Tumbler Ridge Is Being Used to Spread Anti-Trans Misinformation

This story was originally published by The Tyee, with the headline “Tumbler Ridge Is Just the Latest Opportunity for Anti-Trans Hate.” It has been reprinted here with permission.

It began as soon as the first description of a suspect as a “female in a dress” was released by police on February 11, during a school lockdown in a small British Columbia town.

Online commentators immediately called it an example of “transanity” and launched wide-ranging attacks on trans people, politicians, and health care experts.

When police confirmed, on February 11, that the suspect in a horrific mass shooting at a high school in Tumbler Ridge was an eighteen-year-old transgender woman named Jesse Van Rootselaar, right-wing media went into overdrive, blaming the violence on acceptance of trans people and even a pride flag that was displayed at the school.

“Do you know what that flag on schools in Canada means now?” a commentator named Lise Merle asked during a Rebel News livestream the day after the shooting. “Danger, danger.”

To Alejandra Caraballo, an American lawyer who has tracked online hate toward trans people for years, it was a familiar pattern. She said it’s now become common for online commentators to immediately suggest trans people are to blame for the mass shootings that commonly happen in the United States. The few incidents that do involve trans people, as either the shooter or an associate of the shooter—as was the case in the assassination of Charlie Kirk—have only fuelled this trend.

The rhetoric has become so widespread that GLAAD, an organization that fights discrimination against LGBTQ2S+ people, published a fact sheet in 2025 called “Debunking ‘Trans Terrorism’ and Other False Claims in High-Profile Crimes.” The fact sheet points out that of 5,748 mass shootings in the United States between 2013 and 2025, just five, or 0.1 percent, were carried out by transgender people. GLAAD also says there is no evidence of increasing radicalization or violence from transgender people.

“This has been happening for about four to five years,” Caraballo told The Tyee. “Within minutes of a mass shooting, there would be just kind of random people on social media, particularly Twitter [now X], who would falsely claim that the shooter was trans, and they would put up pictures of a trans person that they pulled from Reddit randomly.”

Caraballo said the first time she saw this pattern happen was a 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

“They took a random trans woman’s picture from Reddit and claimed that she was the shooter, and this went viral.”

Since then, it’s become a common tactic after high-profile mass shootings.

In the hours after the Tumbler Ridge shooting, an X account called The Pleb Reporter with the handle @truckdriverpleb posted photos of an adult trans woman who had no connection to the incident. The account later removed the post and said the photos were not of the shooter, but by then, the images had been spread across social media by other accounts and were even briefly included in a story published by Radio-Canada. The Pleb Reporter account holder declined to comment when contacted by The Tyee.

Steven Rai, a senior analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, has verified and analyzed Van Rootselaar’s social media activity, which began in 2019 when she was about twelve years old.

Rai said that, while Van Rootselaar talked about dealing with serious depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, a drug-induced psychosis, autism, and isolation, he doesn’t see any evidence that her transgender identity was a motivation for the mass shooting.

Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said the way some right-wing commentators are talking about trans people in relation to the shooting meets the criteria for hate speech in Canada.

“The Canadian courts have recognized that people who are promoting hate will often . . . use real news stories or incidents or tragedies that have happened,” Balgord said.

The courts have ruled that when “that becomes hateful is when they’re using those real incidents, real stories that happened, to demonize an entire group of people.”

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During the Rebel News livestream on February 11, Merle called the shooting “a predictable act of trans madness” and described being transgender as a mental illness. She also called for more information on “who, in Tumbler Ridge, is participating in dangerous activities that led this child down this dangerous path.”

Sheila Gunn Reid, the host of the livestream, said she was surprised there haven’t been more violent acts in Canada committed by trans people because of “how far we are down the gender madness.”

Tara Armstrong, an Independent member of the legislative assembly who was elected as a BC Conservative, has published numerous posts on X that blame the shooting on the perpetrator’s transgender identity.

Balgord said rhetoric that paints an entire group as violent is textbook discrimination. “We have learned, after a very long time and heroic efforts by the Muslim community, that it is not acceptable when there is some kind of terrorist attack that might be done by ISIS or just by a Brown person, it is not OK to blame Muslims, writ large, for that,” Balgord said.

“We recognize that blaming all Jews for [the actions of Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and the State of Israel is antisemitism.”

Balgord said right-wing figures are also trying to use hatred against trans people to call for actions such as rolling back human rights protections for transgender people or ending BC’s sexual orientation and gender identity, or SOGI, policy in schools.

For decades, trans people have shared their experiences of being able to improve mental health issues by accessing gender-affirming care and wider community acceptance of their gender identities.

But those experiences are now being twisted by politicians, influencers, and right-wing media figures who paint acceptance of transgender identity as the problem instead of the solution, said Jaigris Hodson, a professor at Royal Roads University who studies digital communication.

Hodson said she has watched the anti-trans rhetoric roll across the internet in the wake of the shooting, mostly concentrated on X. But she said she’s also seen a lot of pushback against that rhetoric on platforms like Reddit.

“I think what’s troubling to those of us who study online hate is the degree to which the trans community has been scapegoated,” Hodson said. “Not just in this incident but more broadly.”