Jesse Van Rootselaar’s troubled life

Thousands of parents have consented to puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgical mutilation for their children because they believed transgender advocates when they said, “gender-affirming care saves lives.”

When parents of a boy with gender dysphoria are asked, “Would you rather have a dead son or a live daughter?,” the manipulation is clear.

That is presumably what happened to Jennifer Strang and her son, Jesse Van Rootselaar.

Six years after receiving so-called “gender-affirming care,” Jesse Van Rootselaar is dead. He killed himself earlier this month after committing one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canadian history. He killed his mom and 11-year-old brother at their home, then went to his former school, Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, and killed six more people (five students aged 12–13 and one teacher) before injuring 27 others.

“Gender-affirming care” didn’t help Jesse Van Rootselaar, nor the eight people he murdered. The wages of sin is death. It’s deadly, not life-saving, to affirm transgenderism. A society that encourages trans people to not value the bodies that God gave them shouldn’t expect them to value the bodies that God gave to others.

A 2022 Quebec study reveals that transgender youth are the most likely group to support violent radicalization. The increasingly prevalent examples of mass shootings by transgender people since the release of the study attest to its veracity.

Some of these shootings are politically motivated. If we tell people they are a victim of oppression because of their “identity” and we encourage them to pursue vengeance over their supposed oppressors, they will resort to violence.

However, I believe there is something deeper at play, something that is largely unreported, even on the right.

A recent study shows that individuals who underwent so-called gender-affirming surgery are 12 times more at risk of committing suicide. So transgender surgeries do not save lives. Instead, they put lives at greater risk. That’s not all. Since “gender-affirming care” makes individuals much more likely to commit suicide, it seems to make them more likely to commit homicide and mass murder.

In 2019, the National Institute of Justice funded a study by the Violence Project. According to the study, suicide prevention may help stop mass shooters. The Violence Project said:

A potential predictor of mass shootings is suicidality. … 80 percent of the perpetrators were suicidal before the shooting. … In every case, this was intended to be their final act. They are murderers, but they are murder-suicides. … One critical pathway to stop future massacres could be to focus on suicide prevention.

But measures to prevent teen suicides have failed. Teen suicides increased by 62% between 2007 and 2021. Secularism isn’t working. Image-bearers can only truly be helped by the God who made them in His image. The pathway to stopping future school shootings in Canada and America is God-affirming care, not “gender-affirming care.” God-affirming care saves lives; “gender-affirming care” takes lives.

Canada’s conversion therapy ban, however, protects gender ideology and essentially criminalizes Christian counsel against transgenderism. In other words, Canada has criminalized what could have helped Jesse Van Rootselaar.

Transgender activists, leftist politicians, and the media in Canada have condemned people for expressing their concerns about violence by transgender people. One transgender activist said of the shooting, “This is a mental-health issue. This has nothing to do with gender.”

I agree. Jesse Van Rootselaar’s problems had nothing to do with gender, properly speaking, which is why he shouldn’t have received “gender-affirming care.” Mainstream psychologists have identified a correlation between behavioral problems and transgenderism in children, but they interpret behavioral problems as symptoms of distress caused by transgenderism rather than viewing transgenderism as an extension of behavioral problems, which ultimately buries the real underlying issues.

However, there is another underlying issue that no one is discussing. A few days after the school shooting, Jesse Van Rootselaar’s father said, “I was estranged from [Jesse] and was not part of his life.”

Research shows that the vast majority of school shooters were raised in dysfunctional or fatherless homes. Fatherlessness is the biggest predictor of violent crime by teenagers. That is why 85% of youth in prisons come from fatherless homes. Fatherlessness is also one of the biggest causes of gender dysphoria.

Fatherlessness can confuse boys about their masculinity. Boys without fathers in the home are more likely to suffer confusion about their identity. A boy without a male mentor at home might not feel like a male in his body.

I grew up without a father. I didn’t struggle with gender dysphoria, but I had insecurities about my masculinity. For some boys, the insecurities can lead to resentment against their fathers and rebellion against their Creator and bodies. A Reddit user said:

I'm transsexual and I think I recently figured out what actually caused it. Right before the onset of puberty up until about 15-16 I was significantly more feminine than the boys my age. … It certainly didn't help that my dad was emotionally distant and toxic in a way that caused me to be afraid of him rather than seeing him as a mentor of sorts. … What we need is some way to give young boys without present fathers a father figure who is present and gives a healthy view on masculinity and who can guide the child.

So what happened at Tumbler Ridge isn’t just another horrifying example of the dangers of “gender-affirming care.” It’s also yet another example of the perils of fatherlessness.