Why We Need to Talk About Transgender School Shooters

This week, we’re going to be talking about a horrible crime that took place in Tumbler Ridge, a small Canadian mining town in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

On February 10, an eighteen-year-old middle-school dropout named Jesse Strang, also known as Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed his mother and half-brother at their home before proceeding to a local school and killing six other people, five of them students aged twelve or thirteen.

In many respects, Jesse’s story is tragically familiar: a broken home, easy access to guns, psychiatric issues, drug abuse, a sadistic personality, an addiction to violent video games, and a fascination with morbid online subcultures.

But one aspect of the mass shooting stood out as unusual: When Canadian police reported the news to the public, they referred to the shooter as if he were a woman—which Canadians at first found shocking. In the United States, men are responsible for 98 percent of mass shootings. In Canada, there has never been a mass shooting by a woman in the history of the country. This would have been the first.

Except, it wasn’t. Because as Canadian police grudgingly admitted when pressed, Jesse Strang was a man (albeit a man who apparently seemed to suffer from gender dysphoria)—a fact that immediately became obvious from photographs, and from his numerous dark stereotypically male fixations.

While it’s true, as the police initially said, that the murderer was seeking to transition into a female identity, that doesn’t make him a woman for reality-based purposes.

With me to discuss this terrible crime, and the strange media reaction to the killer’s transgender status, is Toronto-based Canadian journalist Adam Zivo, a columnist for the National Post newspaper and a former gay-rights activist who writes frequently about LGB and T issues.

As Adam will discuss, Jesse Strang’s gender dysphoria seems to have developed amid a deep immersion in sexualised anime subcultures, in which women are often depicted as both extremely petite and highly sexualised. By his own account, Jesse became fixated on the idea of looking like one of these women himself. And his transgender identification seemed to have emerged as an outgrowth of this fetish.

During the conversation you will hear, Adam and I speak candidly about the small but growing number of mass killings being perpetrated by trans-identified individuals.

Just to be clear, however, we will not talk about the most recent transgender-perpetrated multiple homicide, which took place earlier this week at a Rhode Island hockey rink.

In that case, as most listeners will know, a biological man named Robert Dorgan, who called himself Roberta, killed his ex-wife and son. That horrible episode took place on February 16, six days after the Tumbler Ridge killings, and just before my interview with Adam.

As many media observers have correctly noted, only a small number of school shootings have historically been linked to people suffering from gender dysphoria.

But the enormous rise in transgender identification over the last decade raises questions about whether this kind of historical data applies to the world of 2026.

To be clear: there is no evidence that gender dysphoria causes people to become violent. But there is abundant evidence that gender dysphoria—that is to say, the belief that you possess a gender identity opposite to your real biologically-based identity—is co-morbid with a range of other serious mental-health conditions and behaviours that are linked with violence.

Moreover, as British authorities concluded when they shuttered the scandal-plagued Tavistock gender clinic in London, a huge number of deeply troubled youth have actually been encouraged to believe that their trauma, anxiety, depression, and various psychiatric issues can be rapidly cured through gender transition.

Again, the idea here isn’t that being transgender in and of itself makes you violent, but rather that an ideologically driven program of encouraging troubled youth to identify as transgender has effectively created this kind of correlation through a process of self-selection.

In this respect, Adam will present data concerning school shooters that does seem to indicate that just such a correlation has emerged—though, as both of us will take care to emphasise, the available data set is small.

On this score, I want to note that in assessing the statistical significance of the data he presents, Adam used a well-known testing method known as Fisher’s exact test.

And, for what it’s worth, before airing this episode, I doublechecked his results using a binomial test, which is a related test type that can be used, as the name implies, in regard to data distributed in binomial fashion—as in this case. And my own calculations yielded statistical results similar to those that Adam will discuss.

With that said, here is my interview with National Post journalist Adam Zivo.