'Reducing a murderous tragedy to pronouns'

Coverage of the Tumbler Ridge murders - just give us the facts.

Updating this because of the shameful behaviour of a number of outlets which insisted on described Jesse Strang/Rootselaar as a woman, even after the polilce presser which made it clear he’s a male.

The Guardian buried the lead, and our comment on it is here. Reuters tries to pass its lie off by attributing the police: when it should have been at the front asking questions about why they’re so determined to affirm, and whether they knowingly misled the school in its security alert about a ‘woman’. Reuters is bought by almost every newsroom, and has been seen as a ‘one-stop’ resource. It’s trusted. Sky News - its International Correspondent no less - dares to explain how rare it is that a woman committed this crime. ITV News adopts the killer’s pronouns.

You can watch the relevant portion of the police press conference here.

Time was that this affirmative grip on the news cycle would have been watertight. That’s no longer the case. The more outlets refuse to comply - the BBC among them - the more these outlets stand out as recalcitrant, unrepentant, untrustworthy and activist sources.

Our original piece starts here

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Don’t mistake us. Those of us who called for the authorities and the media for clarity on the sex of the killer at Tumbler Ridge are not minimising the deaths of nine people in one of Canada’s deadliest mass shootings. We’re saying it’s what happens when the information is withheld.

Credit: Reduxx for story and image

As Gerald Posner clarifies:

‘This is not a minor semantic dispute. In high-profile crimes, accurate reporting matters. Biological sex is a data category used in criminology, public policy, and statistical analysis. Erasing it, or substituting identity categories without clarity, distorts public understanding’

It means that instead of analysing - again - what leads people to commit heinous crimes like this, and whether sex, or factors around trans identification could have been a driver, we are wasting time trying to find out whether the killer was a man at all, never mind whether he identified as the opposite sex. Legacy media will address neither.

We don’t know that there’s a facet of trans identification which finds an outlet in violence. If there is, it’s terrifying, and it’s important we find it, and talk about it, and hunt mechanisms or solutions to address this frightening possibility. It could save lives.

If there isn’t, we need to know that too. But nothing is more likely to arouse suspicion than a complete shutdown of public discourse on the issue. Sex is of course a factor: men and boys commit the majority of violent crimes. But here, we weren’t allowed to know it - contra all reporting conventions around major crimes.

Nine people were killed in Tumbler Ridge in remote British Columbia: six at the Secondary School, one en route to hospital, and two at a connected residence. The shooter - called a ‘gunperson’ and ‘a female in a dress with brown hair’ by the authorities - then shot himself, or herself, as the police would have it. More than two dozen people were injured.

Reduxx posted at 7.16 am UK time that the shooter was a trans-identified male called Jesse Strang. Reduxx doesn’t have a safety net, it lives and dies by the old reporter maxim, you’re only as good as your last story. At least three of its senior reporters worked on it for hours and they didn’t publish until they believed it was watertight. At time of writing, it has just been officially confirmed. If they’d been wrong, there would be vast reputational consequence for Reduxx. So they’re not in the business of making baseless accusations. There’s a reason they’re trusted.

At the very least, it put the sex of the murderer properly in doubt. But this was around the same time a BBC Today presenter was warning about ‘misrepresentation’ on social media.

We don’t think legacy outlets should look at a Reduxx post on X and reproduce it as if it were Moses tablets. We do think they should report that there are credible doubts about whether the killer was a woman. There’s a very easy way to do this. ‘The police alert warned of a female but the sex of the suspect isn’t clear, and hasn’t been confirmed by the authorities since the body was discovered’. And once you’ve done the research to back it up you can say: ‘There are also reports he may have identified as a woman but it’s not confirmed yet.’ You don’t have to trot out authority lines ad infinitum.

Just after 8am UK time, a local journalist slipped in an interview with the BBC and used ‘he’ for the shooter. Now he couldn’t be challenged on that on air (he was exhausted, traumatised and it would have been very unfair on him) but at this stage it was clear that whether or not the suspect was a woman was seriously in doubt. We understand that it’s hard for outlets to publish anything without confirmation - of course. What they can do is get off the record information and let it guide their coverage accordingly. And they can press the authorities in Canada to be transparent.

Still the legacy procedure, now routine, was to ignore the elephant in the room. ‘Gender and identity not revealed by police’ was the line across outlets, including the BBC. Eight hours after it became clear that the sex of the murderer was clearly a matter of uncertainty, AP was still reporting that ‘a woman believed by police to be the shooter was found dead’.

Being agency copy, like Reuters it was echoed across the US, but through the day ‘woman’ was gradually and quietly replaced by ‘person’ (see NYT and WaPo). Neither did Fox amplify the possible ‘trans’ line. In the UK, about four hours after a number of outlets published evidence of his sex, Sky News needlessly posted: ‘'Woman linked to shooting'. Late in the afternoon Sky was saying: ‘The shooter is female, which is very rare’. Some surprising outlets, including the Guardian and ITV News, were circumspect. How do we know? They buried the ‘female’ description. Precisely because any mass shooting committed by a female is exceptionally rare, and it would be one of the top lines, with accompanying analysis. If any of these outlets were confident the shooter is a woman, we would know about it. Instead, they commit to a mutual silence.

The Telegraph and the Sun stood out with their pointed headlines “‘Gunperson in a dress’. We still have to jigsaw the picture together but they were saying as much as they felt they could. If the police don’t want their compliance quoted, perhaps they shouldn’t say such idiotic things.

This selective framing mirrors patterns seen after other shootings: when the perpetrator’s identity complicates a preferred narrative, such as ‘toxic masculinity’ or ‘easy access to guns’, personal details are minimised.

Outlets wanted to avoid speculation that could be seen as insensitive or politically charged. This is understandable. But a presenter or correspondent can say: ‘We don’t want to engage in speculation, but we do know that the sex of the suspect still hasn’t been confirmed, some reports say this person is male, and we are trying to find that out’. You don’t have to be terrified of even going near it.

We have no doubt that at the BBC and Sky an editorial guidance line was sent out on the exact wording to be used. ‘Do not cross this line’, it will effectively have said.

However the reports by Reduxx and others spread so widely and rapidly on social media and alternative platforms that when they turned out to be right, trust in legacy outlets is crushed again.

Not just by sceptics: most people who were paying what might be called a ‘normal’ level of attention to the story all thought the shooter was a woman. They’ll be much more shocked than we are tonight.

A pattern of selective reporting fuels distrust. Last August Robin Westman killed two children at a church in Minneapolis. The BBC used female pronouns. Anderson Lee Aldrich was gifted they/them pronouns by the Guardian after shooting dead five people at a Colorado Springs LGBT club. But the way Audrey Hale’s crimes were reported was due: female pronouns and clarity about trans identification: similarly here with Tyler Robinson, the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk. Clarity is possible.

‘Progressive’ voices will say they don’t want the trans community stigmatised - that’s fair. Others say that such denialism prevents root causes like mental health crises, cultural pressures around gender, aggressive victimhood or even the impact of medications being investigated.

But what it comes down to for us is simply - tell us. Give us the information. Tell us when the police report is in doubt. Trust the public with the details.

Otherwise you risk inflaming speculation, and accusations of mendacity and special treatment. You risk leaving unaddressed any problems and pressures that might have led to this unimaginable pain. And you end up with us, the audience, having to demand accuracy, for 16 hours - which you can then say is reducing a mass murder to pronouns.