by Will Thibeau, First Things
Jesse Van Rootselaar and Robert Dorgan, two men pretending to be women, killed ten people in separate mass shootings within a single week. Both exhibited documented histories of serious mental illness. Conservative commentators have rightly drawn attention to the relationship between gender ideology and violence, and the media’s instinct to obscure it. But the trans question is a distraction. Gender ideology is a late-stage symptom of a deeper pathology. Feminism is the root, and its quiet, cumulative destruction of the family, of sex-differentiated social roles, and of the Western moral order dwarfs the body count of any individual shooting.
Van Rootselaar, an eighteen-year-old in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, allegedly murdered his mother and eleven-year-old stepbrother before opening fire inside his former school, killing five students and a teacher. Dorgan, a fifty-six-year-old in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, allegedly killed his ex-wife and son, and injured his former in-laws at a youth hockey game. Both men considered themselves to be women.
Van Rootselaar, who came from a broken home, sought psychiatric help as a teenager, abused drugs, immersed himself in online gore communities, and built a Roblox game simulating a mass shooting. His biological father was estranged. His mother, who held the firearms license and promoted his gun content online, raised him in an environment devoid of paternal authority. He obsessively consumed content about prior mass killers, including the transgender Nashville school shooter.
Dorgan’s violence grew directly from the wreckage of a dissolved marriage. He carried a documented history of mental illness (as confirmed by his own daughter). His gender identity fueled years of family conflict, and court records tie his gender reassignment surgery directly to domestic disputes that preceded the killing.
The conservative instinct to focus on the transgender dimension of these shootings is understandable. Both men adopted female identities. Both exhibited the psychological instability that accompanies gender dysphoria at alarming rates. The mainstream press predictably minimized these facts. Both men were operating inside the blast radius of broken families. Fatherlessness, divorce, and the destruction of stable family structure produce the conditions in which gender confusion, mental illness, and ultimately violence take root. The trans epidemic is real, but it is downstream. The question we seem to refuse to ask is: What broke these homes in the first place?