We must be free to speak about the scourge of trans violence

There was a double tragedy at Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia this week. The first was the shooting to death of five schoolkids and an education assistant in what ought to have been the sanctuary of their place of learning. The second is that the names and even the bloody fate of those innocents will not be long remembered. Why? Because they had the great misfortune of being murdered by a member of a celebrated minority. By an adherent to that most sainted ideology: transgenderism.

Watch this horror fade, first from the headlines, then from public consciousness. It’s happening already. No sooner was it revealed that the school shooter was a young male in the feverish grip of the trans delusion than the warning went out: watch what you say; don’t extrapolate; calm down. Jesse Van Rootselaar was 18 years old. He laboured under that lethal misapprehension that is so widespread in our toxic post-truth culture – namely that, through the magic of wishful thinking, he had become female.

On Tuesday, he carried out a truly horrible crime of misanthropy. First he killed his mother and stepbrother. Then he went to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School where he opened fire on students. Five kids were killed, aged 11 to 13. Their classroom assistant was slain too. The shooter finished his murder spree by killing himself. Tumbler Ridge, a tight-knit mining town of just 2,400 people, is shaken to its core by this massacre of innocents.

But watch what you say. Already CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, is warning against any effort to ‘advance hate’ towards the trans community. A ‘transphobic’ response to this shooting could ‘harm an already marginalised community’, it says. To call this tone deaf is too generous. It is rank moral Orwellianism, where we are haughtily instructed to grieve an imaginary backlash against trans people rather than the act of savagery just carried out by a trans person. It brings to mind the media elites’ craven response to acts of Islamist terrorism, when even as people are pulling the screws and nails of suicide bombs from their bloodied faces the cry goes out: ‘Don’t be Islamophobic.’

Canada’s Globe and Mail is worried about the ‘online vitriol’ that followed the shooting and how it might stir up ‘anti-trans violence’. It said this on Thursday. The little victims of a trans shooter weren’t even buried and Canada’s newspaper of record was saying, ‘Oh no, what about trans people?’. It was the trans equivalent of that Norm Macdonald tweet: ‘What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?’ The Globe and Mail warned against any ‘targeting [of] the trans community’. You’re really doing this? You’re using the word ‘target’ in relation to trans people 48 hours after a trans person targeted children for brutish death?

This whipping up of the spectre of ‘transphobia’ is driven by the same cynical, snivelling impulse that fuels the ‘Islamophobia’ panic – to stifle public discussion. It is designed to ringfence a holy identity from the impious analysis of the masses. These days everything is ‘transphobic’, from questioning the hocus-pocus belief that a person with a penis can become a woman to ‘misgendering’ even mass killers like Jesse Van Rootselaar. So when the elites warn against ‘transphobia’ in the wake of the Tumbler Ridge atrocity, they’re declaring war not only on actual bigotry but on truth itself.

The thing really being ‘targeted’ here is the public’s right to think and speak freely about the trans ideology and its consequences. Just as it is not ‘anti-Muslim’ to call out Islamism, so it is not ‘an attack’ on trans people to ask if the more extreme manifestations of this unscientific identity are nurturing new forms of hyper anti-social behaviour and even violence. The double standards of the identitarian elites are just brazen at this point. When lowlife incels carry out mass shootings, we’re subjected to ceaseless discussion about the scourge of incel culture. When white adolescents kill, ‘whiteness’ gets it in the neck. But when Islamists kill, or trans people kill, the opposite happens. Then, extrapolation becomes bigotry. Discussion becomes dangerous. Truth-seeking is tantamount to a crime.

Sainted identities are shielded from the very cultural interrogation that is actively encouraged in relation to other, ‘lesser’ identities. When a white-skinned adherent to neo-Nazism carries out a violent act, lessons must be learned. When a brown-skinned adherent to Islamo-fascism does likewise, lesson-learning is strictly prohibited. Your emotional response to that crime of ideology will be ruthlessly policed. We’re seeing the same now for trans. It mustn’t stand. We need to throw off the censorious gag of ‘transphobia’ and give voice to what we believe to be true.

Here’s what I think: the trans ideology is birthing a new and lethal violence of self-pity. There’s the extreme violence – the numerous school shootings in the US and now Canada carried out by trans-identified people. There’s the general undercurrent of violence, as glimpsed in such vile misogynistic slogans as ‘Punch a transphobe’, ‘Decapitate TERFs’ or ‘Kill JK Rowling’. And there’s the unspoken promise of violence against any uppity woman who dares to object to the presence of men in her bathroom, her changing room or her shelter.

To my mind, this brutish culture speaks to the apocalyptic narcissism of identity politics in general and the trans ideology in particular. Having deluded people into thinking they can change sex, and having encouraged them to view anyone who refuses to validate their ‘new sex’ as bigots, bitches or scum, the identitarian society has created monsters. It has been the midwife to lunatic levels of self-regard and entitlement, where young people in particular are incited to treat as subhuman anyone who fails to bow to their hallucinatory self-image. When trans people are told that mainstream society and its idiot inhabitants are ‘erasing’ them, can we really be surprised if some turn to violence to defend and enforce their delusions?

We will probably never know why Jesse Van Rootselaar did what he did. He seems to have been a profoundly troubled young man – a situation likely worsened, I would say, by the indulging of his gender mirage. But what we do know is that the elites’ cultivation of the brittle, needy and sexist identity of trans has generated grievance and hatred. It is not transphobic to tell this truth.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.