Mass Shooting in Tumbler Ridge Canada

If it were a genuine mistake, that's fine, though it still reduces trust and reduces the ability of people to act rationally based on misinformation (e.g. running towards rather than away from a man in a dress because you think it's a female shooter). However, I seriously doubt it was a genuine mistake.

I don't have time to read everything the BBC has written on the matter. Several people on here mentioned that they referred to "gender" and I was pointing out that this is a meaningless term. If the BBC did not say "gender" then OK...

This. You put it much better than I could. In a fast moving scenario such as a mass shooting, you go with whatever information you have that could potentially save lives. Lots of posters saying that when they heard the news their first thought was ‘it’s a man’. My first thought was God help all those involved.

@Slothtoesyour last paragraph 💯

It is obvious from this that trans ideology is a real and present danger.

In an active shooter situation, people are unlikely to be able to indulge in mental gymnastics. Instinct takes over. People in general are very good at telling the sex of a person on sight, and women are even better.

To tell them that the murderer is a "female in a dress with brown hair" means that they won't necessarily understand a male as the danger. (They might only see his head and shoulders from their hiding places, not his stunning and brave feminine dress sense.) And if there are any vigilantes out there - and rural Canada has a lot of guns - you have to hope that no woman had decided to wear a dress that day.

That was a very odd post. And also, Canadians do NOT have the "right to bear arms" which is more pertinent here. That crazy person does not seem to have come back yet so we haven't heard what their reason is for their post.

So you would have preferred them to wait until they hade identified the shooters’ sex before issuing the shelter in place order, risking people’s lives ? They issued a description. If you see someone coming towards you fitting that description and carrying a gun, you’re not going to wait around to check whether they’re a man or a woman, you’re going to run. Had the police waited until everything had been fact checked and more people had died as a result, they would have been criticised for not acting on the initial information. Lose Lose.

In this instance it might have been best to check the sources yourself. People do clearly have a strong distrust in media here, and arguing about wording without seeing the posts yourself might be adding to the confusion.

I think the BBC have probably gone with what they have been given and this is more on the Canadian authorities for not revealing an identity that seems to have been circulating publicly for hours overnight their time.

the BBC are still saying ‘We have not yet received confirmation of the suspect's gender or identity’’ because that way they can’t get into consequent legal trouble with misgendering, if identity and age and therefore legal sex is still officially unconfirmed, as seems to be stil the case

Today programme on BBC radio 4 interviewed a dad from this devastated tiny community this morning, whose wife was a teacher there (and has survived). This dad wouldn’t say anything at all about what was known of the killer. It must be unbearable to have to give so much consideration to how the truth will be received such that you can’t even speak it, in a context of violent murder of children. I wonder if mainstream Canada will start to think that this is no longer an acceptable social norm.

Until official confirmation I guess the BBC continues on with mentioning a ‘female in a dress’ which is a direct quote and is so overly specific a description to be made in news speak, that it immediately sets off ‘not actually female but description is unconfirmed for now’ in the news audience’s minds.

Yes it’s awful that all the attention goes on this question, and not on the victims or the community and not the severe mental health problems that will have presumably gone along with the perpetrator’s change of personal identity.

I personally am at the point where I don't trust that whatever instruction I receive from authorities is in my best interests. In THEIR best interests sure, but I'm fairly unlikely at this point to blindly follow orders like 'shelter in place'. I will do whatever my personal risk assessment says is best taking into account the utter duplicity and mendaciousness of the police, the government etc.

@HolyGround13 I was just going by what people here were saying the BBC said, I haven't read all their reporting myself...

They pledge allegiance to the American flag

Are you on glue?

I think their point is that, depending on what people calling the police saw, they may well have assessed the shooter at first as appearing to be a female in a dress. The police have that information to issue. Press reporting and accuracy comes later and has been quoting this initial police alert.

I think not.

Their wording is, from a certain perspective, fairly cynical. On one level, it gives gender identity primacy - while also allowing the multitude of people who still understand the word "gender" to be a polite synonym for biological sex the impression that this may be their meaning. They know it's an ambiguous word, and, to my mind, are likely exploiting its scope for meaning different things in different contexts to different people to fence-sit and avoid challenge/condemnation.

And that right there means that their reporting is more focussed more on politics than accuracy.

But if you're told the shooter is a female in a dress and you see a male in a dress approaching you, you might well think 'well, thank goodness, it can't be him because it's a female'.

So lying is unsafe.

And then again, these lies undermine the ability to trust whatever the authorities are telling you, so 'shelter in place' when lying about the other bit might not be seen as truly the best advice, so people may be inclined to not shelter in place but actually run away.

The one I saw said this:
Details of the suspect's identity are yet to be shared by authorities.

Which I took to mean name and sex. I didnt see them use gender.

That’s very interesting and as you say, shameful.

BBC should not be deliberately misleading as they are. They don't need to report this person described as a "female in a dress". They can simply say details have yet to be released.

BBC should have said sex of the shooter, not gender, which is a meaningless term.

Incidentally, I'd totally recommend watching international news channels. They all come with their individual biases but it's especially useful when the powers that be in the UK want to cover something up/ spin something a particular way.

Was watching Indian news on Rupert Lowe's grooming gang inquiry and the reporting did not pull any punches. Shameful that they're reporting on it more than the BBC.

There are multiple threads running on this and each one focuses somewhat on this. The description was issued as a ‘shelter in place’ order from the police while the event was ongoing. What do posters want here, an immediate description of the perpetrators actual appearance so that the public know what to look out for, or a delayed order while they piss about trying to decide whether or not the perpetrator is male or female, and risk other people being shot ? If that’s all the information the police had at the time, then they acted on what they had at the time. Everything else will be straightened out in the aftermath.

Isn't that basically what the BBC did? They said it was reported as a "female in a dress" but then went on to say authorities haven't confirmed details including gender of the shooter.

I’m really confused because the BBC’s reporting sounds almost identical to this?

I mean obviously the problem here is Canadian 'authorities' being willing to lie about sex even in a case as tragic and awful as this without obviously considering the impact of this lie on safety or the feelings of the victims' and their families.

Nevertheless, Al Jazeera has managed to be accurate and informative, subtly pointing out that sex is relevant in crimes such as these and sex has not been confirmed something the BBC has failed to do.

And that's how you do it.

Shame on the BBC.

It's a Greek tragedy in action - the fatal flaw of a stupidly narrow interpretation of "inclusion" slowly killing off the faith in public institutions that's necessary to a genuinely "inclusive" (as far as that absurd word's ever really possible) democracy. We can see the horrors this kind of approach contributed to over the pond (see Kara Dansky on the subject) - yet still we don't learn.

I hope Red doesn't mind me repeating what she says here, as it's so true and important, and she puts it better than me. I don't think it can be said often enough, and just wish some thinking person with influence at these MSM groups would read it.

...a sense of total betrayal and complicity by the authorities that comes across.

The theme that runs through this is loss of trust. That's a theme across politics generally anyway.

My point being this loss of trust in institutions is compounded by this sense. And actually harms transpeople way more than just reporting 'someone who identifies as trans' has done x, y or z because people associate the issues over trust AS WELL AS the actual crime so it becomes a double whammy of outrage.