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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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Did you know that 10 people were killed by a (potentially transgender) school shooter in Canada yesterday?

There is hardly anything about this in the American media today. It’s the third-billed story at best, behind Nancy Guthrie kidnapping updates and the FAA closing airspace over El Paso. Right-wing influencers have mentioned it, but it almost seems as if they are going through the motions. It’s not even trending on Twitter. I don’t feel the raw anger and hatred from when the Catholic school in Minnesota was hit.

The only explanation I can think of is that the shooting happened in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which is in the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants to send reporters to Yukon-lite in February, so we get no coverage.

No wonder Bezos laid these people off.

At the moment, this is the seventh most viewed story on the Guardian.

They call her by her preferred pronouns, but also mention that she was trans:

“I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male who, approximately six years ago, began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly,” he said.

Naturally they do not spin it as 'trans shooter' but mainly focus on mental health issues, which I find fair enough.

So if you are implying that the woke MSM is burying the story I think you are mistaken.

First paragraph:

Canadian police have identified the suspect who carried out a school massacre in remote British Columbia as an 18-year old woman with a history of mental health problems.

The article is 1,291 words long, and it's not until the tenth paragraph, 375 words in that we get any indication that the perpetrator was anything other than a "woman" in the traditional (i.e. adult female) sense of the term: "McDonald said police 'identified the suspect as they chose to be identified' in public and in social media". How many people are going to read down that far?

Also surely not a coincidence that they didn't include a photo of the perpetrator (despite doing so for the Brown University shooting and this UK shooting in September 2024), as no one could possibly mistake him for an adult female.

They may not be burying the story, but they're certainly running interference.

CNN had an article at the top of the webpage this morning. It refers to the shooter as female, which is strictly false, and intermittently swaps between "she" and "they" for pronouns. Eventually, far down the article, it quotes someone else explaining that the shooter was born male.

The central philosophical grounding of transgenderism is that gender is socially constructed (and correspondingly malleable) and thus separable from the biological notion of sex. The idea that a "woman" (gender) is not necessarily "female" (sex) may be arguable, but it is at least comprehensible. Forget expecting future Supreme Court justices to know what woman means--journalists don't even seem to know what female means. Or, more likely: they are part of the trans prospiracy to simply deny facts about biological human sex typing. The sex/gender distinction was drawn for political purposes, and now is being collapsed for those same political purposes. They are pointing at deer and calling them horses.

"Running interference," indeed.

The central philosophical grounding of transgenderism is that gender is socially constructed (and correspondingly malleable) and thus separable from the biological notion of sex. The idea that a "woman" (gender) is not necessarily "female" (sex) may be arguable, but it is at least comprehensible. Forget expecting future Supreme Court justices to know what woman means--journalists don't even seem to know what female means. Or, more likely: they are part of the trans prospiracy to simply deny facts about biological human sex typing. The sex/gender distinction was drawn for political purposes, and now is being collapsed for those same political purposes.

Because the anti-transgender faction, in response to the distinction as initially drawn by the pro-trans faction, was to take social matters of 'gender' and re-cast them as matters of 'sex', thus attempting to undo the exact goal of the pro-trans side, namely that biological sex ought not determine anything in social situations.

That principle is downstream of a more general left-wing ethos, that it is unjust for people to be limited by the circumstances of their birth, and that where we have the ability to make people not thus limited, we ought to do so. From this axiom, one can derive many other left-coded beliefs, which are left as an exercise for the reader.

That principle is downstream of a more general left-wing ethos, that it is unjust for people to be limited by the circumstances of their birth

But with rare exceptions, just about every trans person is quick to claim that they didn't choose to be trans, that they knew from a very young age that they were "really" a girl, that it's not their fault they were born a girl trapped inside a boy's body. Taken at face value, this implies that their (our?) gender identity is just as innate as their sex. Why is it unjust to limit someone on the basis of one trait they have no control over (their sex) but not another trait they have no control over (their gender identity)?