Affirmation Is Not Compassion: Lessons from the Tumbler Ridge Shooting
Mass shootings in Canada are extremely rare. Thus, it was with a sense of horrified disbelief that Canadians received the news that an active shooter had invaded a school in the small community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, last week.
According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), police first received an alert about an active shooter at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School at about 1:20 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday, February 10.
In the first few hours, the public was asked to look for “a female in a dress with brown hair.” Later, however, police confirmed the suspect was in fact a male who had been “transitioning.”
The shooting was a bloodbath.
After police entered the school, they found the suspect dead from a self-inflicted gunshot. RCMP reported that nine people died in total, including the shooter. Police also found two additional victims deceased at a nearby house: the shooter’s 39-year-old mother, and his 11-year-old stepbrother.
All told, another twenty-five people were injured at the school.
The Rise of the Disgruntled Trans Shooter
If it feels like there’s something eerily familiar about the Tumbler Ridge shooting, you’re not wrong.
Over the past several years, there have been a number of high-profile shootings perpetrated by individuals suffering from gender dysphoria, or who have been linked in some way to the transgender community.
Several of these individuals have left behind manifestos or made statements explicitly linking their actions to their self-identity as transgender, often citing their rage at how others did not accept their gender identity, or simply referencing their general existential confusion and self-loathing.
A partial list of the shootings includes:
- Aberdeen Rite Aid Facility in Maryland – On September 20, 2018, Snochia Moseley, a man who claimed to be a woman, opened fire at a Rite Aid distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland, killing three coworkers and injuring three others before fatally shooting himself. The Washington Post reported that Moseley “had been beset for years by mental illness as well as emotional turmoil related to her [his] struggle with sexual identity.”
- Club Q in Colorado – Five people were killed, and 25 others were injured, after Anderson Lee Aldrich opened fire at an LGBT club. Aldrich identified as “non-binary.”
- Highlands Ranch School in Colorado (2019) – Alec McKinney (born Maya McKinney) and another classmate opened fire at the school, killing one student and injuring eight others. McKinney told investigators she launched the shooting in retaliation for being bullied over her gender identity, saying she wanted to target students who made fun of her.
- Annunciation Catholic School in Minnesota –The horrific shooting of Catholic school children who were attending Mass at Annunciation Church last year was perpetrated by Robin Westman. Westman had a history of gender “changes.” In a manifesto, he expressed his disgust and dissatisfaction with his attempts at transitioning. “I only keep [the long hair] because it is pretty much my last shred of being trans. I am tired of being trans, I wish I never brain-washed myself,” he wrote.
- Covenant School in Tennessee (2023) – On March 27, 2023, 28-year-old Audrey Hale, a former student of The Covenant School in Nashville, killed six people before being shot by police. Audrey was a woman but had “transitioned” in an attempt to become male. She left behind a disturbing manifesto in which she expressed her belief that after she died, God would give her the body of a boy. She explicitly stated she was inspired by the Columbine shooters.
There have also been a number of other notable acts of violence perpetrated by individuals identifying as transgender. In the past few days, for instance, a video of a Canadian man identifying as transgender who stabbed his two children began making the rounds on social media.
There is also the well-known connection between Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin and his transgender partner. Whether coincidentally or not, Kirk was shot moments after answering a question about transgender mass shooters.
The Cost of Putting Narrative Before Facts
When a mass shooting like what unfolded in Tumbler Ridge occurs, the one thing that everybody should be able to expect is accurate information. And the last thing anybody wants or needs is groveling, deferential kowtowing to woke ideology, especially when this endangers lives.
In the aftermath of the Tumbler Ridge shooting, however, police and media perpetrated confusion as they agonized over how to report on the identity of the shooter without appearing to question the shooter’s self-professed gender identity.
Speaking to media in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, police referred to the shooter as the “gunperson.” Police also made it clear that they would refer to the shooter by his preferred pronouns.
The CBC, the Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun, CTV, Global News, the Globe and Mail, the Winnipeg Free Press, the Ottawa Citizen, the Montreal Gazette, and other media all referred to the shooter as female.
Meanwhile, over the ensuing hours and days numerous media and political figures rushed to put out statements condemning what they called “anti-trans” misinformation.
British Columbia Human Rights Commissioner Kasari Govender issued a statement decrying the “anti-trans disinformation and the hateful narratives that are being spread.” The CBC published an article titled, “After Tumbler Ridge shooting, false claims about trans people have proliferated online.” The CBC even went so far as to correct the shooter’s own father, when he referred to his son as “him.”
How Gender Ideology Erodes Objective Reporting
In recent years, the media’s embrace of gender ideology has become so complete, that it’s almost impossible to penetrate the dense fog of obfuscation to get at the simplest facts about breaking events.
In the wake of the Aberdeen Rite Aid shooting, for example, CNN ran a lengthy analysis expressing surprise that the shooting defied stereotypes and thereby posed a challenge to law enforcement experts.
“Snochia Moseley does not fit the profile those of us in law enforcement expect with a more typical mass murderer or active shooter,” wrote James Gagliano for CNN.
“Though experts disagree on exact numbers and percentages, they do agree that white men have committed many, many more mass shootings than any other group. Moseley was an African-American woman.”
Except, Moseley was not a woman. Moseley was a man.
The Canadian media’s reporting on the Tumbler Ridge shooting was so lockstep, that it led to people expressing surprise and amazement that such a mass shooting was also perpetrated by a woman. Except, it was not.
Certainly, one of the strangest consequences of gender ideology is the fact that progressive feminists who have expended so much effort demonizing the violent tendencies of white men, are perfectly willing to attribute grotesque acts of violence to a woman, even if that “woman” is in fact a man.
The Link Between Transgenderism and Mental Health
The question of the relation between transgenderism and violence is a complex one. It is not necessarily wrong to express concerns about how some individuals are using unhelpful rhetoric rather than staying anchored soberly in fact.
For instance, it’s not clear to me that there is anything helpful about Daily Wire personality Matt Walsh’s post on X that, “Trans people are the most dangerous and unstable group in existence and it’s not close.”
However, contrary to the finger-waving leftist media, there is nothing irrational or hateful about raising questions about the linkage between gender confusion and acts of violence.
On one important question, the statistics are unambiguous: individuals suffering from gender dysphoria have much, much higher rates of mental health comorbidities, suicide attempts and completions, and substance abuse disorders.
Indeed, one of the most tragic consequences of the way gender ideology has swept our culture, is that many adolescents experiencing what would otherwise be normal and transient identity crises, have instead been influenced to read their developmental distress as proof that they are “transgender.”
And because of the triumph of the gender ideologues, the adults in the lives of these young people often fail to put up any reasonable obstacles to their throwing themselves into this new identity, and everything that comes along with it: new names, new clothes, powerful life-altering drugs, irreversible, mutilating surgeries, and elevated rates of all manner of mental disorders, and treatment with heavy psychiatric drugs.
In particular, the fact that female-to-male individuals identifying as transgender are often put on heavy doses of synthetic testosterone, which is linked to increased levels of anger and violence, seems relevant, especially given the number of shootings perpetrated by women attempting to “transition” to male.
How Gender Confusion Fosters Social Isolation
There is also the demonstrable fact that, in recent years, certain corners of the transgender community have openly embraced the language of violent revolution. One does not need to look far to find examples of gender-confused individuals condemning critics of gender ideology as violent, oppressive tyrants, who must be resisted, with violence if necessary.
An essay making the rounds on the Internet, entitled “Gender Nihilism and the Revolutionary Impulse,” analyzes this phenomenon in some depth.
The essay argues that gender ideology profoundly destabilizes individuals identifying as transgender by rejecting the very notion of a given nature. When the body is no longer received as gift but treated as raw material, the person risks becoming untethered and alienated.
Alienation, left unchecked, curdles into resentment.
As the essay notes:
[E]xploring one’s “gender” does not inherently lead to violence or nihilism. But gender ideology—as it has been promoted by Western institutions over the past decade—has played a significant role in amplifying nihilistic thinking. From schools and medical authorities to social media platforms, the message has often been the same: your body is wrong as it is; you would be better, more complete, in a different form. When people are taught to see their own bodies as mistakes—or the world as hostile to their “true” selves—nihilism doesn’t arrive from the top down. It grows from the ground up.
And now, there are dark corners of the internet where every suffering and setback experienced by a person with gender confusion is interpreted as persecution, and where anger is cultivated rather than soothed.
A young person who already feels isolated can find in such communities a ready-made explanation for his pain. It is not that he is depressed, or socially awkward, or struggling with untreated mental illness. It is that the world is against him. The system is corrupt. The norms are violent. The family is oppressive. The Church is bigoted.
If that narrative is absorbed deeply enough, violence can begin to look like resistance.
Love in Truth: The Catholic Response to Gender Dysphoria
The Church recognizes the profound suffering that can accompany gender dysphoria, and the universal call to treat all individuals with respect.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls us to treat every person with “respect, compassion, and sensitivity” (CCC, no. 2358). Those who experience distress about their bodies or identities are not enemies. They are often deeply wounded individuals who often need our love and compassion.
Yet authentic love requires truth. It is simply true that the body is not merely raw material to be shaped according to internal feelings, but a gift that reveals something true about who we are. To affirm gender ideology is not compassion but a failure to honor the fullness of human nature as God designed it.
And it is to condemn individuals suffering from gender dysphoria to a lifetime of confusion, angst, and, in some cases, profound, destructive resentment.
The Tumbler Ridge, Covenant School, and Annunciation School shootings show what happens when this destructive rage is protected and even defended as an “understandable” consequence of a lack of “acceptance,” and when severe mental illness is reframed as a healthy expression of “gender identity.”
My heart breaks for all of those families who lost loved ones in yet another mass shooting. And it breaks for a culture that is so steeped in confusion that we cannot agree on the simplest of realities.
Human Life International
As president of Human Life International, Fr. Boquet is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having journeyed to nearly 90 countries on pro-life missions over the last decade. Father Boquet works with pro-life and family leaders in 116 counties that partner with HLI to proclaim and advance the Gospel of Life. Read his full bio here.
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