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Canadian parents are sick of progressives The protests risk being derailed by extremists

Scenes from Toronto's 1 Million March for Children protest. (Mert Alper Dervis/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Scenes from Toronto's 1 Million March for Children protest. (Mert Alper Dervis/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)


October 2, 2023   4 mins

Last June, late one night after my kids had gone to bed, I stumbled across a Twitter Space for parents concerned about what their children are being taught at school. There were 60 or so participants, mostly from Ontario: Canadians from a diverse range of backgrounds who weren’t happy about kids being told that maths is racist or having access to graphic books such as Gender Queer. Many of the parents in the Space had been shut down or shamed for asking questions about lessons. Some had been labelled bigots or transphobes. That evening, the discussion was about a recent parents’ rights protest in Ottawa, which was being depicted in the news as a movement of hateful, conservative Muslims who were anti-trans and didn’t want their kids learning about LGBT issues in school.

Under the leadership of Justin Trudeau, Canadian policy has hewn quite close to the transactivist’s ideal: gender identity has become a protected characteristic under the Canadian Human Rights Act, and gender reassignment surgery is now often covered by the country’s universal healthcare system. Meanwhile, school boards and teachers’ unions have been quick to adopt some of the most extreme tenets of gender ideology — for instance, not telling parents when their children start to socially transition. 

Now, parents are pushing back. Last month, parents marched in almost 100 cities under the banner of #1MillionMarch4Children calling for the removal of material from school curriculums that sexualises children. Trudeau had claimed the protests were being “fuelled by the American right-wing”, but the alliance includes all political stances — from Liberty Coalition Canada, a Christian conservative advocacy group, to Blueprint for Canada, a non-partisan platform advocating “classical liberal” values. Some are issue-based, such as Our Duty Canada, a support network for families struggling with the impact of gender ideology. Plenty are grassroots, springing up in villages and towns in response to specific local events.

The protests, though they have been criticised for being anti-LGBT, are actually about protecting minors from harmful content in schools. At the protest I attended — in Durham, just outside Toronto — there were marchers of all races and religions. And their motives varied. Two young moms with children going to kindergarten soon held up placards that read “Education, not indoctrination” and “Stop sexualizing our kids”. A young girl sat next to a poster that read, “No boys in my bathroom!” A father of five children under the age of 15 was there with his wife and kids to protest against Ontario’s sex education curriculum, which he felt introduces material on sexual orientation and gender identity to children too young to understand the concepts. And three Pakistani brothers — one in high school and the other two in university — gave an interview to a local media outlet about why they felt they should not be required to partake in pride activities that went against their beliefs as Muslims.

Conservative Muslims have been overrepresented at recent protests, with a noticeable number of women in hijabs or niqabs. And as a result the movement as a whole has received accusations of being motivated by Muslim extremism. Protests against gender ideology in schools took place over the summer in Ottawa and Calgary, organised by local Muslim parents groups, with reports of young Arab boys stomping on rainbow pride flags while others cheered them on. There was a flurry of progressives questioning Muslim values and attitudes that clash with their beliefs in multicultural Canada. Several hundred people were present at the march I attended, and I’d estimate that 60-70% of them were Muslims.

It would not be fair to assume that all these Muslims were marching in opposition to same-sex relationships as well as in support of parents’ rights; but the Canadian Muslim community is known to have more negative views of LGBT rights than the general population. One transgender protestor I spoke to was in Durham because the chapter in her own town — led by conservative Muslims — was advocating not only for parental rights, which she supports, but also for the eradication of all gay and transgender people. So, the accusation that the movement has an anti-LGBT strain is not entirely unfounded.

There was also a conspiratorial minority at the protests. Anti-vaxxers complained about “shot deaths”, and told tales of what “really” happened during the pandemic. One former nurse who lost her job because she wouldn’t get vaccinated, believed that people were getting sick because of radiation poisoning from 5G towers. The trucker Freedom Convey was also present, waving “Fuck Trudeau” flags; one vehicle was covered in news stories about people who died after getting the Covid vaccines. These conspiracists were not representative; most people really were there to protest against the school boards and advocate for reform of the education system. Indeed, some parents were surprised to see people discussing vaccines and lockdowns. One mom told me: “It’s a free country, they can come here and protest too if they like.” But these fringe elements could be undermining a movement that should, in theory, have mainstream support.

The presence of more extreme groups has doubtless contributed to the Conservative Party of Canada keeping its distance from the march. The more Right-wing, less popular People’s Party of Canada did participate — which would have given the Conservatives another reason not to engage. Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Conservative Party, sent a memo out to his caucus before the march warning them not to speak publicly about the issue — even though, at the recent convention in Quebec City, delegates voted in favour of a future Conservative government prohibiting “life-altering” medical and surgical interventions for gender-diverse and transgender people under the age of 18.

Poilievre is trying to strike a delicate balance here: he has indicated to his base that he’s on the same page as them about parents’ rights and gender ideology, but he doesn’t want his party to be associated with unsavoury characters. It might threaten his current lead over Trudeau in the polls. Poilievre tweeted in support of parents’ rights without explicitly mentioning the protests, which have continued across cities in Canada. Trudeau meanwhile came out firmly in opposition to the march, claiming it was promoting hate against “2SLGBTQI+ Canadians across the country”. It seems that for now, parents are going to have to fight it out with local governments, teachers’ unions and school boards, without the explicit backing of a national party.

The march, for all its issues and contradictions, has managed to unite a huge range of Canadians to come together in support of a common cause: a right to have a say in their children’s education. Most of the participants are trying to stay laser-focused on this cause, putting aside their differences to help pass legislation that will protect kids from being exposed to what they see as inappropriate content — and, in some places, from irreversible surgeries. Public opinion is on their side, but it remains to be seen whether party politics will catch up.


Hina Husain is a Pakistani-Canadian freelance writer based in Toronto.

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Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
6 months ago

I appreciate the author’s effort here, but please stop apologizing. Frankly, I’m frickin sick of it. The radical fringe is not the parents protesting. It’s activists and NGOs who think it’s appropriate to withhold information from parents about their own children. They are the radicals.

Thousands and thousands of Canadians attended protests across the country. Who cares if some loonie toons attended as well? I seem to recall a few fringe people at BLM rallies. That’s what happens with mass movements.

The day you start apologizing for it is the day you have lost the battle. They can’t argue on logic and reason so they resort to smears. Don’t give that tactic oxygen or legitimacy.

And frankly I’m getting sick of the gushing media coverage of Pierre Poilievre. The presence of extreme groups did not contribute to the Conservative Party keeping its distance from the march. Pierre Poilievre did. End of story.

Poilievre is a career politician, a political hack riding the wave of populism to boost his career. He would hack the genitals of every kid in the country, if he thought it would win an election.

Last edited 6 months ago by Jim Veenbaas
Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
6 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

The radical fringe is not the parents protesting.

Yes. Scary how it’s the parents that are cast as ‘fringe’ and not the ideologues that are busy indoctrinating infants in sex and gender confusion.

Colin Goodfellow
Colin Goodfellow
6 months ago
Reply to  Julian Farrows

This artical is a work of fiction. A few people from the proud boy cheer squad – paid for by (shhh dont tell them whos the money)- scream at strangers with about made up phantoms is not Canadaian parents. Its global facisms stalking horse. Unheard is uncreasingly peddling garbage not idea. Shame and shame

Andrzej Wasniewski
Andrzej Wasniewski
6 months ago

Of course it is global fascism That’s why those parents are protesting, because they want to protect their children against global fascism.

harry storm
harry storm
6 months ago

No, your comment is a work of (terrible) fiction.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
6 months ago
Reply to  Julian Farrows

This. There’s a word for when a few elites in positions of power decide questions of policy and social direction, while ordinary folk are ignored, ridiculed, or painted as antisocial radicals and subversives. That word is aristocracy, and ours, like most of those in history, gets more reactionary the more people fight against their dictates. When they can’t convince people of their rightness, they try public shaming and bullying tactics, and when that fails to work, they resort to fearmongering. This is where our modern aristocrats are at. Unfortunately for them, this never works. By overusing pejoratives like ‘racist’, ‘bigot’, etc. and using them to denote any opposing view, they are in fact undermining their own movement by creating more racists and bigots. Sooner or later, the people they criticize will be desensitized to accusations of racism and bigotry. More and more people will just expect the criticism and ignore it, or even embrace the label and accept it as a name for their countermovement. Then, as more people just accept the label, the label becomes more acceptable. Simply speaking, if every opponent is a racist, there will never be a shortage of racists to oppose, and sooner or later they will no longer care what pejorative label they are assigned. It’s like trying to fight one’s own shadow by adding more and more light but in the same place. They’re empowering the thing they’re fighting. Such an approach is inherently doomed to failure.

McExpat M
McExpat M
6 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

I’m neutral on Poilievre at this stage. He has an unbelievably hard balancing act here due to how polarized Canada has become under Trudeau. What I take exception to is the concept of career politician. If we take its opposite, an unqualified moron selected solely on his name and looks being managed by ‘others’ versus someone who actually did the work to receive the qualifications and has an actual working knowledge of economics and law, I’ll place my money on the latter. That being said, the system is entirely flawed and cannot produce the leaders we need and does not have the appropriate mechanisms to remove all the truly bad incentives in it.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
6 months ago
Reply to  McExpat M

I understand the rationale, but your argument is fatally flawed. If intelligence and expertise correlated better with political success, your argument would have greater merit, but there is no such correlation. The greatest correlation to political success is attending an elite University, which leads to networking opportunities with other members of the elite class, and is also an indicator of the second best correlation to political success, access to generational wealth. Elites use their money to send their children to elite institutions where they mingle with other elites and build social connections that support their success regardless of personal ability or deficiency. They favor their own class and justify this by claiming superiority based on the factors you mention, but it’s all just smoke. A Harvard graduate is not necessarily better or more qualified than a graduate of whatever state university, but the elite class needs people to believe that there is to justify their continued rule. This is how the modern aristocracy functions. The excuses are different, but in the end the results are pretty much the same. Our modern aristocracy is, even in the most theoretical sense, only marginally more fair and meritocratic than previous aristocracies based on land and blood. In practical application, it is actually worse than those because we now live in a world of widespread literacy and broad access to education. If the question is “who is most qualified?”, then the clergy and nobility of feudal Europe could make a far better claim to intellectual and experiential superiority than any modern politician or Fortune 500 CEO. They at least could point to concrete things like the ability to read and do basic mathematics where our elites must resort to virtue signalling, nebulous claims of superior ‘expertise’, and raw socioeconomic advantage. Don’t buy the propaganda. Career politicians are not smarter or more capable on average along any meaningful axis other than wealth and the will to power and status. The bureaucrats they appoint and hire for doing the actual work of running the country SHOULD be suited and trained for said work, but even among these, there is a strong elite bias for their own social caste. We’d probably see very little difference in our governmental competence if we picked leaders by a lottery of basically anyone who wanted the job and wasn’t a convicted criminal, and we’d probably see a good deal less corruption, graft, and attention seeking behaviors as a side benefit. We’d probably be better off if we appointed bureaucrats with a similar lottery system accompanied by some list of qualifications and/or test of intellectual ability and related knowledge.

James S.
James S.
6 months ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

Well said. Having met US representatives and senators to discuss healthcare related issues, I can vouch for your point that political success isn’t tied to either intellectual firepower or subject matter expertise. Don’t know about the UK Parliament, but a huge amount of the nitty gritty of US lawmaking is done by congressional staffers, and then fed to the rep or senator.

McExpat M
McExpat M
6 months ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

Which is exactly what I said, the system is flawed and cannot produce the leaders we need.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
6 months ago
Reply to  McExpat M

I have no issue with politicians with extensive experience – none at all. What I have issue with is politicians who have never held a job outside politics. The three leaders of Canada’s main parties have never known anything outside the cloistered confines of politics. What we need are leaders who earned their stripes in the real world who decide to enter politics as a service to their country, not people who choose politics as a career.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
6 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Your last sentence, while I suspect quite true, still makes him preferable to the ideologues who ignore the broader public will entirely while pursuing their own ideology, or try to manipulate, coerce, and intimidate people into conforming to their dogmas.

Joann Robertson
Joann Robertson
6 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Jim Veenbaas you may not like Pierre Poilievre but would you vote for Justin Trudeau in the next election? It is Trudeau and the Liberal Party that has led to all the political unrest in Canada and has nearly destroyed our global reputation. We may be caught between a rock and a hard space but the only road to change is Poilievre whether we like hm or not.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
6 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

You’ve been drinking the koolaid on pp I see.

Ddwieland
Ddwieland
3 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

I’m in accord with your comment up the point where you veer into a diatribe against Poilievre. Yes, he’s a career politician, due to the fact that he has been politically active since high school and that he was elected on his first run for MP and has been consistently re-elected.
But unless he’s been underhanded and misused his position or shown a lack of principle, he doesn’t deserve the disdain you showed. I thought he was too strenuously partisan in the early years, which I found distasteful. In the last several years he has shown far more maturity, principled resolve, and concern for Canadian wellbeing than the current PM. He has trod lightly on the transgenderism issue, no doubt a political strategy, while making it clear that he supports parental rights over transactivism. Your last sentence is disgusting vitriol.

Andrew Roman
Andrew Roman
6 months ago

The 6 year old grandson of a friend came home from school crying in confusion. That was because his teacher had told him that just because he had a pe … s didn’t mean he was a boy. What can a parent or grandparent say in these circumstances?

David L
David L
6 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Roman

That the teacher is an evil extremist

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
6 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Roman

“Stop telling disgusting lies to small children.”

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
6 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Roman

There is only one serious way out of this crap, it will have a chilling effect on all normal transactions between people and institutions if adopted on a mass scale, but at this point there is nothing much left to lose.

The way out is for groups of ordinary people, parents re schools for example, to launch legal challenges, a combination of civil and criminal, across all institutions simultaneously. Class actions. And not just the institutions but individuals – that teacher in your anecdotes could be challenged in the civil courts for damages, or even in small claims courts. If individuals are targeted, they will immediately go to their employing institutions for protection, and then we will see how much water they are all standing in, if their employers back them. Bring the fight into the light. Tie the buggers up in legal knots with the prospect of damages hanging over the institutions like the sword of Damocles for years on end. And this has to be done now – because the law is beginning to shift towards wokedom, but it isn’t there yet, vast tracts of law still nominally remain in the favour of ordinary people.

Valerie Taplin
Valerie Taplin
6 months ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Excellent idea – class action lawsuits are perfect in Canada and USA. I only wish we had them in the UK.

Karl Dowling
Karl Dowling
6 months ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Prashant – I absolutely agree with you, we’re dealing with this garbage here in Ireland too. I reckon the law, while it’s still objective, is the only way to effectively combat this. Liability and the threat of liability can expose their lies and put a halt to their galop..

Coralie Palmer
Coralie Palmer
6 months ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Exactly right. This is what we’ve learned in the UK over the last four years: that these issues are the product of grossly distorted interpretation of the law, and that they need to be challenged in the courts. To date, every time the UK trans activists have tried to take their grotesque arguments to court, they have been defeated.
That process in itself creates important legal precedents. These issues should be fought in court, in the open, based on evidence. Not decided behind closed doors by people no one voted for. It’s the only way to put this gruesome misogyny where it belongs: on the wrong side of the law.

David L
David L
6 months ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

We can’t vote our way out of this nightmare.

James S.
James S.
6 months ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Additionally, starve the beast by supporting private and charter schools that don’t engage in wokery and indoctrination. Vote with your feet (at least in the USA).

Niall Austin
Niall Austin
6 months ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

That approach might also be the answer to the (wildly unpopular) ‘hate-speech legislation’ currently being promoted by the Irish government to limit freedom of speech here!

Shrunken Genepool
Shrunken Genepool
6 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Roman

Homeschool is the only option I”m afraid

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
6 months ago

There are other options springing up all over the place. One engineer founded a Socratic-method school with his wife and some colleagues. They started out with about ten students, all from age 6-16, who were not separated into groups by age. Instead, the older kids worked with the youngest. The school became so successful and popular, they had to expand. They now have parent-facilitated schools throughout the US. I wish I could remember the name of the one I’m thinking about: I listened to a long podcast with the founder several months ago and was very impressed. His independent school now has many copying his model.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
6 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Roman

Say? Remove the child from the school. All parents should be doing that. There are alternatives.

Steve Jolly
Steve Jolly
6 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Roman

Actually that’s a perfect opportunity to disillusion the child in question by telling them their teacher is full of crap, and most people are full of crap. Also, those that claim to know what’s ‘right’ and ‘true’ are usually the ones who are the most full of crap and there’s usually an ulterior motive to go along with whatever crap they are full of. Teach your child or grandchild to be suspicious of anyone and everyone, because in today’s world unmoored from tradition, religion, and native culture, that suspicion is what will prevent them from being duped and taken advantage of by the many, many purveyors of nonsense in our modern world. It’s a harsh lesson for a six year old, and we shouldn’t have to do this, but none of us gets to choose the world we’re born into. If the system is going to try to manipulate and indoctrinate children as young as six, we owe it to them to give them the skills, knowledge, and tools to understand who is doing it, why they’re doing it, and how to resist it and keep their own sense of self-worth and their own self identity. That’s the duty one accepts as a parent.

Chana Shor
Chana Shor
6 months ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

What you’re advocating is not a critical attitude, but cynicism. Those who are “suspicious of anyone and everyone”, lose the ability to discern whom they should trust and whom they should not.
The best solution I can think of (absent an overhaul of public education) is to teach your kids science. Sex is biologically binary, because that is true of all mammals; were we not, we could not reproduce. There is no third sex. We are embodied creatures, and the fact we have higher reasoning does not change that. We ARE our bodies, not a disembodied “gender” trapped in what may be the “wrong” body.
Once kids have that clearly in mind, those who try to tell your kids something that is counterfactual/antiscience are the ones whose views on the subject are can’t be trusted, and it doesn’t matter that they might be a teacher. That last bit — the fact that those they should be able to trust to teach them fact, can be wrong — is the radical lesson. It’s unfortunate that these days kids have to learn it so young.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
6 months ago
Reply to  Steve Jolly

You shouldn’t teach kids to be suspicious. You should teach them to be open minded at the basis for the behaviour they are witnessing.

Last edited 6 months ago by Bret Larson
James S.
James S.
6 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Roman

If financially possible, support pulling him out of government school and put him in a private school that doesn’t pitch this kind of rot.

My child has gone to classical Christian school K through high school and I’ve never regretted the expense. Superior academics as well.

Pete Marsh
Pete Marsh
6 months ago

When the acronym LGBTQ etc is used in articles like this, it always seems to be the TQ element that’s the cause of so much conflict and disruption. Behind which is a small but well organised and very vocal clique of activists.
The LGBs are just a useful stepping stone, and routinely get thrown under the bus, along with women.

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
6 months ago
Reply to  Pete Marsh

The LGBs and the TQ+s are joined at the hip – all in it together until ‘gay marriage’. Now the TQs are coming for the kids and the LGBs are sweating.

Huw Parker
Huw Parker
6 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

There is absolutely no rationale behind an alliance of LGB and TQ. One is about sexuality, the other about identity. One is about behaviour, the other about feelings. One is about science, the other about belief. One relies on sex, the other denies it. They cannot both be real in the same world. Let’s face it, the LGBTQWERTY label was only ever a means for the TQ to lay their cuckoo’s egg in the extremely well-established nest it took gay activism some 50+ years to build.

Last edited 6 months ago by Huw Parker
Derek Smith
Derek Smith
6 months ago
Reply to  Huw Parker

The first gave birth to the second.
The LGB movement originated Queer Theory on one hand (‘Let’s deconstruct all norms so no-one or nothing may be described as abnormal.’) and gender-as-performance on the other (Judith Butler’s book ‘Gender Trouble’ is an explicit defence of the butch-femme distinction in lesbian relationships, borne from a debate within 1980s radical lesbian feminism). When I was at Uni 30 years ago, the gays and transsexuals (as they were called then) had common cause fighting together for societal acceptance. True, some lesbian feminists were critical of the transsexuals, but that is because they are and were equal opportunity misandrists.

“One is about sexuality, the other about identity. One is about behaviour, the other about feelings.”

Those distinctions were blurred by the gays years ago. ‘It’s not what I do, it’s who I am, and to disagree with my behaviour is to erase me’ was a common argument by gay activists and is now being used – with a gender twist, of course – by their TQ successors.
What we now have is the ‘respectable’ sexual revolutionaries complaining that their movement has been overtaken by a mish-mash of blue-haired crazies, teenage girls seized by social contagion and straight male fetishists – which they are ultimately responsible for. The mainstreaming of LGB led directly to this current situation. Revolutions don’t stop merely because earlier revolutionaries got what they wanted.

Chana Shor
Chana Shor
6 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

Same-sex attraction (and its normalization as a human variant rather than as a psychopathology) admittedly may appear similar to the attempt to normalize transgenderism, but the former is not based on Queer Theory. Queer theory posits that the very idea of “normal” should be “queered”, or eradicated, which would thus mean there was nothing abnormal about being “Queer”, which these days seems to mean “Trans”.
The existence of life-long same-sex attraction does have a basis in science. Those who in adulthood turn out to be homosexual, as children often “feel like” they were meant to be the other sex. (Consequently, a large number of the kids being “transitioned” right now are are actually Gay and Lesbian. Which is part of what has the LGB community upset with TQ+.)
On the other hand, the notion that all people have an inherent true “gender”, which has no inherent connection to the body, is pure Queer Theory, or in other words, counterfactual, antiscientific balderdash.

Molly McDougall
Molly McDougall
6 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

Untrue! I had had supper with lesbian friends last week and they were fuming about trans women in women’s spaces and women’s sports. They are considering voting Conservative for the first time ever – ages 60 and 61.

Perhaps it’s the boring middle class group I hang out with, but both gay and straight, we think children should be left alone to be children.

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
6 months ago

I think there is some class issue here too, and most people – whether they belong to sexual minorities or not – do just want to get on with their lives.

However, as I detailed in my answer to Huw, there’s a direct link between the groups. What we are seeing here is more like a family fight than totally opposed groups.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
6 months ago
Reply to  Derek Smith

That bit about marriage is also an abomination.
Marriage was never about right to sleep together or asset sharing among partners, it was about the kids and enforcing parental responsibility.
The “gay marriage” show essentially took public sympathy and guilt over their treatment, and used it to force a revision in the very concept of marriage.
It would be a different matter if gays wishing to adopt or have kids fought for that right (or rather, obligation). But most gays don’t even have kids.

Derek Smith
Derek Smith
6 months ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

The problem here is that ‘straights’ had already gutted marriage of those things long before the gays even considered the possibility of marriage.

If it’s only an easily dissolved contract between two people who currently love each other, with kids and life-long commitment now optional, who can deny it to gay people?

The so-called ‘redefinition’ of marriage that happened in 2013 was just an acknowledgement that it had already been socially redefined by most people anyway.

Regardless of the law we are *all* civil partners now.

Last edited 6 months ago by Derek Smith
Catherine Conroy
Catherine Conroy
6 months ago
Reply to  Pete Marsh

Yes, the alphabet soup parasites have piggy-backed on LGB rights, women’s rights legislation, not to mention equating themselves with marginalised ethnic minorities.

Nik Jewell
Nik Jewell
6 months ago

It’s difficult because of the progressive moral offence of ‘adjacency’. Kellie-Jay Keen has been monstered by the TRAs because a couple of far-right people turned up at one of her ‘Let Women Speak’ events.
I remember Jordan Peterson getting the same for being photographed next to somebody wearing an unfashionable t-shirt (the slogan on it, not the cut!).
I can even remember Cameron being lambasted because Yaxley-Lennon said he was going to vote for him.
It betrays a fundamental fallacy in people’s logical reasoning, but progressives don’t care about such concerns when their modus operandi is ad hominem attacks.
I think, though, that you just have to wear it. You can’t control who turns up. You’ll be attacked for it, but you were never going to change the minds of your attackers in the first place.

Last edited 6 months ago by Nik Jewell
R Wright
R Wright
6 months ago
Reply to  Nik Jewell

In 2020 blackshirt wearing BLM activists were considered heroes while those who counter-protested about statues being destroyed in Parliament Square were tarred as goose stepping racists. We live in a true clown world.

Last edited 6 months ago by R Wright
Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
6 months ago

“It seems that for now, parents are going to have to fight it out with local governments, teachers’ unions and school boards, without the explicit backing of a national party.”

The author forgot to mention the courts. A judge in Saskatchewan has ruled against the province’s recent legislation requiring schools to inform parents when their child changes pronouns. The battle is far from over, but it’s a disgrace nonetheless, considering 87% of people there support the measure

James P
James P
6 months ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Judges in Canada have long been coopted by the hard left. Beverly McLaughlin, former head of our Supreme Court, is now working for Xi in Hong Kong. Go to court at your peril.

Shrunken Genepool
Shrunken Genepool
6 months ago
Reply to  James P

This is 100% true. The hard left control every institution in Canada

Peter Johnson
Peter Johnson
6 months ago

I get tired of coverage of the fringe who show up for these events. When BLM marches so does antifa and they invariably attack people and property. Yet somehow we aren’t expected to believe they represent the whole movement. There are more marches Oct 21 in Canada – I will be going to one simply as a protest against the way the protesters are being treated.

Last edited 6 months ago by Peter Johnson
Shrunken Genepool
Shrunken Genepool
6 months ago

‘taken over by extremists’ – Give me a break. So opposition to mandatory shots is ‘conspiracy theory’. The truckers convoy was ‘extremist’. The progressives are extremists. They are pushing the most radical deconstruction of western civilization in history. The truckers convoy was the first breath of sanity in the Canadian polity for a decade. Poilievre has turned out to be a shill like the rest of them. He hasn’t the b**** to actually take on radical gender and race theory in schools and universities, in the health system, in public bureaucracies – nor to weed out DEI from the corporate world. That is what needs to happen. Anything that falls short is on the wrong side of the culture war. It’s binary. Make up your mind.

Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
6 months ago

So true. It’s perfectly possible for politicians of any leaning to speak up for truth & reality without it meaning that they’ve ‘aligned’ themselves with extreme groups. The words do exist – they just need to find the bollocks to say them.

Catherine Conroy
Catherine Conroy
6 months ago

I’m pretty sure in not being alone in thinking that while ‘liberals’ continue to try and silence ordinary people such as me by vilifying us and calling us extremists (usually right-wing) or bigots, we’re beginning to see that maligned groups (such as anti vaccers or political conservatives) perhaps are not so insane as we thought. I’ve also heard plenty of great opinions from Republicans commentators such as Dave Rubin, whereas I would have avoided his shows like the plague before based on his politics.

Dionne Finch
Dionne Finch
6 months ago

20% of Canadians did not get vaccinated – hardly a fringe. Some of these people are trying to raise awareness of the excess deaths where ever they can and good for them. The authors slander is pretty basic/standard by now.

Nic Cowper
Nic Cowper
6 months ago
Reply to  Dionne Finch

Agreed. For those at the back – this is the tip of the iceberg

Last edited 6 months ago by Nic Cowper
Simon S
Simon S
6 months ago
Reply to  Dionne Finch

Yes and what alarms is the casualness of the slander, a total lack of self awareness because she has been absorbed into that particular groupthink.

Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
6 months ago

“One transgender protestor I spoke to was in Durham because the chapter in her own town — …”

This reporting style is part of the problem. It is now unclear what the sex is of a person who self-describes as ‘transgender’ & journalists are going along with it. So was this a woman speaking? Or a man in some kind of ‘female’ attire with added fake breasts? The use of ‘she’ can no longer be trusted to refer to a female & this has implications for language & communication in every area of life. So – to call ‘trans’ identifying men ‘she’ means what exactly? How do we organise demographics or statistics or census figures or health data for men & women if no one knows any more what a male or a female is?

There’s a tendency to assume that opposition to this ideology is primarily led by religious people. This is probably because so many secular people have opted out of the debate, either afraid of the bullying & name-calling that they invariably get thrown at them if they make the slightest criticism, or thinking (erroneously) that they don’t have any skin in the game. But they do. We all do. Will it soon be perfectly feasible to ‘affirm’ someone who thinks they are a bird, feeding them worms & surgically affixing wings to their shoulders? It’s no more ludicrous than claiming to be the opposite sex…

Being atheist, I’m appalled that so many scientifically qualified & non-religious people are not standing up for objective truth & reality. Humans cannot change sex, although they may of course adopt whatever stereotype they wish to present as. Men have had autogynephile fetishes for generations, but until recently they kept it private – or at least light-heartedly ‘fun’ as in panto etc. So long as they weren’t making this about grooming children the rest of us didn’t pay much attention. Wonderful entertainers like Barry Humphries created witty & clever characters without the need to blur the boundaries between truth & reality. He knew he was a man…

The by-degrees infiltration of ‘transgenderism’ into every facet of public life makes these ideologues by no means the marginalised group that they claim to be. They have no fewer rights than the rest of the population and conflating their cause with that of the LGB is misleading & dishonest at best & vicious at worst. Women should not be forced to compete against men in sports, and organisations that remove the word ‘woman’ from their lexicons need to be called out. They are complicit in the erasure of women’s hard-won sex-based rights & the very reality of women’s existence (‘pregnant people’, anyone?)

By creating confusion in the minds of this generation of children, transgender ideologues will without a doubt be responsible for increasing numbers of emotionally damaged adults in the future. It’s time for it to stop.

Julian Farrows
Julian Farrows
6 months ago
Reply to  Jane Awdry

Thankfully, the children at the school I’m working at seem to see through the transgender charade. As far as they’re concerned it amounts to nothing more than boring lecturing by well-meaning but stupid adults.

Colorado UnHerd
Colorado UnHerd
6 months ago

Thank you for this persective on the encouraging protest by Canadians. I hope we Americans follow suit.
I’m lesbian, and any time I hear LGB attached to “T,” I experience externalized homophobia. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with gender ideology; many of us who fought for gay rights in fact find it homophobic and misogynistic. We stand beside other concerned adults and parents and against this ideology in all its guises, and especially its indoctrination of vulnerable children and usurping of parental rights. Lesbian Canadian writer Eva Kurilova’s reflection on her participation in the recent march is worth a read to those who are still using various “LGBT” (+++) designations, which wrongly presume support from lesbians and gays. This was a strategic forced teaming by trans activists, hoping to capitalize on good will toward gays from straight people who don’t understand the distinction; it should not be validated.

Last edited 6 months ago by Colorado UnHerd
Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
6 months ago

while I have heard that from many L and G, I do not find it helpful. Pretty much EVERY big gay group is pro-TQ. I really don’t care about the individual L or G, because individuals have little power.

How are you attempting to get the Big Alphabet groups to drop the TQ? Human Rights Campaign, etc all support TQ.

So, for that reason, I am more and more blaming L & G for the TQ disaster.

R Wright
R Wright
6 months ago

The cranks and eccentrics are the vanguard of any mass movement. While the weekend warriors come out after the nutters have strewn their bodies over the barbed wire but it should not be forgotten that others paved the way. This article does a disservice to the Freedom Truckers and others that it mocks when they were out there doing the grunt work day after day.

J Hop
J Hop
6 months ago

While the 5G tower content would fall into a conspiracy Covid shot breaths Astra confirmed and very much not a conspiracy. These “vaccines” are not like the ones we are used to and are a disaster. Adverse affects, including death, are way more common than the media will allow to be told. Considering who funds the media that makes sense. No conspiracy needed.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
6 months ago
Reply to  J Hop

What does any of that have to do with sexual education in schools though? These protests against what us being taught in schools would no doubt have enjoyed widespread support, but due to the anti vaccine crowd trying to force their way into them a good number will now stay clear.
If they wanted to still protest about Covid policies (which 99% of the population no longer care about) then they should organise their own rather than trying to piggyback on a much more popular cause

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
6 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Covid conspiracy-theorists are to parental rights protests as Socialist Workers are to all left-of-centre protests.

Shrunken Genepool
Shrunken Genepool
6 months ago
Reply to  Richard Craven

Not wanting compulsion is NOT a conspiracy

Tom Hedger
Tom Hedger
6 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Not at all sure about that 99% figure but I agree with the rest of your post.

Shrunken Genepool
Shrunken Genepool
6 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Because the same authoritarian bureaucracies are weaponizing both issues to get rid of any opposition in universities. The few professors at Canadian universities who stood against mandatory vaccination and the idiotic masking policy (unions are still trying to demand compulsory masking)…are the ones who also have problems with the unrolling DEI regime, affirmative action hires, and the suppression of any dissident voices on gender, race, colonialism, residential schools……Simply asking questions gets you fired or frozen out, And this is routine now in the UK (see Eric Kauffman last week leaving Birkbeck). This is why the Truckers convoy was a litmus and lightning rod for all of this stuff. And you are wrong about 99% of the population. They don’t care…to the extent that the regime has now relaxed again. But union activists are STILL trying to get masks back….Byram Bridle – Professor at Guelph – STIILL not allowed in his lab …..and WTF do you think will happen when Trudeau introduces a digital currency? He froze citizen bank accounts FFS!!!!!!

Catherine Conroy
Catherine Conroy
6 months ago

In fact, regardless of the fact that their focus was not primarily on the reason for the parents’ march, it’s great to see the truckers swell the ranks of protesters.

Catherine Conroy
Catherine Conroy
6 months ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Because in the article, it mentions the participation of anti-vaccers.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
6 months ago

I know it does, my point is that their grievances have nothing to do with the trans debate so they shouldn’t be there protesting about Covid policies as it’s simply a distraction

Richard Craven
Richard Craven
6 months ago
Reply to  J Hop

“While the 5G tower content would fall into a conspiracy Covid shot breaths Astra confirmed and very much not a conspiracy”
I have no idea what this means.

Shrunken Genepool
Shrunken Genepool
6 months ago
Reply to  Richard Craven

It means that there have been demonstrable side effects from the vaccines – very serious for some people; that the trade offs were never adequately assessed, and such discussion was effectively banned in MSM; that the institutions DID ride roughshod over individual rights

M. Jamieson
M. Jamieson
6 months ago
Reply to  Richard Craven

I suspect there is an autocucumber typo in that sentence.

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
6 months ago

Whenever I think about this I can only reach the one conclusion: neo-Marxists have got behind an LGBTQ+ revolution where the traditional political economics have been abandoned for subversive new identities, and pursued in streets and civic spaces with missionary zeal.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
6 months ago

Government funding needs to follow students, not union members. If that happened all of this would disappear.

Helen Hughes
Helen Hughes
6 months ago

I am getting so very tired of people who don’t want to be coerced into having allegedly prophylactic drugs injected into their healthy bodies smeared and gaslighted as being “conspiracy theorists”. It just makes me want to shut down all communication with the person speaking or writing in this case, because my needs to be heard and seen and taken seriously are simply not met – as though in the writer’s view I am a lesser kind of human being. How can these “anti-vaxxer” and “conspiracy theorist” labels be at all helpful?

Helen Hughes
Helen Hughes
6 months ago

I am getting so very tired of people who don’t want to be coerced into having allegedly prophylactic drugs injected into their healthy bodies smeared and gaslighted as being “conspiracy theorists”. It just makes me want to shut down all communication with the person speaking or writing, because my needs to be heard and seen and taken seriously are simply not met – as though in the writer’s view I am a lesser kind of human being. How can these “anti-vaxxer” and “conspiracy theorist” labels be at all helpful? Apart from to signal that a writer adheres to what they believe to be the majority, correct and good opinion, distancing themselves from those who are in their view lesser…

Walter Schwager
Walter Schwager
6 months ago

— What the data says: The Angus Reid Institute polled Canadians extensively on various aspects of culture wars in September, including flashpoints on gender identity. Instead of polarization, the pollster mostly found complexity.
“You’ve got the defiant objectors and the zealous activists who are consumed by these conversations,” Angus Reid President SHACHI KURL told Playbook. “But 60 percent of us are somewhere in the middle, trying to sort out our own opinions. In some cases, there are folks who are just throwing the pillow over their head, saying ‘Please make this stop.'”