Feminism is core to who I am. My past experiences dealing with men’s rage when they discover this about me make me nervous to share my feminism publicly sometimes.

On June 28, a 24-year-old man entered a gender issues course at the University of Waterloo. After confirming the class’s subject matter with the professor, the assailant withdrew two knives from his bag and began attacking the professor and students.

Police said the attack was hate-motivated and related to gender. The attacker was a former student at the university.

Despite the obvious hand misogyny and transphobia had in this incident, ensuing public discourse has curiously veered far and away from those subjects.

Waterloo’s associate vice-president of communications Nick Manning said shortly after the attack that it was too early to consider stationing additional security around campus. However, the topic was not ruled out, and student action at Waterloo is focusing on petitioning the university to update its emergency alert systems.

This is not a discussion restricted to Waterloo. The University of Alberta is exploring upping its security detail to prevent attacks like the one at Waterloo.

Somehow, we are collectively talking about the problem of mass violence as if it begins and ends with security measures. This is nothing new. In the wake of hate-motivated mass violence, there seems to always be a special rhetorical move wherein members of certain institutions invent numerous reasons for the attacks and avoid the real ones altogether.

The National Rifle Association cited the Sandy Hook shooter’s interest in video games as one possible explanation for his killing spree. The 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was chalked up to the shooter’s mental illness.

Research suggests neither video games nor mental illness are predictors of a person’s likelihood to commit acts of mass violence. In fact, mental illness only factors in to about four per cent of violent incidents. Still the subjects of gun control and antisemitism fall by the wayside.

What the Waterloo case has in common with these incidents is the public’s convenient aversion to calling a spade a spade. I call it convenient in that nobody ever has any apparent responsibility to do much in the wake of mass violence. This attack is a case of anti-feminist, transphobic violence, another angry man translating hate into terror.

Just like other cases of mass violence, many are avoiding the real problem and instead engaging in fanciful conversations about a magical single-channel cure-all. Simply ban video games or end mental illness and men will stop going on killing sprees. Now, we appear to be moving past blaming video games or mental illness toward blaming insufficient policing for acts of hate.

Subjecting everyone on university campuses to extra security measures — men, women and non-binary people alike — swerves around the fact that men are overwhelmingly, disproportionately the people committing acts of mass violence.

This is not to say that men specifically ought to be more closely monitored and policed. I mean to say that calls to police the general population both ignore the obvious problems of misogyny and transphobia and divert public discourse away from talking about why men specifically keep doing this.

What is more, comments offered by university and federal leadership have been flaccid, indirect and abstract. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted, “Yesterday’s stabbings at a gender studies class at the University of Waterloo are horrifying and unacceptable.” He continued, “this type of violence must always be condemned.”

Waterloo’s president Vivek Goel said, in the wake of the attack, “there are those who would like to intimidate us. They want us to be afraid […] Afraid to speak our truth.”

These comments almost read as sarcastic to me. Trudeau’s response was so tepid he did not even specify what “type” of violence was unacceptable. I think Goel’s comment endorsed perceptions of gender studies as a fake discipline. The victims of this attack weren’t speaking their personal “truth” like influencers talking about the strains of posting TikToks daily. They were engaging in evidence-based scholarship.

These statements are non-responses to the attack. The one thing that would have really constituted a stance against the attack would have been to show that this violence does not pay and flood gender studies departments with resources. Imagine if the federal government had announced federal scholarships for students incorporating gender studies into their research in the wake of Waterloo.

Melanee Thomas, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, told the CBC that a lack of investment in humanities subjects fuels fervent fury against gender studies. Something is whipping up fervor against fields like gender studies, and universities respond by leaving their humanities programs more vulnerable to attacks. I believe stochastic terrorism is partly at the root.

Stochastic terrorism has several definitions ranging from the stoking rage against a group — to the point where someone is inspired to commit violence against them — to the ways public figures flirt with extremist groups by neither denouncing them nor explicitly encouraging them towards violence.

Funding these programs properly might lead to more students learning that gender studies isn’t the progenitor of evil, ensuring there is a strong presence to counter stochastic terrorism, which breeds anti-feminist rage.

What is also important is for leadership to not behave exactly like stochastic terrorists and leave room for their words to be misinterpreted. At the very least, the prime minister should be calling the Waterloo attack the act of gendered violence that it was.

Writing for Conversation Canada, j wallace skelton, assistant professor at the University of Regina, cautioned this is not an isolated incident. Universities around Canada are leaving scholars in gender studies and queer studies out to dry.

We can blow smoke up our own asses about how we condemn hate. As if anyone is going to disagree with that sentiment. But will university and federal leadership ever do anything substantial about misogyny and transphobia?