When I heard the details of who the shooter was, my first reaction was oh no, the transgender community is going to suffer for this. I went on Facebook and the posts that I saw confirmed my fears. One post said it all.
“ The man was wearing a dress. That’s all you need to know.”
The shooter was identified as Jesse Van Rootselaar, a female, born as a male and identifying as a female since age 12. She has been known to police for a number of years. She has a history of mental health issues. Weapons were seized from her residence a few years ago, but were returned. She had a gun license that had expired back in 2024.
Right wing media in the US are having a field day on this. But the same thing is happening in Canada. Tara Armstrong, an MLA from Central. British Columbia has stated that there is an epidemic of transgender violence in the west. She adds that this epidemic will continue until society changes its view on transgender ideology.
Right wing media, again in the US, says that there has been a disproportionate amount of crimes committed by transgender persons. This is blatantly false. In fact, 0.1% of crimes have been committed by transgender persons since 2013. Just a reminder, the killer of 14 women at Ecole Polytechniqe, back in 1989, was a white male. The Sandy Hook killer, was a white male. The person who killed over 60 people, who were attending a concert, in Las Vegas, was a white male.
No matter how this plays out, transgender persons will have an extremely rough ride in the next little while. The focus should be on the victims and on the family and friends of those victims and on the entire community of Tumbler Ridge. Sadly, it won’t be.
Once the shock wears off, it will be interesting to see how the conservative party approaches this incident with regard to transgender people. Hopefully, and I sincerely mean this, they will react in a way that their right wing counterparts, south of our border, would not.
That’s all I have for today.