Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

You are about to hear a free preview of this week's episode. To hear the full episode,

and to get access to all our podcasts and articles, visit us at quillette.com and click the

subscribe button. This week, we're going to be talking about a horrible crime that took place

in Tumblr Ridge, a small Canadian mining town in the foothills of

the Rocky Mountains. On February 10th, an 18-year-old middle school dropout named Jesse Strang,

also known as Jesse Fawn Rautzler, killed his mother and half-brother at their home before

proceeding to a local school and killing six other people, five of them students

age 12 or 13. In many respects, Jesse's story is tragically familiar. A broken home, easy access

to guns, psychiatric issues, drug abuse, a sadistic personality, an addiction to violent

video games, and a fascination with morbid online subcultures.

But one aspect of the mass shooting stood out as unusual.

When Canadian police reported the news to the public, they referred to the shooter as if he were a woman,

which Canadians at first found shocking.

In the United States, men are responsible for 98% of mass shootings. In Canada, there has never been a mass shooting perpetrated by a woman.

This would have been the first. Except, it wasn't, because as Canadian police grudgingly admitted

when pressed, Jesse Strang was a man,

albeit a man who apparently seemed to suffer from gender dysphoria, a fact that immediately

became obvious from photographs and from his numerous dark stereotypically male fixations.

While it's true, as the Canadian police initially said, that the killer was seeking to

transition into a female identity, that doesn't make him a woman for reality-based purposes.

...