Trans Women, Television and Film, and Real-Life Violence

On Tuesday afternoon a small town in northeastern British Columbia was the site of a horrific mass shooting. Several young people and two adults are dead. There are no words to express how tragic and senseless these events are, and the focus must be on the victims and survivors.

But this can’t be permitted to turn into a transphobic assault on the rights of transgender people and, more specific trans women.

I’m worried that in British Columbia, which has a handful of very reactionary politicians (anti-Indigenous, anti-trans, anti-reproductive rights), we will see the apparent shooter’s mental health issues, which appear to be entrenched and enduring, linked to her identity as a trans woman who had been transitioning for five or six years.

Far more to the point is that there were guns in the home of a person with a history of violent delusions. We need to make sure that can’t happen, and that means revisiting Canada’s already robust gun control laws.

Some crucial facts:

U.S. data demonstrates that “Transgender people over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime .. . including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault.”

Also in the U.S., there has been a recent sharp increase in the murders of transgender women, with Black women most at risk.

More global and granular data is also available, and the figures are alarming.

But we don’t think in statistics; we think in anecdotes, or singular incidents. This is a single, appalling event, and it may be used for cynical political purposes by bad actors.

I’m worried about my students who are trans and nonbinary. I’m worried about colleagues and friends and community members.

Before I had an accurate or thoughtful vocabulary for writing about this, I saw Silence of the Lambs and was deeply concerned about the portrayal of the serial killer and the victims; there are some thoughtful contemporary assessments.

In 2012, a GLAAD study found that “Transgender characters were cast as killers or villains in at least 21% of the catalogued episodes and storylines.” Twice as frequently, they were depicted as victims.

More recent discussions suggest that these are enduring fictional portrayals in television and film. And representations shape how we view the world, and each other.

This is a terrible loss of multiple young lives. It should not be used to disparage and discriminate against a vulnerable minority population.

But let’s focus on gun control and mental health again.

Last spring, British Columbia saw another tragic mass fatality when a man drove into a crowd at the Filipino Canadian Lapu-Lapu Day celebration in Vancouver. Eleven people died; dozens were injured. The person accused in these vehicular murders has a painful recent family history and a longstanding mental health history.

Today I’m going to set aside other projects for a bit and write about how hard it is to access mental health care in British Columbia, which is a topic I am oh-so-aware of, after spending much of the last two decades seeking to support students, family members, and–in the wake of workplace bullying a decade ago–my own mental health needs.

The short version: we have too few psychiatrists; psychologists bill $300 an hour, which is quickly exhausted even with very good extended-health insurance plans; and the opioid epidemic has produced a large number of people who will have lifelong health care needs that the system is largely failing to address because full-time, fully-supported residential care for an adult population of active drug users is very challenging to manage.

Then throw in that some of us have been waiting more than a decade since losing access to a primary-care provider.

I am heartbroken for everyone who has been affected by this tragedy, which was both abrupt and unexpected and many years in the making. A young person did not receive the care she needed; now many people are dead. But if this tragedy is politicized, let’s be honest about the massive gaps in services for young people in crisis.