There are dots here that should be connected.
There are dots here that should be connected.
W e have been confronted this week by two unspeakable but familiar atrocities in nearly as many days.
A high school hockey match in Rhode Island erupted in chaos on Monday when 56-year-old Robert Dorgan, also known as Roberta Esposito, opened fire on his estranged family. Dorgan targeted his ex-wife and three children, as well as a family friend who was watching the game, before he turned his gun on himself. The children’s mother died at the scene. One of Dorgan’s children passed away at the hospital. Three more victims remain in critical condition as of this writing.
Dorgan was described by a family member as being “very sick” with “mental health issues,” his gender dysphoria being just one of them (“narcissistic and personality disorder traits,” according to his ex-wife’s divorce petition, were others). The New York Post reports that the shooter, who underwent sexual reassignment surgery in 2020, went on an online tirade the night before he massacred his own family. In his rant, Dorgan tore into actor Kevin Sorbo for calling transgender Delaware Representative Sarah McBride a man and, thus, “bashing” people like him. “But do not wonder why we Go BERSERK,” Dorgan wrote.
This attack follows the Valentine’s Day massacre of eight in British Columbia, Canada, including the shooter’s own mother and his eleven-year-old half-brother. Before he shot himself in the wake of his slaughter, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar was “described as a deranged teen who was obsessed with mass shootings and death videos,” the New York Post reported.
“Ms. Van Rootselaar was raised a boy and began transitioning at least five years ago to female, according to the police, which identified her as female,” the New York Times reported, granting the killer his preferred honorific. Van Rootselaar sought but may not have ever received hormonal therapies, but he did identify as female and wore “girls’ clothes.” The shooter was also reportedly obsessed with violence. He frequented websites “where users can post uncensored videos of violence and extreme gore, including deaths, beheadings and suicides.”
There are dots here that should be connected. Some will focus on the two shooters’ depressive self-obsession which, in Van Rootselaar’s case, manifested first in a macabre fascination with graphic violence. That is the same behavior 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow exhibited before she killed a teacher and a student and injured six more at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wis., in December 2024. Rupnow was an avid consumer of the content published on websites like “Watch People Die,” which is exactly what it sounds like. So, too, was 23-year-old Robin Westman. Before he scrawled a variety of sick messages on the bullets he used to kill two students and wound 18 more at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis last August (“kill Donald Trump,” “Jew Gas,” “6 Million Wasn’t Enough,” and “For the Children”), Westman identified as a woman and appeared agonized over it. “I am tired of being trans,” he wrote, “I wish I never brainwashed myself.”
An obsession with violence is one clear throughline in these cases. So, too, are the telltale expressions of mental illness that precede these violent outbursts. These killers take inspiration from the murderers that came before them. Rupnow and Westman were captivated by acts of violence that they sought to imitate. Westman borrowed the tactic of leaving messages on bullet casings from Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024. Charlie Kirk’s killer would later adopt it, too.
But a transgender identity has also become an unmistakable warning sign for all those who are brave enough to recognize it as one, regardless of the social stigma that surrounds acknowledging the evidence of your own eyes.
This week’s killers join a growing list of trans-identifying shooters or killers who were steeped in the milieu of transgender activism. Kirk’s shooter was adjacent to that culture. He lived and was romantically involved with “a male transitioning to female,” frequented forums dedicated to “furry culture,” and was reportedly radicalized, in part, by Kirk’s “hate.” The 17 year old who injured five students and killed a sixth at Iowa’s Perry High School in 2024 was reportedly engaged with transgender politics. Twenty-eight-year-old Audrey Hale identified as male when she killed three students and two teachers at Tennessee’s Covenant School in 2023. And so on.
The activist left and their house organs are quick to accuse those who notice this disturbing trend of attempting to “falsely portray all transgender people as prone to mental illness and violence.” That’s hardly the most pressing concern facing society amid a rise in incidents of murderous violence, but it’s a valid rejoinder. The murderously violent are few in number, and they tend not to be representative of whatever communities they once inhabited. The violently mentally ill are, however, drawn to a variety of pathologies. It seems they are particularly attracted to those that dominate the national discourse at any given moment and generate attention for their alleged sufferers.
Perhaps transgenderism is its own mental illness, as some social observers say. Possibly, it is a concomitant feature of a particular sort of mental instability, although not necessarily indicative of it. Or maybe there is no connection at all.
But those who fear the public’s reaction to the observable increase in violence committed by those who struggle with their gender identity will lose the public’s trust if they think they can intimidate everyone else out of the conclusions they’re drawing from their own experience. The conversation the activist class seeks to stifle will simply move underground, where the elite arbiters of the national dialogue will have no influence over its trajectory.
Pretending this phenomenon isn’t happening or has been overblown by bigots and political opportunists won’t make it go away. It must be confronted by those with the courage to do so.