\u2019t a woman\u2014just a man whose mental-health afflictions happened to include gender dysphoria <\/p>\n
It soon became clear, however, that Van Rootselaar wasn\u2019t a woman. He was an eighteen-year-old man\u2014just a gun-obsessed, middle-school dropout whose many mental-health afflictions happened to include gender dysphoria. The mass murderer called himself a woman. But that doesn\u2019t mean he was, or that the rest of us have to live in the imaginary universe he (literally<\/a>) built for himself. <\/p>\n According to Royal Canadian Mounted Police deputy commissioner Dwayne McDonald<\/a>, Jesse was \u201ca biological male\u201d who \u201capproximately six years ago began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly.\u201d In keeping with Canadian policies implemented<\/a> by Justin Trudeau\u2019s government in 2017, McDonald and other police officials then proceeded to refer to the killer with female pronouns, as if he actually were a woman.<\/p>\n This kind of institutionally mandated misuse of language is dishonest at the best of times. But it is especially offensive when it serves to misrepresent reality on behalf of a murderer (posthumously or otherwise). While Jesse Van Rootselaar\u2019s criminal motive is unknown, he left a trove of digital clues about his identity\u2014all of which paint a picture of a deeply disturbed young man with a stereotypically male fixation on firearms and violence. Yes, he sometimes wore makeup and a dress. That doesn\u2019t make you a woman. <\/p>\n Needless to say, no one personally affected by the Tumbler Ridge massacre is in a state to care about culture-war arguments over the killer\u2019s identity. But policies that allow male and female criminals to be miscategorised on the basis of self-declared gender identity can actively hinder law-enforcement efforts to identify and monitor future killers before they strike. <\/p>\n Men are more violent than women, which is why they account<\/a> for more than ninety percent of the world\u2019s prison population, and commit about ninety percent<\/a> of all homicides. For acts of mass murder, US data puts the corresponding figure at 98 percent<\/a>. This greater tendency toward violence is rooted largely in male evolutionary psychology, and doesn\u2019t get erased when a man changes his pronouns or puts on a skirt. Simply put, being male is one of the most important risk factors that exists when it comes to keeping societies safe. And so a constabulary seeking to prevent the next school shooting, whether in Canada or anywhere else, would naturally focus most\u00a0of its limited resources on men, whatever their claimed \u201cgender identity.\u201d And yet, Canadian policy<\/a> since 2019 has been to categorise homicide suspects not according to sex, but rather according to the \u201cgender a person publicly expresses in their daily life,\u201d including \u201cat work\u201d and \u201cwhile shopping.\u201d<\/p>\n One commonly offered rationale for \u201caffirming\u201d a dysphoric man\u2019s female pretences is that any act of \u201cmisgendering\u201d may, in and of itself, drive him to despair, suicide, or other self-destructive acts. But these are ideological slogans, not evidence-based therapeutic principles. In her authoritative 2024 review of the treatment of gender dysphoric youth, Dr Hilary Cass<\/a>, a former president of Britain\u2019s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, concluded that while \u201cit has been suggested that hormone treatment reduces the elevated risk of death by suicide in this population,\u201d the available evidence \u201cdid not support this conclusion.\u201d <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Cass Effect<\/p>\n A landmark report properly emphasises the application of science, not slogans, in establishing treatment protocols for trans-identified children.<\/p>\n In the case of Van Rootselaar, his own mother seems to have greeted her child\u2019s announced transition sympathetically, and lectured<\/a> conservatives about transphobia. Yet Van Rootselaar killed her all the same during his rampage. (This was apparently the second time<\/a> he\u2019d tried to do so.) A somewhat similar pattern played out with another recent trans (or ex-trans, depending on how you interpret his diaries) mass murderer, Robin Westman<\/a>: His father publicly celebrated his transgender identification on Facebook (though his mother appears to have taken longer to come around). As Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman write in a Quillette article<\/a> entitled, We Need to Talk About Trans-Identified Killers, \u201c\u2018affirmation\u2019 didn\u2019t relieve Westman\u2019s distress. By his own account, it may even have accelerated his deterioration. \u2018Gender and weed fucked up my head,\u2019 he wrote. \u2018I wish I never tried experimenting with either.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Join Quillette for free to continue reading<\/p>\n This is not a paywall. Please sign up to our free email list to continue reading.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Copy-of-Copy-of-Feature-Images--33-.png\")
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