Reading some of the stories about Jesse Strang aka Jesse Van Rootselaar in major news outlets is a bit depressing. After any act of violence like the one that just happened in Canada, it's natural for people to want to know why. What were the issues that drove this person to murder and injure innocent children?
Frequently, as in this case, the person responsible had some sort of obvious mental issues. And so, fair enough, the NY Times has a story titled "Before Mass Killing, Mental Breakdowns and Online Violent Extremism."
The mass shooting, which also left two children injured with gunshot wounds, has sent shock waves across Canada, where such violence is rare, and has devastated the small rural community of 2,400 people.
An investigation of Ms. Van Rootselaar’s online life offers a chronicle of a young person’s gradual descent into mental health crises and radicalization into extreme violence.
Her online presence seems to show a teenager who went from being fascinated by, and frequently using, firearms, to using an array of prescription and illegal narcotics, and, eventually, frequenting some of the internet’s darkest corners, where she avidly consumed and commented on violent, nihilistic content.
The 'her' and 'she' pronouns really stand out. The NY Times is following the lead of the Canadian authorities (and Canadian media outlets) who have bent over backwards to avoid making Van Rootselaar's trans identity part of the story. So you have this weird juxtaposition where, on one hand, we're talking about someone's descent into madness. And on the other hand, we're doing our very best to respect the individual's chosen pronouns because a boy in a dress murdering kids is totally just as normal as a boy not in a dress. There is only one sentence in the entire story where all of these issues are connected together as things the killer was dealing with. I've highlighted it in bold below:
Ms. Van Rootselaar was raised a boy and began transitioning at least five years ago to female, according to the police, which identified her as female...
In 2023, she posted on the site about dealing with suicidal thoughts, exploring drugs, playing video games and undergoing a gender transition...
In February 2023, Ms. Van Rootselaar posted that she had started a fire in her house while high on psychedelic mushrooms.
In the same post she said that she had been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, and that she suffered from a number of mental-health conditions, including depression, as well as being diagnosed on the autism spectrum. Elsewhere she listed several different kinds of prescription antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs she claimed to be using alongside smoking cannabis and ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms, which are illegal in Canada.
But that one line aside, the whole story is communicating that Van Rootselaar was depressed (worrisome), suicidal (worrisome), occasionally psychotic (worrisome), using illegal drugs (worrisome), fixated on violence (worrisome) and also wanted to be a girl (totally normal).
The Times is implicitly doing the same thing that many trans activists do which is start from a presumption that self-ID cannot be questioned ('trans women are women!') and then steamroller through every other issue where that becomes a problem. So, for instance, when it comes to boys competing as girls in high school sports. The activists say we should all accept this as normal get used to it but most Americans say no. Similarly, the Times is refusing to acknowledge that, in some cases, trans identity might be a kind of comorbidity with a lot of other mental issues. They must know that's true in this case, but they can't say it outright because that would be offensive.
In pursuit of isolating the trans issue from the other problems, the Times makes a point of saying that Van Rootselaar was not on any medication related to being trans. In other words, gender affirming care in the clear for these horrific crimes while the authors (six of them) instead point to guns, violent video games, depression and drug use as the real culprits.
That same month, Ms. Van Rootselaar, who had begun socially identifying as female and was beginning to buy girls’ clothes, said she was on a six-month waiting list for hormonal treatment to medically transition at a hospital in British Columbia. There is no indication that she ever actually received gender-affirming care.
There's no manifesto in which he claims he's committing these crimes over anger about being trans. So I think it's fair to say that singling that issue out as the only cause here is going too far. He obviously had lots of issues. On the other hand, the Times (and many other news outlets) are making the opposite error. Let's not pretend that the trans part of this wasn't one more sign of Van Rootselaar's mental distress. All of these issues were happening at the same time. They were connected somehow. If he had a mental breakdown, being trans was part of it.
Lots of people in the US play violent video games and aren't killers. Lots of people use illegal drugs and aren't killers. Lots of people are depressed and aren't killers. Lots of people like guns and aren't killers. And lots of people are trans and aren't killers. Looking at it that way, you really could argue that none of these issues are solely or directly to blame. But the media isn't making that argument. They're happy to blame interest in guns or online nihilism or violent games but they're warning us not to look at the killer's trans identity or ask what part that might have played in his derangement. And that's why the story ends like this.
In a handful of high-profile shootings in the United States in recent years, the perpetrator has been wrongly identified as transgender on message boards and social media, including in the assassination last year of Charlie Kirk.
Fewer than 1 in 1,000 mass shooters over the past decade have been identified as transgender, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks gun violence in the United States using police reports. The group defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims were shot or killed.
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