The Tumbler Ridge shooter was a trans female. How rare is that?
RCMP on Wednesday identified the perpetrator of the mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, a transgender female. Dwayne McDonald, deputy commissioner of the RCMP in British Columbia, said that Van Rootselaar was born a biological male and began to transition to a female about six years ago.
McDonald added that Van Rootselaar “identified as female both socially and publicly.”
He also confirmed that a total of nine people died in the shooting, including Van Rootselaar. One victim who was reported to have died en route to hospital is alive and in serious condition. The victims included one female educator, three female students and two male students. In addition, Van Rootselaar’s mother and stepbrother were found dead in their home nearby.
What has been said about transgender people and mass shootings?
Popular and well-known figures in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement have accused trans people of being dangerous, or made claims that they are disproportionately represented among mass killers.
The day after the shooting death of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, 2025, Donald Trump Jr. said on The Megyn Kelly Show: “I can’t name, including probably like al Qaeda and the Taliban, a group that is more violent per capita than the radical trans movement.”
He also said in a Fox News interview that day that he couldn’t “name a mass shooting in the last year or two in America that wasn’t committed by, you know, a transgender lunatic.”
What moves are the U.S. administration considering?
Last September, the Independent newspaper reported that the Heritage Foundation, a think tank behind Project 2025, had called on the FBI to treat “violent transgender ideology” as a new domestic terror threat.
The same month, multiple news sources reported that the U.S. Department of Justice was considering limiting the right to possess firearms for transgender people.
What was behind these moves?
The previous month, 23-year-old transgender woman Robin Westman had opened fire with a rifle at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minn., killing two children and injuring another 21 people. Westman then died by suicide in the parking lot behind the church.
Are transgender people responsible for many shootings?
The organization FackCheck , citing figures from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), an independent organization that tracks gun-related violence in the U.S., noted that there had been 5,748 mass shootings (four or more injured or dead) in the U.S. between Jan. 1, 2013 and Sept. 15, 2025.
Of those, GVA said there were five confirmed transgender shooters, or fewer than a tenth of one per cent. (There have also been four cases of mass shootings by females in the U.S. since 1982.)
In addition to the Minneapolis shooting, the five by transgender people GVA listed included a March 2023 shooting at a school in Nashville; a November 2022 shooting at a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado; a May 2019 shooting at a school in Highlands Ranch, Colorado; and a September 2018 shooting at a warehouse in Aberdeen, Maryland. However, the convicted shooter in the Colorado Springs incident was later identified as nonbinary, a category that overlaps with but is not identical to transgender.
Transgender people account for 0.6 per cent of Americans over the age of 13, according to a 2022 estimate by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. If the rate of mass shootings by transgender people matched their proportion of the U.S. population, one would expect 34 cases between 2013 and 2025.
The Violence Prevention Project at Hamline University in Minnesota, using a slightly different definition of mass shootings, similarly found 0.1 per cent were committed by transgender people, compared to 2 per cent by cisgender women and more than 97 per cent by cisgender men.
“The overwhelming pattern is clear and consistent: mass shootings are committed almost entirely by men,” wrote James Densley, the project’s co-founder and deputy director.
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