Jonathan Kay at Quillette:

On 10 February, Jesse Van Rootselaar (also known as Jesse Strang) killed eight people in the remote British Columbia mining town of Tumbler Ridge. The first two victims were the killer’s mother and half-brother, whom Van Rootselaar shot at home. Van Rootselaar then went to a local secondary school and murdered six more people—five of whom were twelve- or thirteen-year-old students—before committing suicide. Twenty-seven others were injured. It was the deadliest Canadian school shooting in almost four decades, and the highest-casualty mass-shooting event in the nation’s history.

…

When news of the tragedy was first reported to Canadians on the afternoon of 10 February, it appeared to include a striking anomaly: The killer, we were told, was a “woman.” There are scattered examples of female killers in the annals of Canadian crime. But this would be the first time in the recorded history of Canada and its colonial antecedents—going back more than 400 years, to the early seventeenth century—that a woman had gone on this kind of murderous rampage.

It soon became clear, however, that Van Rootselaar wasn’t a woman. He was an eighteen-year-old man—a gun-obsessed, middle-school dropout whose many mental-health afflictions happened to include gender dysphoria. The mass murderer called himself a woman. But that doesn’t mean he was, or that the rest of us have to live in the imaginary universe he (literally) built for himself.

According to Royal Canadian Mounted Police deputy commissioner Dwayne McDonald, Jesse was “a biological male” who “approximately six years ago began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly.” In keeping with Canadian policies implemented by Justin Trudeau’s government in 2017, McDonald and other police officials then proceeded to refer to the killer with female pronouns, as if he actually were a woman.

It’s so heart-warming when the government orders us to lie about a male committing mass murder.

This kind of institutionally mandated misuse of language is dishonest at the best of times. But it is especially offensive when it serves to misrepresent reality on behalf of a murderer (posthumously or otherwise). 

And – what Jonathan Kay fails to point out – when it serves to misrepresent reality about which sex is more prone to extreme violence. Women just don’t do this shit, and that matters.

Men are more violent than women, which is why they account for more than ninety percent of the world’s prison population, and commit about ninety percent of all homicides. For acts of mass murder, US data puts the corresponding figure at 98 percent. This greater tendency toward violence is rooted largely in male evolutionary psychology, and doesn’t get erased when a man changes his pronouns or puts on a skirt. Simply put, being male (and young) represents one of the most important risk factors that exist when it comes to violent crime.

There. Better late than never.