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April 28, 2021 - 11:59am
Progressive campaigning, by definition, seeks to bring into being a desired world that — we’re told — would be an improvement over the existing cruel and ugly one. Recently, such campaigning has taken a radical new turn: the pursuit of legal reforms designed to enable everyone to bring into being the particular version of the world they wish to inhabit — often regardless of the degree to which that conflicts with others’ versions of reality.
Canada is the forefront of this drive for the mass customisation of reality. Recently, for example, a Canadian judge ruled that all three adults in a polyamorous relationship should be registered legally as the ‘parents’ of a two-year-old boy they are raising as a ‘throuple’. And last month, Vancouver postman Rob Hoogland was jailed for calling his natal female child ‘she’ — because his estranged wife, and the school his child attends, have been supporting the child (known as A. B.) in “socially transitioning” to a male identity. Hoogland was forbidden by court to refer to her as ‘she’, or seek to influence his child in any way to desist. He refused to comply, and has now been jailed for contempt of court.
Back in 2016, the Canadian academic (and now self-help superstar) Jordan Peterson rose to prominence for his protest against Bill C-16, which he feared would result in ‘compelled speech’ and the threat of punishment for using words that reflected his understanding of reality rather than an officially orthodox one. Column inches were expended at the time explaining why this was mere fear-mongering. But five years later, it seems Peterson was right: in Canada at least, the balance of power has tipped decisively in favour of individuals’ right to tailor their own reality to personal preference — and to use the law’s coercive force to compel public compliance.
This in turn invites the question: whose realities get priority? After all, some realities are mutually exclusive, such Hoogland’s belief that his child is a girl, and that of his ex-wife that the same child is a boy. Similarly, at some point in the future, a now two-year-old boy’s wish to understand which of his three ‘parents’ provided his genetic inheritance (ie which two of the three were his biological parents) may come into conflict with three people’s legal recognition as equally his parents. Which side the law comes down on in such cases, as each emerges, will reveal the underlying moral hierarchies now being entrenched.
Similar contests are afoot in England too. At the time of writing, Maya Forstater is in the UK’s Employment Appeal Tribunal appealing against a ruling that her belief that humans can’t change sex is ‘not worthy of respect in a democratic society’. The laws in question may seem abstruse but at their root is the question of how, and to what extent, individual desire and individual identity should be required to submit to shared material or social realities — or vice versa.
It’s one of the defining political battlefields of our time — and surreal legal rulings now emanating from Canada provide some clue as to where we might be heading. Let’s hope British courts, and British public opinion, are able to resist the siren song of the world as it should be, and retain some relationship to the world as it is.
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SubscribeMaybe I haven’t grasped what it is that people are demanding.
But… every cell in the human body has male or female chromosomes – trillions of them, every one defining the person’s sex.
You can call yourself what you like, or receive medical attention with drugs or surgery. But those chromosomes remain as male or female.
Please enlighten me!
They are demanding to be treated as ‘special’. I have personally known three male to female ‘transsexuals’. They were all attention and sympathy seekers, always ill with mysterious (although imperceptible to the casual observer) illnesses, always being the victim of some similarly intangible slights or injustices. Whatever sympathy or attention they recieved,it was never enough .
It has to be said that to the impartial observer they made physically unconvincing women (tall, big hands and feet, male pattern baldness at least before the hormones -and wigs-). More interesting perhaps is that they also made unconvincing women in manner. They all still evinced ‘masculine’ (sorry boys) behaviour, talking across people, interrupting, even physical menacing if upset or crossed.
It’s a very small sample, I know. However, it seemed to me that their ‘inner woman’ was not in control of their behaviour. One sees the same thing when they turn up at female events, shouting at and physically threatening what they call TERFS (and I call sane people).
I think that when they get their way, and they are allowed into every female space, and have pushed their way to the top of every female shortlist, and every female sport, they will be disappointed, because they will be mainstream – and then who will care? Who will pay special attention to extraordinary them?
So the next stage will be demanding to be recognised as a camel, or maybe a panda , cos they survive on a diet which it is very difficult to supply in most of the western world.
Still Penny Mordaunt thinks that ‘trans women are women’, she said so in Parliament. She must have a different perception and experience of women to me.
Yes, it is largely narcissism that is in play here.
The fact that a significant portion of “Trans” people usually end in suicide could be either considered sad or a silver lining, depending on where you stand on this moronic topic
I’ve been looking into the suicide claims that are regularly weaponised by trans rights activists whenever they aren’t getting their way for over a year now and i have to say I’m yet to find any from a reliable source / or that isn’t hearsay from ‘opinion’ articles.
The vast majority of the new wave of TiMs don’t hate themselves, in fact quite the opposite, there’s a growing body of work that suggests many of them suffer with autogynephilia which is an erotic desire for oneself in female form. Hence the narcissism, and the insane rage and aggression if their identities aren’t affirmed by everyone around them – in particular, women.
a very good comment except for the last bit of speculating how far truly crazy people might take these broadening of the tolerance of the greater community for the bullying, demanding, threatening behaviours, of very small minorities.
Essentially though, the basic principles are accurate and can be summarized as follows;
if a person is let us say threatened with a gun to their head and asked ‘do you really genuinely believe that you have a woman’s body ‘trapped’ inside your male body – (or vice versa) and the person answers ‘yes’, then they are deluded, psychologically ill, and the responsible medical treatment of delusions is not hormones or radical body surgery.
On the other hand, if the person answers ‘ of course not, but it’s the way how I ‘feel’ – then the person is suffering from that dreadful human condition known as ‘unhappiness’,
unhappy with themselves, with whom they are, with the genetic endowment they were given by their parents, etc, etc, with ‘societies’ narrow prejudices about male and female etc, etc, etc, and – surprise surprise, the responsible medical treatment of unhappiness is neither hormones nor radical genital surgery.
I find it alarming that we, as a society, allow/promote such things. There is a court case in British Columbia now over a youth wanting to transform and the dad is in jail because he won’t call the child by the preferred gender title. From what I am gathering of the case he wanted the child to wait until he/she was older to make that very big decision. Obviously, we have not enough to do in our lives. Our society is being up-ended. Yes, after all this has been accomplished maybe it will be people wishing to be camels. 🙁
I have shared this article before but I think it is worth sharing again as it provides clarity as well as strong arguments against the current trends: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9752.12549
But five years later, it seems Peterson was right:
No kidding. We’re at a point where womanhood is treated as no more than an idea, where being gay is apparently more a matter of being confused at one’s gender, and where a man can be jailed for uttering objective fact.
At the time of writing, Maya Forstater is in the UK’s Employment Appeal Tribunal appealing against a ruling that her belief that humans can’t change sex is ‘not worthy of respect in a democratic society’.
Then it is no longer a democratic society. The whole point of such a society is to allow for vigorous debate on matters. What’s not worthy of respect is to pretend that immutable factors are not immutable after all, though it is a view that should still have an airing. Because that’s how debate works.
Hence trans rights being on a collision course with female rights and gay rights.
actually, they look at it the other way around! that the ‘mistaken’ sex that they were physically born into was ‘wrong’, because that is not their alleged ‘gender identity’ which is their belief that they really are, were always meant to be, the opposite sex and that alleged ‘gender identity’ is immutable – I kid you nor –
and the rest of us are nasty persecutors, are intolerable full-of-hate people who will not let them call themselves who or what they want, and now want to stop people who have grown up as boys and men and want to declare they are women be allowed to compete against ‘real’ women in sports, be allowed into places of refuge such as shelters for abused women, be allowed to share the same quarters in prisons as ‘real’ women.
A woman with children said to me, “I look at gender on a sliding scale”. A – what? I was speechless.
One of the most annoying thing about the trans bully approach is that they claim that “science vindicates trans”. This “scientism” is primarily due to the fact that the DSM currently does not define trans as a psychosis, which it is. This was done in around 2010, by a vote of a panel of “experts” who were dominated by trans proponents. The real story here is that there is a LOT of money involved in the sex-modification industry. To pervert your sex into the other one (and there are exactly 2) takes a lot of money – money for surgeries, money for incorrect hormones. This is a life-long expense, since the body does not understand gender – the body is a sexual body, defined by a chromosomal reality present from the moment of conception.
I have read on the American media that Planned Parenthood sees the transgender industry as a very big money-earner.
I think we can thank Caitlin Jennings for the start of this movement. And yes, a huge money maker.
to add to your comment,
the American Psychiatric Association DSM diagnostic manual is based upon recommendations by committees that ‘we call these symptoms and observations diagnosis ‘x’ ‘ and it is NOT based on any of the physical biological criteria that define diagnosis in the whole of the rest of medicine.
In the rest of medicine, diagnosis ultimately is based upon a combination of symptoms, examination, and various laboratory tests that ultimately might include biopsy, which is the examination under the microscope of body cells, which then show a characteristic abnormality for any particular disease or illness.
That does not exist in psychiatry as a whole, and certainly not in these very politically-charged sexual areas.
So if you read for instance that “Gender dysphoria is a recognized medical condition” you would not know unless you were very knowledgeable of how the American Psychiatric DSM diagnostic manual is generated, that there are absolutely no physical/body/brain markers confirming that statement.
That in fact, Gender Dysphoria is a made-up term agreed by a committee, to ‘classify’ people who say they are unhappy with whom they are in this particular aspect of their lives, and that their level of unhappiness is so high that the committee agrees to call it a condition’.
That is all that it is – and nothing more.
As a supplement to the above see: https://www.city-journal.org/canadian-father-jailed-for-speaking-out-about-trans-identifying-child
It’s not only about customising reality, but customising identity, being allowed to claim ‘We are who we say we are’. This is the title to a review essay in the TLS (October 2, 2020), which is scary as much as anything because the author, who is a lit. professor at Harvard, blithely assumes that her/his/their vision for the future is what we all want, ‘ a future in which gender roles and identities are something you get to try on, or try out, almost as you might try living in Glasgow (!), or becoming a carpenter, or square dancing, asking whether it feels right for you.’ Oh brave new world!
it is a step beyond customization, to include the rest of us being forced to go along with whatever the individual’s claim may be. This mindset relies on coercion, which is the hallmark of any bad idea.
Thanks the posting the link. It is truly scary.
I’m all for treating people with respect, and going along with some things out of politeness. But the trans-activist world wants the power to force everyone to be fully complicit in their delusions. It is no different than if infertile people forced everyone to pretend that their dolls were babies, and had a bunch of “experts” to vouch that babyness is a “spectrum.”
clever comment
Canada is rapidly becoming an authoritarian dystopia of a kind that has never been seen before. It’s fascinating but I’m glad I don’t live there, not that we are not going in the same direction here.
As a Canadian citizen, I must agree with you on this one, Fraser. Canadian politicians are playing a dangerous game by yielding to such nonsense as pushed by identity politics ideologs. It will come back to haunt them soon, be it on elections or on embarrassing court decision exposures such as the one pointed by the author.
There should be a clear line drawn between respecting someone’s individual choices and imposing a surreal ideology on everyone else “as a token of such respect”.
Dual U.K./Canadian citizen here and I must agree. I’d like to say I barely recognise the Canada I left 24 years ago to return home. Trouble is, I live under a similarly batsh!t crazy hyper-woke regime in Sturgeon’s Scotland so it sounds all too familiar. This kind of thinking isn’t reflected in the thinking of most Canadians and Scots and other British people. How do we return both countries to sanity?
Canada has been described as ‘A dead country walking’.
North America’s Sweden. Likewise Scotland.
That’s mostly accurate but Canada is barely a country anymore. All signs of national culture and identity are being scrubbed, hence the Anglo-Canadian obsession with destroying Quebec.
I don’t see it like that at all for the reasons you note. We are losing our identity period. Statues are trashed and taken down, illegal immigrants are crossing the border daily and collecting many benefits that Canadians can’t get, too much given in the way of First Nations and BLM as a way to appease the groups, just like the government initially did in Quebec to keep them happy, and a high five shown to LGBTQ requests on every level. If anyone says anything about any of this, you are a racist, a homophobic, or just a downright miserable SOB. We are individual islands all floating out on the ocean with nothing to claim other than we live in Canada.
We are mostly in agreement. In Canada, Aboriginals and other minorities are encouraged to have an identity while ‘white’ people (whether Orthodox Jews or members of the Aryan Nation, as it happens) are most definitely not. The attack on French Canadians, whom the Canadian left despises for being white people with a sense of pride, history, culture and identity, is well underway. I expect we will see a fair amount of French bashing when Justice Abella retires in July and the left demands that a unilingual Aboriginal jurist take her place.
Well, it has a lot of good things – which make such a rash contrast with this BS of identity politics. The trick is how to filter the BS out…
I am sad to have to agree with you.
And I’m sad to be living here. It’s frightening…
And ever more with the crazy rules etc over this covid issue.
You are correct Fraser. Thanks to our idiotic government we see all kinds of authoritarian BS being brought before our eyes with this subject and many others. It is alarming and terrifying.
Governments are now acting like an occupying force in most Western countries, particularly ones in the Anglo-sphere. They are doing all that they can to destroy our self-reliance and personal freedoms and disguise this by bestowing dubious ‘rights’ to sexual outliers who care nothing for society at large, but merely for the right to flaunt their sexual proclivities over the masses. The same is being done with the stirring of racial animosity between those of different skin colors. Those who oppose this are quickly labelled ‘phobic’ or ‘right-wing’.
The strange thing is, that this is all being cheered on by the educational and journalistic establishment who should know better, but have let themselves be reduced to nothing more than courtiers to the rich and powerful and mouthpieces for their propaganda.
excellent observation
but it is happening in countries where educational standards have plummeted, so that even at university level so many students are unable to think clearly coherently and logically
Yes, even at a university/college level they can’t think critically because at a young age it was forced upon them but they didn’t see it that way. Heavens forbid if they do, they soon see the wrath of that. Look at Lindsay Shepherd. She was a teaching assistant at Sir Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario and took that university to task and wrote a book about it (just recently released). Brave young woman calling a spade a spade.
You are so right! Kids are being taught so much of this garbage in school too and at a young age and so by the time they are a young teen, they think they have already figured out their life on planet earth. Propaganda at its best!
Much of this stems from the deluge of poorly written rights legislation, which rather than protecting so called vulnerable classes of people, has elevated them to holding superior legal, political and cultural powers over the rest of the population.
The relationship between these vulnerable classes and the courts is symbiotic. The more protected classes there are, the more influence over legislation the courts get and this means more power for activist lawyers and judges, to bypass democratic institutions they feel have been “captured” by popularists.
Truth, is always secondary to power.
It’s not a “siren song”, it’s a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
What I find strange about this is that experimental lifestyles were going on all over the place in the 1960s and 70s (amongst the hippies), a few people tutted a bit but mostly the experimenters were left in peace to get on with it.
Why does this generation find it necessary to legislate and force the issue ?
It seems as if there is a definite tendency towards authoritarianism, the paradox being an enforcement in pink fluffy gloves.
Yes, Canada is in the forefront of this movement that has been given a variety of names: identitarianism, woke, social justice, etc. I would call it hyper-liberalism: extreme individualism of all against all, with the most powerful individuals winning against the majority, for example aggressive men enforcing their desires onto women. However, it is not really a movement, so much as an increasingly entrenched ideological hegemony. Our federal, provincial and municipal governments and all of our political parties, mainstream media and institutions have unquestionably adopted this mindset. In its wake, women have been erased as a distinct human binary and are now a subset of males and are therefore subservient to males. Thus, patriarchal polygamy is okay.
There are some very clever people contributing to this site but they should realise that all this is not going away. It will get worse and worse and spread over the world like a …erm… pandemic.
All of the ridicule and clever answers and indignation will make no difference. There could be 1000 comments per day on the subject but it will not die.
Time for positives instead of negatives. Ideas. Schemes. Plans.
Going with your pandemic analogy, immunity is the answer (an answer). Immunity is why the hogwash isn’t taking any hold in the former eastern-bloc countries; they acquired robust and long-lasting immunity against the malaise, and they can spot it from a mile by its vocabulary. But they paid a big upfront price (45+ years of communist hell) for their immunity.
For the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed ‘West’ it might be a case of things getting much worse before they can get any better. As long as supposedly sane grown-up people squirm and break out in indignant protestation when someone calls them a “racist” etc. instead of asserting with a beaming smile that “That i am indeed. Have a problem with that?” – the lunatics will have the upper hand. Stop giving them the upper hand. That would be a good start.
Sure, talk is cheap but ineffective. On the other hand, ridicule is powerful. Ridicule is positive.
Ideas, schemes plans all begin on the individual level. Sit down, assess your situation and behaviour, assess what you can do, what you can reasonably afford to do, etc. Find your personal workable balance between sacrifice and cowardice. Then from that point start chipping away at the cowardice.
Privately most people reject and despise the woke dogma. But they shy away from publicly voicing their distaste for it, due to a variety of fears – some warranted (losing job / livelihood), others vanity-based (fear of ostracism, fear of being called a racist / whateverist), the latter are what i call cowardice. The more people see that they are not alone with their distaste for wokery (but in fact they are the sane majority) the more willing they will be to speak and act.
Based on the volume of gun sales in the United States, many people are preparing for that possibility.
In Canada, Trudeau has taken many guns away from the legal gun owners (farmers, hunters, etc) and yet, the gangs all still have their guns and bringing more in illegally daily. I think he knows one day the legal owners may just need to use them. We are looking more like a communist leaning country every day.
Yes, the Liberals would be happiest if everyone was disarmed and sitting at home in a marijuana induced torpor!
Honestly, I agree. My thought is that the antidote to Woke lunacy is Stoicism. This is a philosophy of self-control, of self-actualization, of self-improvement.
I am curious about what you may suggest.
I’d be interesting in seeing an article about the kinds of legal ideas and laws which lead to judgements like this.
The possibility of falsifying original birth certificates in the first place is part of the issue I think. Many places will give an adoptive couple a second birt certificate, but that does not replace the first one entirely, and that seems reasonable. But as soon as it became possible to legally put same sex couples on as if they were the biological parents – and the fact is that we all know that cannot be so – the door was opened to falsify them in other ways – like three parents.
Watch out for the trans women to put their troll costumes on and start voting everyone else down.
13.40 Wednesday April 28.
I wouldn’t be too hasty to criticize the court in the British Columbia case about the sentencing for contempt of court because of the way the human rights laws of British Columbia are written. The court may have had little or no choice.
Let’s look at this in a broader perspective. In most of the last century the advocacy around sexuality was focused on women’s rights. Women are approximately half the population. When many rights were won for women the focus shifted to gay rights, which changed from being seen by psychologists as a curable mental illness to a sexual orientation that was socially acceptable and legally protected. Gays are estimated to represent 10% of the population. Then came transgender rights, with self-identification as determinative of those rights. Transgender persons represent no more than 1% of the population. Thus, we are becoming increasingly polarized as a society about smaller and smaller segments of the population.
The underlying force today is the cult of the victim, which is the religion of the self-appointed rescuer. You can’t be a virtuous rescuer unless you have a victim to rescue. Hence the unending search for ever smaller minorities of victims to be rescued from some grievance by militant rescuers. We see similar religiosity in issues of race with calls to defund the police, and the existential climate crisis, with calls to save the only planet we have. All of these are, at bottom, modern religious crusades.
Of course power-seeking governments and their well-paid bureaucrats are quite happy with this situation because it distracts the voters from criticizing governments on issues that affect a lot more people, often in harmful ways.
It seems to me that all the labeling or unlabeling of peeps is getting out of hand. Why should it offend anyone that I am woman? I am not offended because others are whatever they are or choose to be. I think peeps who are so concerned with being labeled ‘correctly’ by others who don’t know them and never will know them puts too much pressure on society in general and gives people one will never know, responsibility that doesn’t belong to them. My shortened personal first name is also a man’s name, so over the course of my life I have received mail addressed to Mr. I even received a notice to register for the U.S. military draft. These things did not hurt me or define me in any way. I think people are giving the whole label thing way too much power in their everyday lives. What would happen if they faced a life threatening crisis? These people have no coping skills nor confidence in the choices they say they have made. Seems to me anyway.
I’m not sure these two examples are comparable. Can’t the registration of all members of a ‘throuple’ as parents be considered akin to the legal protection provided through adoption? If this is the family structure that the child is being brought up in, then this ensures that the non-biological parent must continue to be part of this child’s life and remain financially responsible, regardless of how the relationship pans out. Providing security and stability for the child is a major benefit of this ruling.
In western Europe, North America and Australasia the educational and civic instititions are overtaken by this ‘thinking’ and are intent upon enforcing their will on a largy reluctant but supine people. How though will Africa, the Middle East, India, China, Russia and Japan, amongst others react? I can’t see the King of the Zulus transitioning to a Queen any time soon… and what kind of western cultural colonialism would try to suggest that he could?