Dead Wild Roses

Stopping Rules: Why the transgender debate won’t settle until institutions stop being asked to referee metaphysics

February 19, 2026 in Culture, Medicine & Institutions, Politics, Public Policy | Tags: Cass Review, Free Speech, Gender Ideology, Institutions, NHS England, pediatric medicine, pluralism, sports policy, Stopping rules, WPATH | by The Arbourist | 1 comment

This essay is not an argument against transgender adults living freely and being treated decently. It is an argument about a specific set of claims—metaphysical, political, and clinical—that tends to generate persistent institutional conflict because it lacks a shared stopping rule. By “stopping rule,” I mean a principled boundary that both sides can recognize as legitimate: a line where accommodation ends and coercion begins, or where uncertainty requires caution. When subjective identity claims are treated as authoritative and dissent is treated as harm, disputes recur across domains—speech norms, public policy, and pediatric medicine—because there is no common adjudicator capable of resolving the underlying disagreement.

1) Thesis and scope: what is being argued, and what is not

The claim here is procedural. Whatever one’s moral intuitions, systems built to enforce contested metaphysics predictably produce friction that neither side can permanently “win.” A pluralist society can enforce civility and prohibit harassment. It cannot, without escalating conflict, require citizens and institutions to treat an internally felt identity as the final authority over publicly legible categories—especially when those categories structure law, safety, and fairness.

2) Metaphysical claim: identity as authoritative reality

The metaphysical claim, stated minimally, is: when sex and self-declared gender conflict, identity is treated as the authoritative reality for how others must speak and for how institutions must categorize. In a liberal society, people routinely request courtesy; the tension begins when courtesy becomes a duty enforced by institutional sanctions, because that converts disagreements about contested concepts into compliance problems.

The mechanism is structural rather than psychological. If a proposition is treated as morally obligatory yet largely unverifiable, enforcement shifts from evidence to norms, and from norms to penalties. This does not require attributing motives; it is a predictable consequence of asking public systems to operationalize contested metaphysics. The cost is an expansion of “speech governance,” where ordinary interpersonal mistakes or dissenting beliefs are treated as policy violations rather than social disputes. The verdict: making subjective identity authoritative at the level of public rulemaking tends to destabilize shared norms, because the principle contains no internal boundary that can settle recurring disputes.

3) Political claim: institutions forced to referee contested categories

The political claim extends the metaphysical one: public institutions must treat identity as authoritative in classification and access. The “no stopping rule” problem becomes concrete when policy must decide eligibility, categories, and competing rights. Sport is not the whole controversy, but it is a clear case study because sex-segregated categories exist to preserve fairness under stable biological differences.

World Athletics’ 2023 regulations excluding transgender women who have experienced male puberty from elite female competition were an explicit attempt to draw a boundary grounded in performance-relevant biology rather than identity.(worldathletics.org) This example does not “prove” the broader thesis; it illustrates the governing dilemma: once identity is treated as determinative, any sex-based boundary becomes contestable on the same logic, and institutions are pulled into continuous adjudication. The cost is not only policy churn but legitimacy loss, as significant segments of the public come to see institutions as enforcing contested beliefs rather than administering neutral rules. The verdict: when institutions are made to referee contested metaphysical claims, policy disputes harden into identity conflicts and become difficult to resolve through ordinary pluralist compromise.

4) Clinical claim: minors, uncertainty, and the need for evidentiary brakes

The clinical claim is narrower and higher-stakes: affirmation-first protocols are often presented as the evidence-based default for minors, despite ongoing disputes about evidence quality, long-term outcomes, and appropriate thresholds for irreversible interventions.

The mechanism is again about stopping rules. In pediatrics, where patients may have limited capacity to grasp lifelong tradeoffs and where interventions can be difficult to reverse, uncertainty normally triggers caution: structured assessment, conservative pathways, and high evidentiary standards. In England, the Cass Review’s recommendations prompted major service redesign, and NHS England’s implementation document outlines steps already taken and planned in response to those recommendations.(england.nhs.uk) The UK government also announced that emergency restrictions on the private sale and supply of puberty blockers would be made indefinite following advice from the Commission on Human Medicines, citing safety concerns; the DHSC explainer situates this within a broader shift toward research frameworks.(gov.uk)

The point is not that UK policy settles the science. The point is procedural: a major public health system treated evidentiary uncertainty as a reason to tighten pathways and emphasize research structures. The cost of overstating certainty is predictable—trust erosion among families, clinicians, and the public when policy appears to run ahead of evidence. The verdict: for minors, uncertainty should operate as a brake; when it does not, clinical decision-making becomes vulnerable to political and ideological pressure.

5) Steelman, with a credibility caveat: what proponents argue, and why WPATH cannot be treated as neutral authority

A fair steelman starts with the humane premise: some young people experience profound distress; social rejection correlates with worse mental health; supportive environments may reduce suffering; and for adults, liberal societies generally presume wide autonomy over body and presentation. Observational research has reported short-term associations between receiving puberty blockers or hormones and lower reported depression or suicidality among transgender and nonbinary youth, while still facing the usual limitations of nonrandomized designs (selection effects, confounding, short follow-up).(jamanetwork.com)

Advocates often cite WPATH’s Standards of Care (SOC8) as a professional consensus reference point. A publishable essay, however, has to include a procedural caveat: SOC8 is now contested as an uncontested authority, particularly for minors, due to public disputes about guideline-development process and evidentiary representation. The “WPATH Files” publication by Environmental Progress alleges internal discussions inconsistent with the public posture of evidentiary confidence.(environmentalprogress.org) Separately, an HHS report alleged that during SOC8 development, WPATH suppressed certain systematic reviews considered potentially undermining to preferred protocols.(opa.hhs.gov) WPATH and USPATH responded by disputing key characterizations and criticizing the HHS report, framing it as misrepresenting evidence, and noting constraints around ongoing litigation and related processes.(wpath.org)

The responsible conclusion is limited but important: SOC8 may still be used to describe the best-case articulation of the pro-affirmation position, but it cannot function as a neutral “settled science” stamp—especially in a pediatric domain where evidentiary confidence must be demonstrable rather than asserted. The verdict: steelman the humane intent and the reported short-term associations; do not outsource epistemic certainty to a guideline whose development and representation are under active public dispute.

6) Synthesis: stopping rules as the governance solution

The practical question is governance, not moral panic: can a pluralistic society accommodate people without compelling metaphysical assent, and can pediatric medicine proceed without overstating certainty? The answer is unglamorous: stopping rules.

In institutions, stopping rules mean enforcing civil treatment and anti-harassment norms while refusing to treat metaphysical agreement as a condition of participation in public life. In medicine, stopping rules mean evidence thresholds, transparent review, and heightened caution for minors where long-term outcomes remain contested. If stopping rules are refused, conflict tends to migrate: from clinics to courts, from policy to punishment, from persuasion to compulsion. The cost is durable polarization and degraded trust in institutions. The verdict: if the goal is social peace and clinical integrity, the burden is on advocates and opponents alike to articulate boundaries that are evidence-responsive, rights-consistent, and enforceable without demanding ideological conformity.

Glossary

Affirmation-first: A clinical approach that treats a person’s stated gender identity as true and prioritizes support for it; critics argue it may reduce exploratory assessment, especially for minors.
Cass Review: Independent review commissioned by NHS England into child and adolescent gender services; its recommendations prompted service redesign and tighter evidence standards.(england.nhs.uk)
Observational study: Research that observes outcomes without random assignment; can show association but generally cannot prove causation.(pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Puberty blockers (GnRHa): Medications that suppress pubertal development; debated in youth gender medicine due to evidence-quality and risk/benefit uncertainty.(gov.uk)
SOC8: WPATH Standards of Care, version 8 (2022), widely cited in gender medicine; currently disputed as neutral authority in some public controversies.(environmentalprogress.org)
Stopping rule: A principled boundary that can settle recurring disputes (e.g., evidence thresholds for minors; category rules in sport).
WPATH Files: A publication of alleged internal WPATH materials by Environmental Progress; relevant here because it is part of an ongoing credibility dispute about guideline development.(environmentalprogress.org)

References

NHS England, Implementing the Cass Review recommendations (PDF). https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/PRN01451-implementing-the-cass-review-recommendations.pdf
NHS England, Children and young people’s gender services: implementing the Cass Review recommendations (long read). https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/children-and-young-peoples-gender-services-implementing-the-cass-review-recommendations/
UK Department of Health and Social Care, “Ban on puberty blockers to be made indefinite on experts’ advice” (11 Dec 2024). https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ban-on-puberty-blockers-to-be-made-indefinite-on-experts-advice
DHSC Media Blog, “Puberty blockers: what you need to know.” https://healthmedia.blog.gov.uk/2024/12/11/puberty-blockers-what-you-need-to-know/
World Athletics press release (Mar 2023) on female eligibility. https://worldathletics.org/news/press-releases/council-meeting-march-2023-russia-belarus-female-eligibility
World Athletics eligibility regulations PDF. https://worldathletics.org/download/download?filename=c50f2178-3759-4d1c-8fbc-370f6aef4370.pdf&urlslug=C3.5A%20%E2%80%93%20Eligibility%20Regulations%20Transgender%20Athletes%20%E2%80%93%20effective%2031%20March%202023
Tordoff et al., JAMA Network Open (2022). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2789423
Environmental Progress, “The WPATH Files.” https://environmentalprogress.org/big-news/wpath-files
HHS, Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria (Nov 2025). https://opa.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/2025-11/gender-dysphoria-report.pdf
WPATH/USPATH response (May 2025). https://wpath.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/WPATH-USPATH-Response-to-HHS-Report-02May2025-3.pdf

We Didn’t “Discover” Trans Kids — We Built a Script, Then We Built a System

February 18, 2026 in Canada, Culture, Gender Issues, Queer Bullshit | Tags: Children, Institutions, Medical Evidence, Schools, Transgender ideology | by The Arbourist | 3 comments

“Trans kids didn’t exist until we created them” is blunt phrasing, but the mechanism underneath it is real: kids don’t merely reveal identities; they adopt the identity-models a culture supplies and rewards. Adolescence is a meaning-factory. Pain looks for an explanation. Alienation looks for a tribe. If adults and institutions elevate one interpretive story for distress and then attach moral prestige, protection-from-questioning, and instant community to that story we should expect more kids to step into it. Not because every child is “lying,” but because this is how social scripts spread: they simplify suffering, convert it into status, and offer belonging on demand.

Proponents will tell a cleaner story. They claim “trans kids have always existed” and we’re simply seeing higher visibility in a less stigmatizing age. They claim affirmation is harm reduction. They claim the clinical pathway is cautious, selective, and evidence-informed. And they claim the “social contagion” frame is just a pretext to dismiss real dysphoria. That’s the best version of their public narrative: visibility + safety + compassion + careful medicine. The problem is that this narrative asks society to treat disputed assumptions as settled truth and then to treat moral confidence as a substitute for evidence – precisely in the domain where evidence must be strongest: irreversible interventions for minors.

That’s where the ideology runs aground. The evidence base for pediatric medical transition—especially puberty suppression—has repeatedly been assessed as weak and low-certainty. The York-led systematic review published in Archives of Disease in Childhood concluded there is a lack of high-quality research on puberty suppression in adolescents with gender dysphoria/incongruence, and that no firm conclusions can be drawn about impacts on dysphoria or mental/psychosocial outcomes. A 2025 systematic review in the same journal similarly characterized the best available evidence on puberty blockers’ effects as mostly very low certainty. This isn’t a minor academic quibble. It’s the difference between “we have strong reasons to believe this helps, on balance” and “we cannot be confident what this does to developing bodies and minds.” When the confidence level is that low, the ethical default is not acceleration; it’s restraint.

And restraint is exactly what some public health systems have moved toward—because the claims didn’t cash out in robust evidence. In the UK, the NHS stopped routine prescribing of puberty blockers for under-18s and restricted them to research context, and the government moved to make restrictions indefinite after expert advice citing insufficient evidence of safety. NHS England’s Cass implementation materials also frame puberty blockers as part of a research program with long-term follow-up, alongside evaluation of psychosocial interventions. That is not what “settled science” looks like. That is what a field looks like when it is finally admitting—late—that it has been making high-stakes moves on thin ice.

Now zoom out from the clinic to the culture, because this is the part people keep refusing to say out loud: the social environment is not neutral. Once schools, media, and professional bodies moralize one framework (“affirmation is care”) and stigmatize alternatives (“questioning is harm”), you get a one-way ratchet. A child declares an identity; the adults are trained that the declaration must be treated as authoritative; “exploration” becomes suspect if it doesn’t begin with affirmation; and any friction is rebranded as abuse. That moral framing isn’t compassion—it’s epistemic closure. And epistemic closure is exactly how you end up routing heterogeneous adolescent distress into a single explanatory funnel.

Because the presenting population isn’t one thing. It’s a mix: anxiety, depression, trauma, obsessive traits, social contagion dynamics, autism-spectrum features, sexual discomfort, body dysmorphia, internalized homophobia, loneliness, and the general misery of puberty in a screen-soaked status economy. Give that mix one glamorous story with institutional backing, and you will pull more children into it. You will also make it harder for them to exit, because the identity becomes socially defended and medically reinforced. Once irreversible steps begin, doubt becomes expensive. Regret becomes unspeakable. The “care model” becomes self-protecting: the deeper you go, the harder it is to admit the initial certainty was misplaced.

This is why I don’t treat “gender-affirming care” as a neutral phrase. It’s marketing language for a clinical posture that—too often—front-loads conclusion and back-loads caution. Real care for minors under uncertainty looks boring: slow assessment, serious differential diagnosis, treatment of comorbidities, family stability, and time. Real care doesn’t require anyone to be cruel. It requires adults to resist the temptation to turn a child’s distress into an adult moral performance. It requires institutions to stop rewarding certainty and punishing skepticism. It requires the basic humility to say: “We might not know what’s going on yet, and that means we don’t get to make irreversible bets with children.”

If we don’t change course, the end state is predictable. More kids will be swept into an identity pipeline that confers instant meaning but demands escalating commitment. More parents will be coerced by policy and stigma rather than persuaded by evidence. More clinicians will practice defensively in a moralized climate. And the backlash won’t stay polite or surgical; it will arrive as a blunt instrument, because careful critics were dismissed as hateful for too long. That’s the social damage: not merely the trend itself, but the institutional refusal to admit uncertainty until the human costs become impossible to ignore.

The Tumbler Ridge – Disarming Apologia

February 17, 2026 in Canada, Politics | Tags: Mass School Shooting, Trans Violence, Tumbler Ridge | by The Arbourist | Leave a comment

The Firewall and the Body Count: Media Complicity After Tumbler Ridge

February 16, 2026 in Canada, Media | Tags: activist journalism, Gatekeeping, Global News, journalism standards, journalistic objectivity, media accountability, Media Complicity, media ethics, media hygiene, narrative firewall, reputational risk, Tumbler Ridge | by The Arbourist | Leave a comment

The first duty of public journalism after a massacre is simple: name the dead, establish the sequence, and tell the truth about what is known and what is not. That is media hygiene. That is how a public learns. That is how systems get fixed.

Instead, we got a firewall.

In the immediate wake of the Tumbler Ridge killings—home first, then school; five students dead, an education assistant dead; the perpetrator dead by suicide—the national conversation was quickly steered away from forensic clarity and toward reputational triage. In at least one major network segment, the frame was explicit: the story was “anti-trans disinformation” after the shooting. Not the chain of events. Not the failure points. Not the institutional blind spots. The message was prophylactic: watch what you say; the real danger is how people might talk about it.

This is not merely tone-deaf. It’s a form of complicity.

Not complicity in the act, obviously—complicity in what follows: the slow, predictable replacement of accountability with moral theatre. When a newsroom’s first instinct is to manage narrative risk, it begins to treat facts as flammable materials—things to handle with gloves, filter through approved experts, and keep away from ordinary citizens who might draw the “wrong” conclusions.

That is how gatekeepers lose legitimacy. And it is how tragedies become recurring.

The mechanism: switch the object of fear

Watch the pivot closely and it’s always the same move.

A real event happens in the world—blood, bodies, families blown open.
The newsroom identifies a second-order risk: public anger, political fallout, reputational damage to a protected consensus.
The coverage shifts from “What happened?” to “What must we prevent?”
Prevention is defined as protecting a narrative, not repairing a system.

The object of fear changes. Instead of fearing the next killing, the institutions fear the next argument.

So they tell you the problem is “misinformation.” They tell you the danger is “conflation.” They tell you this is a moment for “community support” and “protecting vulnerable people.” And those may all be decent impulses—in their proper place, at their proper time. But as a lead story? As the framing lens? As the moral of the segment?

That’s not reporting. That’s crisis communications.

“Don’t conflate” becomes a solvent

One line in particular functions like a solvent in the modern media ecosystem:

Don’t conflate an identity with violence.

Fine. True in the general case. But after a massacre, deployed as the first moral reflex, it does more than discourage scapegoating. It quietly discourages inquiry.

Because inquiry is not a vibe. Inquiry is a chain:

What was the timeline?
What were the warning signs?
Who saw what?
What interventions were tried?
Where did they fail?
What policies shaped those failures?
What is going to change next week because children are dead?

A solvent doesn’t “refute” those questions. It dissolves the social permission to ask them. It turns scrutiny into contamination.

That is why it feels so out of touch to grieving parents: it is journalism behaving as if the central public hazard is discussion rather than risk.

Media complicity looks like this

Complicity, in this context, is not about malice. It’s about habit.

It’s the habitual choice to protect institutions from accountability by rerouting attention:

From the scene to the discourse.
From the victims to the community statement.
From the timeline to the think-piece.
From “what failed?” to “what mustn’t be said?”

A professional newsroom used to be allergic to this. The old standards—imperfect, often biased, frequently arrogant—still had a core ethic: facts first, advocacy last. If advocacy entered the frame, it was labeled as such. If uncertainty existed, it was named. If a claim couldn’t be verified, it didn’t get aired as settled truth.

Today, too often, we get advocacy laundering: press-release moralizing presented as news, with the added twist that dissent is treated as a moral defect rather than a factual dispute.

That is not neutrality. That is narrative commitment wearing a blazer.

What “media hygiene” used to mean (and must mean again)

A return to old standards isn’t nostalgia. It’s practical survival. Here’s what media hygiene looks like when it’s done properly—especially after mass violence:

1) Victims first.
Name the dead. Describe the community. Make the loss real before you make it useful.

2) Sequence before interpretation.
Timeline, confirmed facts, and clearly separated unknowns. No moral “lesson” until the basic chain is established.

3) Mechanisms over slogans.
If firearms were involved, the mechanism is access and storage—specific failures, not national clichés. If mental health is part of the background, the mechanism is escalation thresholds and follow-up—specific gaps, not hashtags.

4) No prophylactic framing.
Do not lead with “misinformation,” “backlash,” or “what this might fuel.” Those are downstream effects. They are not the event.

5) Don’t pre-label inquiry as bigotry.
Scapegoating is wrong. So is shutting down investigation by treating questions as dangerous.

6) Separation of church and newsroom.
Advocacy voices may be relevant. They must not become the controlling lens. Journalists should interrogate them the way they interrogate police, politicians, and corporations.

7) Corrections that cost you pride.
If you get something wrong, correct it prominently, not performatively. Trust is built when gatekeepers admit error without theatrics.

None of this requires “hating” anyone. It requires doing the job.

The consequence of failing the job

When media behaves like a narrative defense force, the public does not become more compassionate. It becomes more suspicious. It begins to assume that every tragedy will be translated into a pre-approved moral. It begins to look elsewhere for facts—often to sources far less responsible, far more conspiratorial, and far more cynical.

That is the boomerang effect of the firewall: the attempt to prevent “bad interpretations” produces a credibility vacuum, and the vacuum fills with poison.

If journalists want to stop that cycle, they can’t do it by lecturing the public into compliance. They can only do it by earning trust the old way: through sequence, clarity, restraint, and the disciplined refusal to turn atrocity into messaging.

Because if the first move after a massacre is to protect a narrative, the system will not learn.

And if the system does not learn, it will repeat. 🕯️

Global News – The Headline That Gave the Game Away

February 15, 2026 in Canada, Gender Issues, Media, Politics | Tags: Mass Shooting, media analysis, Media Fail, Media Narratives over truth, Tumbler Ridge | by The Arbourist | 3 comments

Global National ran an “overnight” segment after the Tumbler Ridge massacre under a framing that is, in its own way, a confession: “Anti-trans disinformation circulates after mass shooting.” (Global News)

Not Who died? Not How did this happen? Not What failed? Not What do we change Monday morning?

The story, as packaged, is not forensic. It’s prophylactic. The first institutional instinct is not to look hard at systems and sequences, but to manage reputational spillover: prevent a narrative from becoming “dangerous,” protect a constituency from backlash, and pre-label certain lines of inquiry as moral contamination.

That choice matters, because a town is burying children.

And because when journalism reaches for a firewall before it reaches for an autopsy, it stops being a public service and becomes a public-relations function.

What Actually Happened: Sequence Before Sermon

On February 10, 2026, an 18-year-old, Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed people at home and then attacked Tumbler Ridge Secondary School before dying by suicide. Multiple accounts report that the attack began with the killing of the shooter’s mother and 11-year-old half-brother, followed by the school shooting. (The Wall Street Journal)

The victims include five students (ages 12–13) and a 39-year-old education assistant, with the mother and half-brother killed beforehand. Names and details have been published widely and confirmed in Canadian Press reporting and related coverage. (People.com) The BC RCMP also issued a public confirmation of deceased victims. (RCMP)

That’s the baseline: a chain of events with a clear order—home, then school—ending in a pile of dead kids and a town whose grief will not be solved by better discourse hygiene.

Sequence matters because it points to systems:

What warnings existed and where?
What interventions were attempted and by whom?
How were firearms stored and accessed?
What did the school know, and when?
What did police know, and what tools were used (or not used)?
What gaps exist between “we did a wellness check” and “we prevented a catastrophe”?

Reporting indicates a history of mental-health-related police interactions and investigators reviewing digital footprint and online activity. (The Wall Street Journal)

These are the questions you chase when you treat murder as a real event in the world—not as a pretext for messaging.

What Global Chose to Do Instead

Global’s piece does not begin at the crime scene. It begins in the information ecosystem.

In the related Global coverage and clip description, the emphasis is on how the suspected shooter’s trans identity is “being used to fuel misinformation online,” and the segment elevates advocacy voices concerned about anti-trans sentiment. (Global News)

To be blunt: they treat the massacre as a vector for disinformation, rather than as a symptom of institutional failure.

This isn’t a claim that concerns about backlash are always illegitimate. It’s a claim about priority and timing.

You can caution against scapegoating without making that caution the lead, the thesis, and the moral center—while the basic forensic questions remain unasked in the same breath.

Worse, the frame is fortified by official moral language. BC’s Human Rights Commissioner issued a statement warning against conflating trans identity with violence and calling such conflation “incorrect, irresponsible and frankly dangerous.” (bchumanrights.ca)

Again: that statement may be true as a general principle—identity is not destiny—but it is also rhetorically useful as a solvent. It dissolves scrutiny by implying that scrutiny is the harm.

And in the current media climate, once a question is placed inside the “dangerous” bucket, it stops being investigated and starts being policed.

That is what narrative-commitment looks like: not lying, necessarily—just selecting a reality tunnel and treating alternate tunnels as morally suspicious.

Why This Reads as Out of Touch

Because the public is not asking for a sermon. The public is asking for accountability you can measure.

When parents hear “anti-trans disinformation” as the headline after a school attack, the implied hierarchy is:

protect the narrative
protect the vulnerable (as defined by the segment)
later, perhaps, protect the public

That hierarchy does real damage.

It tells the bereaved: “We have already decided what the real emergency is.”
It tells the skeptical: “Your questions are morally tainted.”
It tells institutions: “If your policies intersect with a protected narrative, you will be insulated from the normal post-disaster autopsy.”

And it tells everyone else to stop trusting the gatekeepers.

Journalism doesn’t lose trust because it has values. It loses trust because it has values that pre-empt facts.

What a Forensic Post-Tumbler Ridge Agenda Looks Like

If you want a serious follow-up—one that serves victims, not narratives—here are the obvious “system” targets. None of this requires scapegoating an identity. It requires the courage to audit failures like adults.

1) A full public timeline, cross-agency

A public accounting that stitches together: school records, police contacts, mental-health interventions, family context, and warning signs—chronologically, with decision points. This is how you find the failure nodes.

2) Firearms access: storage, compliance, and enforcement gaps

Reporting indicates multiple firearms were used and investigators are examining how they were obtained. (The Wall Street Journal)
The question is not “gun control” as a slogan. The question is: What specific mechanisms failed—safe storage, licensing, supervision, enforcement, reporting? Fix the mechanism, not the talking point.

3) Threat assessment and school safety protocols that actually bite

Most institutions are good at paperwork and bad at escalation. Schools need a protocol that converts “concerning behavior” into structured threat assessment, and threat assessment into action—without letting “this might stigmatize” become the veto.

4) Mental-health intervention that doesn’t stop at “wellness checks”

If repeated mental-health-related police visits are part of the story—as reporting suggests—then the system question is: what happens after the tenth check? (NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth)
Communities need a bridge between crisis contact and sustained containment: follow-up, risk management, family support, and clear thresholds for escalation.

5) Media standards: separate “backlash management” from “causal inquiry”

A newsroom can do both—but not in a way that treats one as taboo. Post-massacre coverage should have a simple rule:

Name the victims.
Lay out the timeline.
Identify plausible failure points.
Present what is known, what is not, and what must be investigated.
Only then: address secondary narratives (backlash, misinformation, online dynamics).

Right now, too many outlets reverse that order.

The Real Test: Can We Ask the Questions Without Being Moralized Into Silence?

There is a difference between scapegoating and scrutiny.

Scrutiny is what you owe dead children.

If the media class cannot bring itself to treat Tumbler Ridge as a forensic event first—if it must immediately translate it into a morality play about discourse—then it is not merely “out of touch.” It is structurally incapable of learning.

And systems that cannot learn repeat.

Not because people are evil, but because the firewall held—until it didn’t.

The DWR Sunday Religious Disservice – Where did the “Colonialism Bad” advocates go?

February 15, 2026 in Religion | Tags: Hypocrisy, Islam, The DWR Sunday Religious Disservice | by The Arbourist | 2 comments

Tumbler Ridge: When Narrative Protection Beats the News

February 14, 2026 in Canada, Education, Gender Issues, Politics | by The Arbourist | Leave a comment

On February 10, 2026, Tumbler Ridge, B.C. (population ~2,400) was hit with a catastrophe it will carry for decades. RCMP have confirmed eight victims: five students aged 12–13, one education assistant (39), and—before the school attack—the shooter’s mother (39) and 11-year-old half-brother. The perpetrator, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, then died by suicide.

Name the dead, because that’s the baseline for honest coverage. Abel Mwansa (12). Ezekiel Schofield (13). Kylie Smith (12). Zoey Benoit (12). Ticaria Lampert (12). Shannda Aviugana-Durand (39). Jennifer Jacobs (39). Emmett Jacobs (11). The family tributes are almost unbearable. Ticaria’s mother called her “my Tiki torch… a blazing light in the darkness.” Kylie’s father pleaded with the world to “hold your kids tight.” This is a tight community. The loss isn’t “eight fatalities.” It’s eight holes in a town where most people can point to the exact place those kids used to stand.

Now the media problem: within days, a noticeable slice of Canadian coverage pivoted to managing the public’s reaction to the shooter’s transgender identification. Global News ran a segment framed around “misinformation about trans people” being fueled by the shooting. The Tyee published an opinion piece warning that suffering “should never be weaponized,” focused less on the dead children than on backlash narratives. Even wire coverage foregrounded the shooter’s identity and used female pronouns while naming victims in the same breath—an editorial decision that tells you what frame is being protected.

Let me be precise about the critique, because this is where defenders hide behind a strawman. Nobody reasonable is arguing that “all trans people are responsible” for anything. The question is simpler: why was the instinct—right after slaughtered children—to warn Canadians about transphobia and “disinformation” rather than interrogate the failure chain that got us here? Reporting has already described a history of serious mental health issues and police encounters connected to the shooter, including firearm-related interactions. What interventions happened? What warnings were missed? How did access to weapons occur? Those are the adult questions. “Don’t be mean online” is not an answer to a mass killing.

This is what ideological capture looks like in practice: a hierarchy of empathy enforced by institutions. The victims are mourned, yes—but the “secondary story” rapidly becomes protecting a narrative category from reputational harm. That is not compassion. It’s brand management, and it trains the public to understand tragedy through approved lenses: some facts are treated as volatile, some questions as taboo, and anyone who notices patterns is pre-emptively suspected of malice.

Tumbler Ridge deserves better than that. Journalism’s first duty in a massacre is not to pre-scold the audience. It is to tell the truth, foreground the human cost, and pursue the causal chain without fear or favour. Start with the dead kids. Keep them at the center. And then do the hard work—because if the press won’t, the vacuum gets filled by cynics, activists, and conspiracy merchants. That isn’t “safety.” It’s surrender.

References

RCMP victim identifications & family statements: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/livestory/active-shooter-alert-tumbler-ridge-secondary-school-bc-live-updates-9.7083740
CNN victim profiles: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/13/americas/victims-tumbler-ridge-shooting-intl
Global News on “misinformation”: https://globalnews.ca/news/11667066/tumbler-ridge-shooting-misinformation-trans-people/
The Tyee op-ed: https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2026/02/12/Suffering-Should-Never-Be-Weaponized-Tumbler-Ridge-Tragedy/
BBC/RCMP timeline: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e98w35qyjo

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Dead Wild Roses

1) Thesis and scope: what is being argued, and what is not

2) Metaphysical claim: identity as authoritative reality

3) Political claim: institutions forced to referee contested categories

4) Clinical claim: minors, uncertainty, and the need for evidentiary brakes

5) Steelman, with a credibility caveat: what proponents argue, and why WPATH cannot be treated as neutral authority

6) Synthesis: stopping rules as the governance solution

Glossary

References

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The mechanism: switch the object of fear

“Don’t conflate” becomes a solvent

Media complicity looks like this

What “media hygiene” used to mean (and must mean again)

The consequence of failing the job

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What Actually Happened: Sequence Before Sermon

What Global Chose to Do Instead

Why This Reads as Out of Touch

What a Forensic Post-Tumbler Ridge Agenda Looks Like

1) A full public timeline, cross-agency

2) Firearms access: storage, compliance, and enforcement gaps

3) Threat assessment and school safety protocols that actually bite

4) Mental-health intervention that doesn’t stop at “wellness checks”

5) Media standards: separate “backlash management” from “causal inquiry”

The Real Test: Can We Ask the Questions Without Being Moralized Into Silence?

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