It Took Exactly One Week For The Thing That Never Happens To Happen Again
Mental health comorbidity, male pattern abuse, and the transgender shooter
Robert Dorgan, a 56-year-old man, shot four members of his family and one more person before taking his own life yesterday. Two of his victims died at the Pawtucket Dennis M. Lynch Arena “in what authorities described as a family dispute”, according to WPRI News, a CBS affiliate in Providence.
In a notable development, no one is using pronouns for Mr. Dorgan. Instead, the killer’s ‘gender identity’ is front and center as the proximate mental health issue which led him to shoot his own family, that led his wife to divorce him in 2021, after he had vaginoplasty and completely lost his mind.
At a late-night news conference, Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves said Dorgan also went by the name “Roberta,” and court documents show his gender identity played a role in multiple family disputes over recent years.
Dorgan made what appear to have been false criminal charges against his ex-wife and shooting victim, his father-in-law, and even his own mother. The case is rightly cast by WPRI as domestic violence, a tragic family annihilation by an angry, insane man who clearly received no mental health benefits from transition.
This time, there were no tortured phrases, no “woman in a dress”, even though Mr. Dorgan reportedly dressed in female attire for the occasion. Only a man would wear a dress or a skirt to do a mass shooting because a real woman would want pockets for her ammunition. Audrey Hale, the female trans-identified Covenant shooter in Nashville, wore sensible BDU trousers as she assumed any man would do.
Just one week before yesterday’s shooting, 17-year-old transgender boy Jesse Strang killed nine people and wounded 25 in one of the worst mass shootings in Canadian history. Strang, who was misidentified by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as Jesse Van Rootselaar, received the novel appellation of “gunperson” to protect his poor, vulnerable transgender identity.
Unlike Strang, Dorgan forgot to delete his social media accounts beforehand. As a result, X users quickly found that Dorgan had threatened to “Go BERSERK” over people “bashing” his transgender clan on the day before the shooting. His son was reportedly playing in a hockey game at the time of the shooting. Dorgan was angry at the world and took it out on his family.
This time, “Roberta Dorgano” is being deadnamed. “His ex-wife filed for divorce in 2020, on grounds of “gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic + personality disorder traits,” according to WPRI.
“The reasoning was later replaced with ‘irreconcilable differences which have caused the immediate breakdown of the marriage,’” presumably because leaving your husband just because he wants to be a woman is such an evil thing for a woman to do, these days.
In fact, as soon as I saw the news, I immediately thought of Ute Heggen, Shannon Thrace, and the women in Behind the Looking Glass, a 2024 documentary about transwidows. They endure very high rates of physical, verbal, mental, and financial abuse.
Imagine that your husband wants to become you, to walk in your skin; that he wears your clothes in secret while he masturbates, that he even tries to imitate your orgasm. Now imagine that he has the support of an entire community, while you are completely alone in the world, because your objections, your boundaries, your nauseating dread are a hate crime against him.
That did not happen in this case, possibly because the community in question was all too familiar with Mr. Dorgan. Rhode Island is at least as woke as Canada. Perhaps he does not receive the same consideration as Strang because he was all too ‘visible’ in Providence. We shall see.
There will of course be efforts to pretend this tragedy has nothing to do with transgender people at large. We are not allowed to examine the premise that any man becomes a woman if he says so. To that end, Dorgan’s evident support of Donald Trump, love of Nick Fuentes, and approval of Marjorie Taylor Greene are convenient political distractors.
Nor should we let his opinions on specific transgender issues concern us. Dorgan did not think men should be in women’s sports, but felt he should be free to enter any women’s locker room because he had vaginoplasty. He felt entitled, because that’s what transgender ‘inclusion’ is: an entitlement.
As with Canada, the impulse to defend ‘transgender people’ against ‘attacks’ from a cardinal political direction (‘the right’) remains strong in blue Rhode Island. Watch as Dorgan becomes a ‘very troubled’ man whose mental health was adversely affected by his family’s transphobia. It will already be creeping back in at the margins today, as the shock wears off.
Of all the X posts that turned up yesterday, the most surreal has got to be Dorgan’s response to Alex Jones, the infamous Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist. “stfu Alex dont be so butt hurtt over somebody different”, Dorgan said. The next day, he was committing murder over his personal “butt hurtt”.
Weirdly, The New York Times has five reporters on the story, yet they cannot name Mr. Dorgan, instead noting that the nameless shooter had two names they do not report. The reporters also avoid using any pronouns for him.
Dorgan “targeted” his family, according to police, because of their resistance to his ‘gender identity’, and killed a son who was supposed to get married this summer because he felt rejected by the child years ago. A daughter calls him a “sick person” with “mental illness”.
Robert Dorgan was a violent narcissist, and the whole town seems to have regarded him as one. That is making it very, very hard for the press to do its usual job of ideological programming, but watch them try, now. Watch how they try.