Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Kimberly A. Williams, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Mount Royal University
When a trans person commits violence, their gender identity is often framed as evidence of the collective threat of transgender people, while the more prevalent pattern of cisgender male-perpetrated violence is attributed to individual factors.
This double standard redirects attention away from masculinity as a driver of violence.
Masculinity refers to the socially produced set of norms that define what being a man requires. In Canada’s settler-colonial culture, these traits include dominance, heterosexual prowess, independence, competitiveness and the suppression of vulnerability. Masculinity is a rules system cis boys encounter early and repeatedly, and that cis men are expected to enact and reinforce.
Far-right influencers, partisan media figures and some politicians routinely blame mass shootings on the transgender community long before any information about the suspect is released, even though fewer than one per cent of mass shooters are transgender.
In the rare cases when a transgender person does commit an act of violence, the perpetrator’s gender identity is treated as the cause of the violence, and trans people are framed as a threat. This dynamic surfaced recently after 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar shot and killed eight people in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., before turning the gun on herself.
Why does one rare act of violence by a trans person quickly become a referendum on all trans people? Yet the well-documented, ongoing violence of cisgender boys and men — who commit the vast majority of violence against women, children, gender-diverse people and each other — prompts little scrutiny of men and masculinity.
Lone wolves and structural invisibility
If we consistently generalized from behaviour to gender, masculinity’s role in violence would be obvious. But it is not. We don’t ask what role cis men’s gender identity plays in their violence. Men’s violence is often explained by individual concepts like the “lone wolf,” personal grievance or mental illness. This holds true across recent history.
Canadian data offers repeated consistently missed opportunities to highlight masculinity as a driver of violence.
The 2019 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, for example, documented ongoing violence against Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit people. The report identified cis men as the majority of perpetrators along with colonialism, racism and institutional failures as the cause of that violence. Yet this did not trigger a moral panic about white settler men.
When Alek Minassian invoked incel ideology before killing 10 people in Toronto in 2018, public debate focused on online radicalization and mental health. Far less attention was paid to the gendered entitlement at the core of that ideology: the belief that men are owed sexual access to women’s bodies. Even when masculinity was named by the perpetrator himself, scrutiny shifted to technology.
A 2022 CBC News Fifth Estate investigation found that since 1989, police have investigated at least 15 alleged group sexual assaults involving men’s junior hockey players. These revelations have sparked debate about consent and hockey culture but no blanket condemnation of men as a category.
Another CBC News analysis recently revealed that more than 600 RCMP officers have been disciplined for gender-based violence since 2014. Settlements have been paid and reforms promised, but the issue has been framed as workplace culture and accountability. Masculinity remains largely unexamined.
The pattern appears consistent: when a member of a marginalized community (such as transgender people) is violent, the entire group becomes suspect. But when members of dominant groups are violent, the violence is normalized or explained away as an exception.
If prevention matters, the questions must change
If violence prevention is the goal, we need different questions. And the pattern, not the exceptions, must guide our analysis.
Just as living under a political system does not make every citizen equally responsible for its injustices, being socialized into masculinity does not make every man violent. But it does mean masculinity operates as a widespread framework that shapes boys’ and men’s responses to shame and rejection, their definitions of worth and the social meaning of power.
Since violence repeatedly comes from white cisgender men, we must ask what that pattern reveals.
Read more:
Let’s call the Nova Scotia mass shooting what it is: White male terrorism
How do boys learn anger, shame and power? What emotional skills are discouraged? How are dominance, aggression and sexual conquest rewarded in teams, fraternities, online spaces and workplaces? What counts as “weakness,” and what are boys taught to do with their vulnerability?
Institutional questions matter too. Who knew about past behaviour? How are complaints handled? What reputational or financial incentives protect insiders? What systems allow men to retain power after repeated misconduct?
These are structural questions, not ones of blame.
Some may contend that cis men’s violence is hardwired, a result of testosterone, evolution or sex-based brain differences. These arguments are not supported by research. And if they were accurate, there should be more consideration of men as a public health hazard.
The call to follow patterns, not exceptions
Cisgender men commit the overwhelming majority of violence, legitimating the examination of masculinity as a cause of that violence.
No comparable pattern exists for trans people. They do not commit violence at disproportionate rates. By contrast, because cis men do, masculinity is part of the pattern, so it must also be part of the analysis.
A call to examine masculinity as a structural factor in cis men’s violence is not an argument that we are facing a “crisis” of masculinity. The issue is that dominant, settler-colonial models of masculinity encourage violence by being organized around control, entitlement and hierarchy.
Kimberly A. Williams is a registered social worker and a member of the Social Workers Association of Alberta, the Ontario Association of Social Workers, and the Canadian Association of Social Workers. She has previously received SSHRC funding for her current project documenting the people, places, and politics of Calgary’s historic sex industry. Williams is a member of the NDP and the Board of Directors for Amethyst Centre in Ottawa.
– ref. Why is violence pathologized for trans people but individualized for cis men? – https://theconversation.com/why-is-violence-pathologized-for-trans-people-but-individualized-for-cis-men-275882