The Tumbler Ridge tragedy has fueled vile anti-trans hate. But trans shooters are extremely rare.https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/02/the-tumbler-ridge-tragedy-has-fueled-vile-anti-trans-hate-but-trans-shooters-are-extremely-rare/ 🔗Molly Sprayregen (12 Feb 2026)
An 18-year-old trans woman has been identified by police as the suspected shooter responsible for nine deaths in the small Canadian town of Tumbler Ridge.
The tragedy has sparked an alarming wave of anti-trans rhetoric, with influential right-wing figures using it to spread dangerous misinformation on the prevalence of trans-perpetrated violence.
"This will just get uglier now for us and for our community as a whole, when our attention should be on the care of these victims and to support communities," Marni Panas, an Edmonton-based trans activist, told the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC).
"We feel the same things," she continued, adding that in addition to the agony she feels over what happened, she now must also deal with feeling less safe as a trans person. "We feel the sorrow, we feel the compassion, we feel the grief that all Canadians are for these families and these victims."
James Densley, co-founder of The Violence Prevention Project, which tracks mass shootings in the United States, spoke with CBC about the extreme rarity of transgender mass shooters and how people often overassign significance to the unusual cases.
"When a shooter is transgender, that fact becomes the story, especially on social media," Densley explained. "Whereas when the shooter is male, their identity is never really mentioned because it's just unremarkable."
Densley shared Violence Prevention Project data, which has found that 97.5 percent of mass shootings are perpetrated by cisgender men, two percent by cisgender women, and only half a percent by trans people.
