No, the Tumbler Ridge school-shooting suspect was not ‘female’

Are women becoming more violent? There certainly seems to be more violent crimes attributed to the fairer sex these days. The horrific school shooting in Canada earlier this week is the latest apparent example of this grisly trend.

According to local police reports, on Tuesday, a ‘female in a dress with brown hair’ opened fire on students at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia. Seven were killed, and over two dozen were left injured. The 18-year-old suspect, Jesse Van Rootselaar, was pronounced dead at the scene, killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Van Rootselaar’s mother and step-brother were also found dead in their home, having been killed prior to the school shooting.

Van Rootselaar allegedly went by the name ‘Jess’ and began to ‘transition’ six years ago, prior to dropping out of school, which would have made him 12 years old at the time. Online accounts revealed he struggled with ADHD, OCD and had been on both antidepressants and antipsychotics.

Van Rootselaar is the latest addition to what appears to be an uptick of trans-identified shooting suspects, mostly men identifying as women. He follows Audrey Hale, a trans-identified male who opened fire at the Covenant School in Nashville three years ago, and Robin Westman, who shot through the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis last year. I will leave it to the psychologists to speculate as to what is motivating these killings. But what defies rational explanation entirely is the willingness of the authorities and the media to ‘respect’ the identities and pronouns of these suspected mass murderers.

The case of Van Rootselaar is particularly baffling in this regard. Even after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had clarified that the suspect had been born male, the media – in Canada, the US, the UK and beyond – continued to repeat the initial police statement that Van Rootselaar was ‘a female in a dress’. NPR, the Independent, the Detroit News, Modern Diplomacy, People, Yahoo! News and Bulletin all referred to Van Rootslaar as either ‘female’ or a ‘woman’.

It was disturbing enough to see this man referred to as ‘she’ and ‘her’, but ‘female’? This is a distinctly biological term, referring to the half of humanity with XX chromosomes. Even if the word ‘woman’ is seen as a nebulous concept by trans activists, most of us had assumed that the f-word had been begrudgingly left to those of us with actual uteruses. If not, that inane phrase ‘assigned female at birth’ would be all the more meaningless. Hence why this sudden linguistic creep feels so jarring.

Of the 195 mass shootings that occurred in the US between 1966 and 2024, only four of the perpetrators were actually female. That’s less than three per cent. This is down to a combination of factors that may be biological, evolutionary and social.

If we adopt the trans-activist language, and go by each killer’s self-identified gender, then how are we supposed to interpret crime rates if more acts of violence are attributed to ‘females’? Must we all close our eyes and ignore it when certain types of ‘females’ are overrepresented when it comes to violent crimes? Should we instead refer to crimes committed by ‘birthing-capable people’ or ‘uterus-owners’ to clarify when we’re talking about biological women, rather than men who think they’re women?

Whenever there is a tragedy like the Tumbler Ridge shooting, the media have one job: to establish the facts of what happened. To describe this suspect as a man isn’t cruel or unkind – it is the truth. And to say otherwise is a lie. It is identity politics at its most delusional and deranged.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.