After Tumbler Ridge shooting, false claims about trans people have proliferated online

Marni Panas, a trans activistic based in Edmonton, says her bosom skint when she saw tidings of Tuesday's mass shot in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., that left nine people dead, including the suspect, and 27 injured.

Later, when rumours started to percolate that the suspect in the shooting was a transgender woman, Panas watched what she says has become a predictable pattern emerge online. Within minutes, she says some people began to leverage the tragedy to "advance hate" against the trans community.

"This will just get uglier now for us and for our community as a whole, when our attention should be on the care of these victims and to support communities," she said.

B.C. RCMP have identified the suspect as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar. RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald said at a news conference early Wednesday afternoon that Van Rootselaar was assigned male at birth and began transitioning to female about six years ago, and identified publicly as female.

But hours before police had confirmed the identity of the suspect, anger and false claims were already being directed at the trans community online. Some pundits, politicians and right-wing news outlets began posting about what they called an epidemic of violence by trans people. But experts say there's no evidence to support such a trend and trans advocates worry that these claims will do nothing but harm an already marginalized community.

Tara Armstrong, an Independent MLA who represents Kelowna-Lake Country-Coldstream, made several social media posts Wednesday about what she called transgender ideology, saying it is "radicalizing youth, and unlocking violent impulses."

"There is an epidemic of transgender violence spreading across the West," she wrote on X.

American right-wing political commentator Matt Walsh was among the pundits weighing in on social media Wednesday, telling his four million followers on X that trans people "are the most dangerous and unstable group in existence and it’s not close," without providing evidence to support his claim.

After seeing this kind of discourse online, Panas, the trans activist, says she feels less safe, on top of the despair and sadness she feels for the victims, both as a parent and a human being.

“We feel the same things. We feel the sorrow, we feel the compassion, we feel the grief that all Canadians are for these families and these victims."

James Densley, co-founder of The Violence Prevention Project, which tracks mass shootings in the U.S., says the claims that some are making about an epidemic of mass shootings by transgender people are not true and can be refuted by statistical evidence.

In the U.S., he says 97.5 per cent of mass shootings in his database were carried out by men who are cisgender — those who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Two per cent of those shootings were carried out by women and 0.5 per cent were carried out by people who are trans, making trans people statistically underrepresented.

Densley says the false perception that there are more mass shootings carried out by trans people can be attributed, in part, to what's known as "base rate neglect" — the idea that even a couple of incidents in a short window can make something feel like a pattern even when it's not.

"When a shooter is transgender, that fact becomes the story, especially on social media. Whereas when the shooter is male, their identity is never really mentioned because it's just unremarkable," he said.

"That creates an asymmetry in the coverage, where people will recall all the unusual cases because they were unusual."

Densley, who is also a professor of criminology at Metro State University in Minnesota says that the demographic of mass shooters is overwhelmingly male, "and that's been consistent for decades."

He says the online discourse is troubling, noting a "long and ugly history" of people associating an entire marginalized group with mass violence based on a statistically negligible number of cases.

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"It happened with Muslim Americans after 9/11, for example. It's happened with young Black men for decades, and now it seems to be happening with transgender people as well," he said.

"In some ways, the perceived pattern is speaking more to the politics of the moment than to any actual causal relationship."

Amelia Newbert, co-executive director of Calgary-based 2SLGBTQ+ advocacy group Skipping Stone, says it's unfortunate that her focus has had to shift from grieving the tragedy to doing "damage control" for her community.

Newbert says any attempt to use the shooting to advance a political or ideological position is "absolutely wrong" and "disgusting."

She says this should be a time for Canadians to come together to grieve, to support those who have lost loved ones and to find a way to heal together.

"The actions of a vocal minority to politicize this are not helping, they're only harming," Newbert said.

"They're only going to continue to inflict deeper wounds and deeper scars towards not just the trans community, but towards our country in general."

Digital Writer

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