Yesterday, a person in Tumbler Ridge, BC went into the high school and shot a large number of people, killing 6 at the school, and injuring dozens more. This is after they had shot and killed two family members in their home.
Today, we learned that the shooter was a young transgender woman who had dropped out of high school a few years ago. Predictably, our friends over at The Western Standard jumped on this to argue that somehow transgender identity is therefore intrinsically dangerous. (I won't link to material I consider overt hate literature - a series of screen copies will be provided at the end of this which will contain the offending column).
The writer, Christopher Oldcorn, has been carrying the "anti-transgender banner" for Western Standard since at least 2022, possibly earlier. His working thesis here seems to be "well, because the shooter was transgender, clearly gender affirming care doesn't work", or something to that effect.
Angles of Attack
Oldcorn uses two angles of attack here. First, he starts off with enumerating other mass shootings which have involved transgender shooters. This is intended to provoke the reader into thinking that transgender people are intrinsically violent for some ineffable reason.
The second angle of attack occurs when he shifts to going after gender affirming care, implying not only that it doesn't work, but in fact may be reinforcing "dangerous delusions". Oldcorn then moves on to argue that we should handle transgender identity in the same way that we treat major mental illness such as schizophrenia (because trans people are so dangerous, you see /snark).
Errors of Logic and Reasoning
The first error in Oldcorn's logic is the oldest one in the book - correlation fallacy. A horrific event has occurred, and it was committed by someone who is known to be transgender. Therefore, reasons Oldcorn, the transgender identity must be the reason for the shooting. This is clearly a "leap of logic without evidence". At best we have a correlation here - a coincidence where the offender happens to possess a particular attribute, but we have no real evidence that the attribute has anything to do with the action.
Practical clinical experience with transgender people tells us that there is no correlation between gender identity and violent behaviour. Are there violent people who are transgender - sure - but the tendency to violence has no apparent connection to their gender identity.
The second fallacy that Oldcorn falls into is a "generalization fallacy". A generalization fallacy is basically saying "hey look, this example over here has the one trait I'm expecting, therefore all examples must have this trait. Oldcorn tries to prop this up by pointing to a list of other events that have involved shooters that are transgender. However, when you put it in perspective, we're talking about a handful of cases among thousands of transgender people, and when the majority of those cases come out of the United States, we're talking about a handful of cases among several thousand shooters (who are by far mostly cisgender, and male).
Criticisms of Gender Affirming Care
Oldcorn doesn't let an opportunity to attack gender affirming care (GAC) go to waste, implying that GAC is ineffective because of a literature review study he found that says "gosh, we don't understand how GAC affects anxiety and depression symptoms". The problem here is that GAC addresses gender dysphoria. People with gender dysphoria may also experience anxiety and depression, but unless gender dysphoria is the sole factor in their symptoms, GAC is only going to have so much impact on depression symptoms.
The other dimension of Oldcorn's argument against GAC is that he considers gender dysphoria to in fact be a form of delusion. From the DSM IV (there is similar wording in the DSM 5, but DSM IV is much better worded):
"Insistence by a person with a Gender Identity Disorder (sic: Gender Dysphoria) that he or she is of the other sex is not considered a delusion, because what is invariably meant is that the person feels like a member of the other sex rather than truly believes that he or she is a member of the other sex." DSM IV TR pp 581
I know this probably seems like a leap too far for the writers at the Western Standard to fully grasp, but the upshot of the above quote is that a transgender person fully understands the distinction between their feelings about themselves and the reality that they live with. This is quite different from a delusion (clinically speaking) where the person is unable to differentiate what they are experiencing from lived reality.
Treatment
Oldcorn wants to see transgender people "treated" like we treat people who are experiencing psychosis. The problem is that treatment for psychotic disorders isn't the same as treatment for gender dysphoria. This demonstrates a wholesale ignorance of how mental health treatment works. Someone experiencing psychosis is a completely different matter from someone experiencing gender dysphoria or even anxiety disorders.
Being charitable, I suspect what Oldcorn is really saying is that he believes transgender people are so dangerous that they should rounded up and put in camps (or worse).
What We Don't Know
There is a lot we don't know about this latest event. I'm just going to briefly list some of the points that we really need to better understand as we unravel the events of February 10, 2026:
- Was the shooter under active mental health care of any sort?
- Was the shooter on any kind of psychoactive medication?
- Was the shooter using any street drugs, marijuana, or alcohol?
- What was the shooter's social network like?
- Were they able to access regular supportive counselling / therapy?
- Was the shooter able to access the care they needed for their transition?
- Were the shooter's family and friends supportive of their transition?
- How was the shooter experiencing the world around them?
- The shooter had dropped out of high school a few years ago - how had that affected them?
- Had there been changes of behaviour in the days or weeks leading up to February 10?
Those are just a few of the basic questions we need to answer before we can even begin to understand what was going on that led to those tragic events.
Short of the shooter having left us a suicide note or similar explaining their thinking in the last few days, we may never actually get to clear answers here. The shooter took her own life, and therefore we cannot ask directly.
A Closing Thought
None of what I have written is intended to diminish the horrific nature of what happened. Were this person still alive, I would want to see her held accountable for her actions. There are families who will forever bear the scars of what happened yesterday, and there are others who will spend much of their lives living with the memory of a shooter entering their school and killing indiscriminately. Their hurt and fears should take the front seat for now.
However, we should also recognize that it is grossly inappropriate to use this tragedy to attack an entire class of people, and I am disgusted that the writers at The Western Standard, Juno, and other politically motivated "news sites" have chosen to use this tragedy to attack a minority that has never harmed them.
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