To think the sex of suspects should always be properly reported for violent or sexual crimes, the mass killer in Canada was male. That's important to know.

[SingleSexSpacesInSchools]

"Suspect in Canada shooting is identified as an 18-year-old with history of police visits to her home"

Is incorect. Women don't tend to go on mass killing sprees. Or rape many people.

https://apnews.com/article/canada-school-shooting-british-columbia-e577eb5689d1af42f6077a56368d4170

That data doesn’t come from news reports though. It comes from police records.

@HeadyLamarr sounds more like a cousin living close by not a sister.

It's not the primary issue with this particular event, no, but it's sure as hell an extremely important issue in terms of the implications of "post-truth" society and the reliability of the media.

Are the media not getting information for their reports from the police? Who says the police are any less captured?

The "female in a dress" line came from an emergency text alert sent out to the community as the situation was live. It wasn't a formal police statement. It wasn't a formal identification. It was an emergency alert based on a witness call.

The police would not have had time to find, identify, and send out a more accurate description.

Would it have been better if it said "man in a dress"? Yes, absolutely. Would even have been better if it just said "active shooter".

I'm still not going to fault the emergency services who were placing themselves in harms way for not being able to accurately ID and send out a positive report on that within minutes of receiving a call about an active shooter in a school.

Saying 'born a male' isn't 100% clear language. He IS male (or was).

Some reports did say it was a woman and there are numerous instances of male crimes being recorded as female crimes due to fetish/AGP

Born male, died male. The news reports should stick to the facts, including biology.

But the poster I was responding to was asking why knowing the gender is important as ‘murder is murder’.

Accurate recording of a perpetrator’s sex is very important. That’s the point I was making.

🙄

As soon as the matter was reported as ‘female in a dress’ I was certain it would turn out to be a bloke. Not least because if I was minded to go out and commit mass murder I’d be putting a comfy pair of joggers on - because my identity doesn’t rely on wearing pretty dresses and makeup 🙄

The initial alert being ‘female in a dress’ DOES matter because it completely misdirects about who to be on alert for. If there was a description of the dress or indeed the ‘female’ then I could accept it mattered less but it didn’t - because accuracy no longer matters. Being kind is king 🙄

Actually it is MORE important in cases like this to know the shooter was biologically male.

Because: mass shooting is an almost exclusively male crime. Statistically since the 1960s over 97% of mass shooting crimes have been perpetrated by men.

Therefore this person - who had been permitted to identify as female and socially transition from age 12 - was not female. Evidenced most meaningfully by the fact that when he “snapped” he committed one of the most masculine crimes he could possibly have committed. Psychologists have already pointed out that women and girls tend to turn negative feelings inwards. They don’t snap and aggressively attack their communities.

So this tells us something very important : that “feeling like a girl” for six years absolutely did not lead to this man behaving like a woman. Which therefore should make us question as a society: was it right to let this boy adopt the identity of a girl for six years?

So disingenuous.

I've seen a few posts on Facebook about it, maybe earlier news stories, where it says the shooter was female. These stories don't update, and people may not read further stories.
Many in the comments are correcting this saying "man in dress" and quite a few are saying "maybe if people had been kinder to her, she wouldn't have done it".

It distracts from the loss of life and horror of what happened, but I would really like this crime to be recorded as a male crime.

For that argument to hold true, you would need a massive amount of trans people running amok in murderous droves to make any impact on the stats

I also think it's silly to say 'woman with mental health problems.' One of the man's mental health problems was believing he was a woman, stop pandering to mass murderer!

Absolutely OP. The pussy footing around this by the media is disgusting.

I feel like I’m being gaslighted or part of some Orwellian experiment or something!

I’m telling anyone who’ll listen that it’s a lad, just in case they’re in any doubt.

Hot take. I dont think it matters what the sex of the shooter was. What difference would it make to the crime committed?

Well for one it annoys me if male crimes get attributed to women.

And it's in the public interest to know who has committed crimes, that's why names are released. Releasing the wrong sex warps public perception of risk and also means that the press are publishing known falsehoods.

It’s important that we have accurate statistics about who commits crimes. It influences policy, awareness and prevention activities and initiatives.

No you dont

This male will be added to the female stats not the male stats

The male killers % is understated
The female killer % is overstated

So the addition of even one additional killer to the female stats and removal of a male from the male stats move the % of female killers and adds a massive skew in the female data

Y1 : 1 killer female
Y2 : 1 killer female + 1 male killer called female

Y1: 1 killer
Y2: 2 killers

Calculate the % change from Y1 to Y2 and should the public be worried if they are told :

The year on year data of mass shooting by women has risen by __? %

This is a mass killing by a male.

The families and community will want a proper police investigation..

Should the survivors and other witnesses say that the killer was a female?

Should the State issue documentation and official findings that he was female?

I wonder if the families and community though is just as gas lighted as the rest of the country, they may well shut down discussion in the same way people on the thread are. Canada are a lost cause and now so is the EU parliament.

Do you not care whether the news we read and hear is factually correct or not?

I know we live in a world where truth is represented as fake news, and lies as the truth, but are we really at a stage where facts don't matter at all?

Yanbu. When I heard about the woman in a dress I thought, “Yeah” 🙄

Reddit asked yesterday ‘who was Jesse Van Rootselaar?’
I answered with a boy in a dress, not a woman or female as reported. Said reporting has to be accurate and women should not be tarred with this crime.
Got up this morning to a message that my account is being monitored as ‘reddit found that you broke Rule 1 because you promoted identity-based hate or attacks. ‘

I didn’t promote hate, I highlighted that the media was spreading misinformation. I appealed, but to no avail.