Jesse Van Rootselaar and Robert Dorgan, two men pretending to be women, killed ten people in separate mass shootings within a single week. Both exhibited documented histories of serious mental illness. Conservative commentators have rightly drawn attention to the relationship between gender ideology and violence, and the media’s instinct to obscure it. But the trans question is a distraction. Gender ideology is a late-stage symptom of a deeper pathology. Feminism is the root, and its quiet, cumulative destruction of the family, of sex-differentiated social roles, and of the Western moral order dwarfs the body count of any individual shooting.
Van Rootselaar, an eighteen-year-old in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, allegedly murdered his mother and eleven-year-old stepbrother before opening fire inside his former school, killing five students and a teacher. Dorgan, a fifty-six-year-old in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, allegedly killed his ex-wife and son, and injured his former in-laws at a youth hockey game. Both men considered themselves to be women.
Van Rootselaar, who came from a broken home, sought psychiatric help as a teenager, abused drugs, immersed himself in online gore communities, and built a Roblox game simulating a mass shooting. His biological father was estranged. His mother, who held the firearms license and promoted his gun content online, raised him in an environment devoid of paternal authority. He obsessively consumed content about prior mass killers, including the transgender Nashville school shooter.
Dorgan’s violence grew directly from the wreckage of a dissolved marriage. He carried a documented history of mental illness (as confirmed by his own daughter). His gender identity fueled years of family conflict, and court records tie his gender reassignment surgery directly to domestic disputes that preceded the killing.
The conservative instinct to focus on the transgender dimension of these shootings is understandable. Both men adopted female identities. Both exhibited the psychological instability that accompanies gender dysphoria at alarming rates. The mainstream press predictably minimized these facts. Both men were operating inside the blast radius of broken families. Fatherlessness, divorce, and the destruction of stable family structure produce the conditions in which gender confusion, mental illness, and ultimately violence take root. The trans epidemic is real, but it is downstream. The question we seem to refuse to ask is: What broke these homes in the first place?
Second-wave feminism marked the beginning of a nearly thirty-year rise in women’s workforce participation. Betty Friedan’s core claim in The Feminine Mystique, which was published in 1963, was that domesticity was a form of psychological imprisonment. The educated housewife was wasting her life, the home was a “comfortable concentration camp,” and female fulfillment required escape into professional life. The book inaugurated an unrelenting public demand for equality of opportunity, outcome, and fulfillment for women at the cost of presuming injustice wherever such goals remained unmet. The premise that the traditional family was an obstacle to women’s flourishing rather than the foundation of it became the operating logic of American public life for the next sixty years. During the subsequent decades, marriages collapsed at the behest of women until the institution stopped functioning in the first place. Women initiate 70 percent of all divorces. Among college-educated women, the figure approaches 90 percent. The divorce rate only began to decline after 1980 because fewer people were getting married. The disease did not go into remission. The patient stopped showing up for diagnosis.
The premise that natural distinctions between the sexes are merely social constructions to be overcome is not a feminist invention alone. It is the inevitable terminus of a rights-based liberalism that cannot distinguish between unjust discrimination and natural difference. Once the law and the culture accepted that any observable inequality between men and women was presumptive evidence of injustice, every remaining distinction became a target. Women could be corporate executives, infantry platoon leaders, and football players. Many conservatives convinced themselves these were the natural outcomes of the liberal society we enjoyed. The sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, and the dissolution of sex into self-declared “gender identity” are not betrayals of liberal principles. They are their fulfillment.
The consequences are measurable and devastating. Men’s real median wages have fallen since 1979 while women’s have risen by 25 percent. Male college enrollment has dropped by a million students in barely a decade. Men now earn only 42 percent of bachelor’s degrees. The percentage of boys growing up without their biological father has doubled since 1960 to 32 percent. Twelve million boys are being raised without a father in the home. Men constitute 80 percent of all suicides and die deaths of despair at three times the rate of women. The life expectancy gap between men and women widened to nearly six years in 2021, the largest since 1996, driven almost entirely by male overdose and suicide. Among Americans without a college degree, life expectancy has declined for over a decade. That trajectory is without precedent in the modern West outside the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Republican Party has seized on trans issues precisely because they’re an easy target in the culture war. A politician can denounce men in women’s bathrooms while still voting for every trade deal and immigration bill that hollows out the communities where fatherless boys become broken men. The trans debate functions as a permission structure for cowardice on the things that actually matter: family formation, economic policy that serves fathers and mothers rather than shareholders, and an immigration regime that does not suppress the wages of the men who are already drowning. We should hold a higher standard than a conservatism that mistakes popularity for seriousness.
The existential threats to our civilization exist in the promotion of feminism as virtue, and the necessary accompanying destruction of manhood across too many facets of American life. The men whom feminism displaced and discarded seek an escape of their own, destroying themselves to become the women that the culture tells them are more valued. Van Rootselaar and Dorgan are not aberrations. They are products of a civilization that broke its families, abandoned its sons, and then expressed surprise when those sons broke in return.
