What Is Gender Ideology?

I have long asserted that Gender Ideology is fundamentally a "straw man" construct that the political right has co-opted and turned into a bucket that they fill with all of their fears about transgender people (in much the same way that the word "transgenderism" is another term they love to throw around to invalidate transgender people).  

This morning, I went to Google and asked its AI to define "Gender Ideology", here's what it came back with: 

"Gender ideology" is a term primarily used by conservative, religious, and anti-LGBTQ+ groups to describe, and criticize, a set of beliefs regarding gender identity, sexual orientation, and reproductive rights. It is largely employed as a pejorative, catch-all phrase to frame modern understandings of gender—particularly those that decouple gender from biological sex—as a dangerous, artificial, or fabricated construct. 

Core Beliefs Criticized as "Gender Ideology"
Those who use the term "gender ideology" often argue it encompasses the following ideas: 

• Social Construction of Gender: The belief that gender roles and identities are not fixed by nature or biology, but are constructed by society and culture.
• Gender Identity over Biology: The assertion that a person's internal sense of their gender ("gender identity") is more definitive than their assigned sex at birth.
• Gender Fluidity: The concept that gender can be fluid, non-binary, or chosen, rather than strictly male or female.
• Separation of Sex and Gender: The distinction between biological sex (chromosomes/anatomy) and gender (socially constructed roles), which is foundational to gender studies.

Unsurprisingly, GLAAD notes that this is a term which is used not by either academic researchers in the area, nor by actual transgender people.  It is used primarily by the same actors who used the term "gay agenda" (similarly devoid of meaning for the people it is intended to attack).  

Looking closer at the broad ideas that "Gender Ideology" is charitably intended to encompass, we see a pattern that in domains like psychology and sociology we call "biopsychosocial" (BPS), where the concepts involved encompass the domains of biology (the physical), psychology (the individual), and sociological (the social) dimensions in a manner where they intersect with each other.  

Wherein Colin Wright Takes A Victory Lap

Over in The Wall Street Journal, author Colin Wright takes a victory lap declaring that transgender youth are in fact the result of "social contagion".  

As you might expect, he's fallen all the way down the Gender Critical rabbit hole, making some of the most ridiculous claims possible, and citing material from the "Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine" (SEGM) - a notoriously anti-transgender group which is more a collection of cranks than practitioners of legitimate science.  

The dominant counterargument to the social-contagion theory, repeated endlessly by the media and activists, is that the sharp rise in transgender identification over the past decade simply reflects liberation: People today are more comfortable expressing their authentic selves. The favored analogy compares this rise to the historic increase in left-handedness once schools stopped discouraging it. As transgender activist and biologist Julia Serano put it in a 2017 article, “there wasn’t really a rise in left-handedness so much as there was a rise in left-handed acceptance” that allowed its true natural prevalence to emerge. John Oliver popularized this analogy on “Last Week Tonight” in 2022, insisting that the surge in trans identification was simply a sign that “people were free to be who they f— were.”

If transgender identity were an innate trait, like left-handedness, we would expect identification rates to rise at first when it became socially acceptable, then plateau and remain stable at a fixed level. If the phenomenon were instead driven by social contagion, we might expect a boom-and-bust pattern: a spike followed by a rapid decline once the social forces driving it weaken.

As both a transgender person and a left-handed person, I cannot tell you how completely misguided this really is.  In order for Wright's hypothesis to stand up, we have to turn a blind eye to the last 5 years or more of increasingly hate-filled anti-transgender _LEGISLATION_ and rhetoric coming from the political right, especially in the US and UK.  These laws are draconian, they are hurtful, and yes, they are profoundly damaging. 

If Mr. Wright thinks that transgender youth identities are "just social contagion", he is implying strongly that those youth are too stupid to understand the world around them - that they only follow the lead of others.  Reality is quite different.  Youth are in fact very sensitive to the social signals in their environment, and it would be hard for transgender youth not to be aware of the increasingly hostile legislative environment.  Nor can they ignore the hostility that they hear on a daily basis coming from religious leaders in church, or even their families.  

Mr. Wright has engaged in one of the most serious errors in research and analysis:  Correlation Fallacy.  He is assuming that the reduction being observed indicates a "reduction" in the number of transgender people.  This is, in my experience, likely false in the long run.  Transgender youth are clever - they know the signals they are receiving and will decide to transition later when they feel it's safer to do so.  That may mean getting out from the family home, or given current circumstances, may mean emigrating to another country where being transgender isn't being actively criminalized.  To claim as he does, without serious evidence, is sloppy at best.

Such as it is, the "evidence" for "social contagion" theory regarding gender identity is at best sparse, and most of it is so methodologically flawed as to qualify as junk science.  As an example, many "Gender Critical" arguments reference Littman's 2017 paper proposing "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria".  It was pure junk science.  Methodologically flawed, it proceeded to draw conclusions about transgender youth without even talking to a single transgender youth!  Learn to recognize junk science, people. 

Now, who the heck is Colin Wright?  The byline for him posted with his article reads:  "Mr. Wright is an evolutionary biologist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute."

The Manhattan Institute? Oh - another conservative "think tank" - you'll pardon me while I ignore that - partisan think tanks are at best disinformation sources, and being affiliated with one doesn't help.  Being affiliated with SEGM is in my view another strike - SEGM is a key purveyor of junk science and misinformation about transgender people.

Doing a brief search on Google Scholar, I see no evidence that Mr. Wright has ever engaged in significant study of transgender people, either as a primary researcher, or as a contributor.  So, basically, we have another case of "I have a PhD, therefore, I can opine on any subject, regardless of whether I know anything about it".  This is sadly, an all too common state of affairs.  People with no actual background or study in the area manage to acquire an audience, and presto, they are "experts".  

There's a reason we don't go to a mechanic to diagnose medical issues, and we don't ask our physicians to repair our cars.  They are very different domains with different training and knowledge.  It would be nice if Mr. Wright had some actual expertise in the area of gender identity, but aside from writing opinion articles in newspapers, he has none.

How To Respond To the UKSC Ruling On Trans People

 This week, the United Kingdom Supreme Court (UKSC) issued a ruling that on the face of it invalidates transgender women’s rights under the law.  I haven’t finished reading through the entirety of the ruling (I’m also not a lawyer - so reading this stuff is often slow going for me!), and I’m sure that others will have more clear headed things to say about the ruling itself.

However, my objective here isn’t to perform a deep dive into the ruling.  This is more about how a ruling like this can be turned back on itself.  The objective of these cases is clearly to shove transgender women (in particular) out of public life.  To do so, proponents of these suits often dive behind what they think of as “scientific wording” - in this case, the phrase “biological woman” comes to the fore very quickly. 

In a sense, such simplistic phrases are perfect for weaponizing, and they can be weaponized very effectively by transgender people and their allies.  Even the UKSC ruling, while it adopts this language doesn’t attempt to provide any kind of meaningful definition of what this means.  

A trivial version of taking it apart is a bit like the snarky quip about “organic vegetables”:  It’s clearly a vegetable, and by definition it is organic in that no human being assembled it.  Similarly, a transgender woman might well say “I’m biological, and I’m a woman - I don’t see a problem here”.  It’s a bit facetious to do so, but given the approach being taken by the anti-transgender panic brigade, not entirely wrong. 

The other end of it is when cases get before the courts, (and they inevitably will), we start off with bringing in biologists and have them give lessons to the court on the complexity of human biology when it comes down to reproductive biology and sex development.  It’s strange - oh so strange - and efforts to treat it as some kind of rigid dichotomy are hugely problematic.  

Pretty much every time you hear “biological woman”, you know you’re talking to someone who has absolutely no idea what they’re saying - biology isn’t simple, and it’s beyond laughable to try and reduce any human being to “the bits between their legs”.  Every time the antis bring up transgender people as some kind of abhorrent problem, slap them down with all of the exceptions that already exist even if transgender people didn’t.  

The logic they’re using is so rigid it’s brittle.  Twist it on them until it breaks at every turn. 

Will it be easy?  Nope.  But it needs to be done.  Every single argument the “antis” are making to justify shoving transgender women out of public life is based on falsehoods.  Their suppositions about transgender people are rigid and false, and that makes them vulnerable to attack - even when they think they’re backed up by the highest courts in the land. 

Alberta's Anti-Trans Legislation

So, now that the UCP has rolled out their anti-trans legislation, we can take a long look at it.  Yesterday, they tabled 3 related bills and earlier in the week they tabled their amendments to the "Alberta Bill of Rights".  I'm not the fastest read of law, and I suspect that some of the legislation has been created to tangle the courts up.  So ... this is probably part 1 of a series.  

Anyways, let's dive in.

The 2024 UCP AGM Policy Resolutions

The UCP's policy resolutions were published on the party website the other day.  It's about as bad as you might expect, worse if you're a transgender person.   

Let's take a look, shall we? 

Reviewing The Cass Review Report

The subtitle for this should be "How Cass Weaponized Science".

Now that the Cass Review has published their final report, it is possible to look beyond the apparent issues in how the report was assembled, and examine the report, its recommendations, and see just how bad it really is. 

Let’s Go Back To The DSM III !

Apparently there is a belief held among certain members of the trans community that we should go back in time … back to the days of the DSM III in particular - at least for what is now referred to as Gender Dysphoria.  (If you wish to read the DSM III section on Transsexualism, it’s Diagnostic Code 302.50 - in the chapter on Sexual Disorders, I think).

I have opinions.  

First, let me post the thread that I just read before I go off and explain just how incredibly wrong these people have it. 

There are a few things to bring out here.  First is a gross misunderstanding of the role / purpose of the DSM and its development.  Then we need to get into a discussion of just what treatment for transsexuals looked like back then, because wow - it wasn’t pretty.  

You Got Played, Girl

 On March 19, 2024 the United Conservative Party of Alberta held an event that they called "Let Kids Be Kids" (spoiler alert:  it was an anti-trans/anti-2SLGBTQ/anti-SOGI/"parents rights" rally in reality).  

They brought in a transgender woman from Lethbridge to speak to the transgender case.  I don't know this person, but from their answers to the questions put to them, they clearly lack both research and clinical knowledge in the domain.  Being transgender does not mean that one has spent time in the academic and clinical literature relevant to this domain, and this is a problem.  

Her stated purpose was to engage in dialogue, but quite frankly, she got played.  In a 2 hour long event, she was allocated a grand total of 10 minutes during which the host asked them questions that she had to respond to.  The rest of the 2 hours was given over to opening comments, and presentations by some of the most dishonest players in the Alberta "parental rights" movement - and their presentations destroyed any semblance of "goodwill" and "open dialogue".  She got played for a patsy. 

Let me explain: 

Affirming Care Is Not A “Conveyor Belt”

In reading the essay “Current Concerns About Gender Affirming Care In Adolescents”, it occurred to me that there is a fundamental misrepresentation about what Gender Affirming Care means, and the anti-trans movement has exploited it to their advantage. 

Before I delve into that too deeply, let me take you back to the days of “big hospital gender clinics” in the 70s and 80s.  There was one in Canada that stood out and that was the program at the Clarke Institute for Psychiatry (now known as the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)). The gender identity program there was notorious in the transgender community by the 1990s.  The reason for the notoriety was that it was very much a “conveyor belt” model, and the program was designed to be as obstructive as possible.  At one point, adult patients were not allowed access to Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy (GAHT) until they had lived full-time in their desired gender for two full years.  Patients were often told they had to change careers and take on jobs that were “more typically feminine”, and of course if you weren’t “passing pretty”, you were criticized for it.  The entire program was designed to make it as difficult as possible to transition - and this was not unusual for other similar programs that grew up in the 1970s.  They all had a very narrow understanding of what it meant to be transgender, and if you didn’t fall perfectly into the little box they had constructed, well I guess transition wasn’t for you.

That kind of program is very much a conveyor belt model - you either follow their steps, and do them to the satisfaction of the gatekeepers who are managing it, or you aren’t going to transition.  

Gender Affirming Care is portrayed by the anti-trans movement as though it’s a straight line of “social transition -> puberty blockers -> GAHT -> Gender Affirming Surgeries”.  This is not only inaccurate, but it is profoundly misleading.

The core principle of the model is the second word of the name: “Affirmation”.  This literally means you affirm the person as they are presenting themselves to you. If they tell you that they feel feminine (or masculine) you accept that statement at face value.  In other words, you meet the person where they are at that time.  That doesn’t mean that you blindly start making treatment decisions based on that - especially if the person before you is a child.  

There are all kinds of principles at play here, but one of them is careful observation.  You don’t tell the person that you “don’t believe them” - implicitly or explicitly.  Instead, you monitor over several visits while you gather background.  Each time you meet with them you meet them where they are. Your job is to monitor for consistency (or inconsistency), to check in with how they are feeling as they take steps on their path.  

BUT, there’s a big point here:  the person making the changes is who decides what steps they are willing to take.  Nobody else gets to dictate that.  That means if they start saying “hey, this isn’t feeling right”, or “I’m feeling really anxious now”, then it’s important to spend time processing with them what they are experiencing.  For some, that may be nothing more than “stumbling over a tree root on the path”, for others, it might be an indicator that it’s time to turn off the path they are on.  You process with the person, meeting them where they are at, and you help them make their best decision at that time.  

When matters like medical interventions such as puberty blockers, or GAHT come up, it’s really important to discuss the implications frankly with the individual and their parents (at least when we are dealing with youth).  I disagree that the youth is somehow “unable to form consent” here based on their age.  By the time puberty is beginning, the individual is capable of understanding a lot - claiming that they can’t possibly understand what they are doing not only infantilizes them, but it denies them agency at a time when that agency is critical.  Yes, parents have to consent as well for obvious reasons, but it’s also important to gather consent from the child.  If the child says “I’m not sure I’m ready for that”, or “I don’t understand”, something along those lines, then of course caution is needed.  Such is the complexity of consent.

Likewise with GAHT, open and frank discussions need to be had because the implications of GAHT are enormous.  Again, consent matters here.  Consent has to be formed appropriately with the individual.  Going from puberty blockers to GAHT isn’t “automatic”.  Some will decide to step away, others will not. Again, the decision here has to belong to the person making the changes, and nobody else.  

The principle I am describing is really the notion of a non-judgmental space where the person can be heard - more or less the core of Rogers’ Client Centred Therapy.  

Critics try to portray the process as some kind of forced progression, when the reality is that the progression is being put in the hands of the person transitioning, and the role of the caregiving team is to help the person along THEIR path, wherever it may lead.  Human development is rarely a straight line, and for transgender people - especially youth - it unquestionably is not a straight line.  As adults, our job is to ensure that they have a stable, loving environment that doesn’t question the steps that they choose to take. 

For the most part, the “doubters” like Dr Levine strike me as having lost sight of the big picture, and they are getting hung up on hypotheticals instead of enabling people to make their best possible lives. 

Let's Talk About Protecting Children

The ostensible reason for the UCP government's recently announced bundle of policies around transgender youth (actually, all trans people - but we'll come back to that) is to "protect children".  I'm going to speak to this from a professional and therapeutic perspective, because I have relevant training and experience in that regard. 

First, let's consider what it means to "protect" someone else's interests - to safeguard them.  The approach being taken by the UCP seems to be more about preventing the individual from making decisions for themselves, apparently on the basis that you "can't possibly understand the consequences unless you're an adult".  This clearly misrepresents the idea of safeguarding, and ultimately robs the individual of autonomy.  

The UCP's approach basically is based on the old nuclear family concept that the parents, siblings, and relatives magically "know what's best" for the child.  This is reflected in Smith's statements, as well as in the bizarre "mandatory notification" model being imposed on schools.  However, again, this model ignores the person most affected by these decisions - the child.  It's no longer given to them the opportunity to say "no, I'm not comfortable with notifying my parents right now".

And this is where the entire policy construct shows us its wrong-headedness.

About That Consultation Thing

I'm sure that we all heard Premier Smith claim that she has consulted widely on the draconian anti-transgender policies that she announced last week.  

Now it starts to come out exactly whom she consulted with - and surprise, surprise, it's not exactly a group of people well-qualified to help guide the development of government policy on a topic like transgender youth.  

Let's take a closer look, shall we? 

Alberta's Proposed Trans Policy

It's been 3 days since Premier Danielle Smith dropped a bomb on Alberta's transgender community, and I'm still reeling.  I'm alternating between being angry with the government, and grieving for the youth that will be most deeply affected by these policies. 

Before I dive into a deeper analysis of what Premier Smith announced, and my thoughts about it, I just want to say to my readers who are not themselves transgender, and may be looking at this as "well, this seems reasonable":  Ask yourself how you would feel if your access to treatment, social validity, and activities were arbitrarily legislated away?  Because that's exactly what's being done to transgender people (not just youth) here. 

Now, onwards into the policy bundle that Premier Smith announced on Wednesday.

The CPC Went Full SoCon

The brief summary of yesterday’s policy votes at the CPC 2023 convention was published by CBC. Go there first, and read it - but I really think they missed more than a few things, so this is going to be a bit more of a deep dive into the policies they passed and how much worse for women and minorities it really is.

What Exactly Is A “Broad Coalition Of Conservatives”?

This morning, on the news one of the headline stories was about the CPC policy convention, where they are going to debate a range of policies, and two of them are outright eliminationist anti-transgender crap. (We’ll come back to that) One of the party talking heads said some inane drivel about the CPC being a “democratic party with a broad coalition of conservatives”. 

Besides being a somewhat silly attempt to define the party as “big tent”, what does the term really mean? It certainly doesn’t mean inclusion - the CPC continues to pander to extreme libertarians whose idea of “economic policy” is basically “let them eat cake”.  So if you’re somewhere in the middle and lower income ranges, they sure as hell aren’t including you - your pockets are the first ones they are going to pick through user fees, means testing programs, etc.  They also continue to be very much in the thrall of social conservative movements that want to exclude people who don’t fit into a particularly narrow idea of the world (usually one based on a bad reading of Old Testament texts).  So yeah, if you’re a woman, a member of the 2SLGBTQ community, or you belong to one of those “other religions”, don’t think for a moment that you’re safe in that party - you aren’t.

I did take a look through the CPC policy proposals, and there are some doozies in there.  Let's go exploring, shall we?

Not A Trans Person … Again

Last week, it came out that The Calgary Stampede _KNEW_ about, and did nothing to stop a child molester working in their midst. This isn’t a couple of middle managers “knowing about” and dropping the ball, it’s the board - the senior executives.   Then this morning, I awoke to the following headline out of Australia: “Childcare worker charged with sex abuse of 91 children”.

It’s been like this for a while.  Every day there are headlines about child molesters appearing.  They’re often people in positions of trust and authority - group leaders, coaches, pastors, priests, and so on.  Ten minutes with any reasonable search engine turns up a plethora of cases in the headlines - all of them recent.  I shudder to think how many cases don’t make it into the headlines - because media still only prints the most salacious of cases. 

What do these cases have in common?  It is almost never someone who is transgender (ie - in my quick look this morning, I found exactly zero cases involving trans people or drag queens).  While such cases may exist, they are vanishingly rare.  So rare as to suggest that the uproar over transgender people living their lives is clearly vastly overblown. 

Gender Affirmation Is Care - Not Ideology

Over at “GenderReport.ca”, we find this steaming pile of verbal dung: “How Gender Ideology Imposes A Dangerous Political Agenda In Our Schools”.  

As is common with such articles, it is deliberately alarmist, designed to terrify people, not inform.  In particular, it treats the concept of “gender ideology” as a given, while never actually providing a meaningful definition of it.  In other words, like a lot of these articles, the term has become something of a “straw man” which the reader is then encouraged to direct their fears and worries into. 

What is “gender ideology”?  In today’s right-wing discourse (which is pretty much the only place you will see the term in active use), it pretty much boils down to anything that involves recognizing transgender identities as real and valid, any steps taken to acknowledge transgender people’s legitimate rights to move through society safely. They throw in a nice dash of “predator fear” for flavouring, and then dump it about in great quantities.  It’s the intellectual equivalent of cheez puffs - lots of volume and energy, no real substantive value. 

Where schools are concerned, we get the “protect the children” nonsense rolled out, with claims made that children are too young to understand this stuff, and therefore “Gender Ideology” is harming kids.  They go on to argue that social contagion (aka “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD)” - debunked over here) is going to cause their kids to be forcibly “transed” (sic - their term, not mine) by schools and doctors.  

Pay close attention to the wording of this last sentence here. It is loaded with misconceptions, misunderstandings, and generally false ideas about what transition means, the nature of medical treatments involved, and the ability of trans people of any age to understand and consent.  

First, let’s talk about the notion of “highly experimental surgeries”.  Male to Female gender reassignment surgeries have been around since the 1950s (and arguably sooner than that by some accounts), and in many ways are really little more than a variation on the seemingly less controversial surgeries performed on intersex children.  Female to Male genital surgeries are newer (60s or 70s, I think), but any surgery that’s been around that long is hardly “experimental” at this point.  Likewise, hormone therapy has been around since before the 1950s, and puberty blockers have been actively used to treat precocious puberty since at least the 1970s - hardly “experimental” in any meaningful sense of the term.  The risks and consequences are well documented and well understood. 

As for “taking pills for the rest of your life”, I challenge anyone over the age of 40 to look at their medicine cabinet and the prescriptions that they get refilled every few months.  Kids who have asthma often require inhalers for the rest of their life; Type 1 diabetics often need insulin for the duration of their lives, and so on.  I’m not seeing a major issue here.

Let’s talk briefly about the developmental issues that get raised - namely that “kids are too young to understand”.  First, this infantilizes students who go through some of the most significant stages of development while in school.  

By the time a child is in grade 1, we already expect them to understand “boy” and “girl” - and frankly the vast majority do.  Who is to say that a grade 1 child cannot also understand the idea of “I have a boy’s body, but I don’t feel like a boy”?  In fact, when you talk to a lot of transgender adults, stories of being aware of the incongruence of their body, the social cues they were getting, and how they felt internally is common, with awareness of being transgender happening somewhere between pre-school age and the end of elementary school.  Whether they had the language to express that or not is irrelevant.

If the boy that was Johnny is grade 1 comes back the next year and is going by Jane, with long hair now, that’s simply not a problem.  We know from experience that most of their classmates will shrug and carry on as normal.  Children are, at this age far more flexible than their parents often are.  

Middle School (or Junior High as it is called here), is the point in time when most kids go through puberty. Anyone who doesn’t think that transgender youth don’t understand what’s happening to their bodies has never talked to a transgender youth.  It is not uncommon for transgender youth to find themselves painfully isolated, both physically and socially at a time when social development is just as important as what’s going on in the body. 

By high school, the damage is done for many trans youth, and they’re hanging on until they can transition as adults, free from whatever strictures their parents may have imposed.  You cannot tell me that by their teenage years a person is incapable of understanding gender both in physiological and social terms.  If you’re going to argue that, then I’m going to ask how it is that person is deemed able to work, operate machinery, and ultimately vote?    

What about those for whom “it’s (trans identity) is just a phase?”.  Sure, there’s going to be some of that.  That is why in general irreversible treatments don’t happen until the individual is old enough to understand the consequences of their decision (mid-teens for cross-sex hormones, and 18 or so for surgeries).  Puberty blockers are reversible, and are used as an instrument to buy the person time to experiment and adapt socially without experiencing the often traumatic experience of “the wrong puberty” - and trust me, unwinding that experience as an adult is brutally painful work in therapy.  

I will refer you to the following editorial which provides an intelligent, clear-headed overview of why gender affirming care - including recognizing transgender identities in schools - is so important.  I won’t bore you with a ton of academic papers which also support that position.  Suffice it to say that a few minutes with a decent academic search engine turns up plenty of evidence that supports the author’s claims. 

This is a particularly sly bit of sleight-of-hand.  Suddenly we go from “gender ideology” to “woke”, so the author can pivot to complaining how recognizing a student’s gender identity in class is somehow an infringement on their right to disagree.  We’ve heard this before, from Dr. Jordan B. Peterson (Dr in that he holds a PhD, not that he has any medical expertise).  The problem with positions like this is that it is basically telling the students that “as your teacher, I know you better than you know yourself”.  This is arguably backwards to begin with, but it’s particularly offensive when you are in fact condescending to the students in your classroom. 

As for scrutiny, it’s next to impossible to “scrutinize” a position like this when the concepts of “gender ideology” are not grounded in reality to begin with.  Instead it is a mashup of random fears and claims by people who clearly have little or no direct experience with transgender people, their needs and concerns, and the realities of treatment they face.  It is one thing to be concerned about something you don’t understand, it is quite another to use those “concerns” to try and erase an entire segment from society because they “scare you”.  

On a closing note, I encourage all of you to go read the article “Bathroom Battlegrounds and Penis Panics” for a clear-headed, social perspective on all of this.  

Anti-Trans Protests, Gender Criticals, and Groomers

It’s a little difficult to miss the torrent of anti-transgender hatred spreading about these days.  Whether it is street preachers organizing “protests” over transgender people existing, or failed political candidates trying to whip up a mob on Twitter, it seems as though they are everywhere.  

The lie is always the same - ‘they’re coming for your kids’.  They inevitably conflate issues, linking the existence of transgender people to the content of sex education curriculums.  Or complaining that frank and direct material talking about sexuality is somehow “grooming kids”.  Anyone with half a brain and a bit of reason understands that is nonsense, but that doesn’t stop the propagandists from continuing their lies. 

Then something like this pops up: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-stampede-lawsuit-sexual-harassment-1.6919239

So, for a decade, this guy is literally grooming and sexually assaulting youth.  Meanwhile, even when the Stampede Board became aware of it, they turned a blind eye to it. Not for a year, but for multiple years. Sit with that for a moment. 

The offender was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to a decade in prison.  Five years later, we finally get an admission from the Stampede that they knew about this for years? 

If you’re worried about “groomers” and pedophiles, I’m going to suggest that the problem isn’t trans people, it’s elsewhere.  Hardly a day goes by where my various news feeds don’t have a headline about someone in a position of power over youth abusing their charges. 

Do you know what I never see in those articles?  Evidence that the person is transgender. They can be anything else - coaches, pastors, priests, youth group leaders, and on the list goes.  These are often respected members of society.

One might come to the conclusion that the motives of the people going after transgender people aren’t as pure as they claim. 

The Anti-Trans Movement Is A ReInstatement Of Patriarchy

Although the current backlash against transgender women (trans women) has its roots in a branch of feminism, it is no longer arguably a “feminist” discussion. In fact, there’s a considerable argument that it now exists as a patriarchal movement intended to re-establish the dominance of men in western society. 

First, consider the following shifts that have occurred.  In the early 2000s, most of the noise was coming from a handful of moderately well known feminist writers and their more vocal followers. It was mostly a fringe movement that hung out at the intersection of lesbian community politics and so-called radical feminism. If you weren’t in either space, you didn’t really hear about it … at all. My first encounters with it arose over the ruckus associated with the “Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival”, and one or two particularly toxic Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERF) that were flailing about harassing trans people online (names are left out here because … well, they’re still toxic, and I don’t want to give them the attention).  

On the other side of the discussion, we find the usual assortment of “Social Conservatives (SoCon)”, which is a polite, but inaccurate bit of language for describing people who are ultimately Christian fundamentalists who want to impose their particular idea of Christianity on all of us. Around about 2010-2012, we start seeing the language of the TERFs, and the language of the SoCons suddenly starts aligning. To the point that they were using the same language and arguments, and one often couldn’t tell at first whether one was arguing with a Christian, or with a TERF.  

However, once the two groups started sharing language and arguments, they rapidly started sharing tactics and strategies, and they coalesced around ideas such as “immutability of sex”, “trans women have a natural advantage in sports”, and failing all of that, “trans women must be perverts and pedophiles”.  

The latter set of claims is of course very much a repetition of the kind of arguments that were made about (particularly) male homosexuals for decades. More or less, it is constructed from the patriarchal assumption that by definition men are a danger to women.  They have extended the definition of “man” here to include anyone who possesses, or ever possessed, a penis. The argument is then extended to the idea that anyone who fits into this categorization of “man” is also a danger to molest children. 

How is this a patriarchal claim? It is patriarchal on several levels. First, it assumes that men are so much more “powerful” than women that they cannot be trusted around women and children. In other words, it places men at the top of a social hierarchy rooted in physical strength. Second, it places undue focus on the penis, making it an object which is to be feared - and anybody who has ever had one is automatically a danger, but also in doing so implicitly relegates women to second tier status in the power hierarchy.  

There is a point to this. In many Christian cultural contexts, there is a specific hierarchy in the family unit, which places the man (husband) at the head of the household (after all, he’s the breadwinner, right?), and the woman (wife) in the position of being the person who supports the husband, and ensures that the home is orderly and well run. Children in this context often end up being treated as “little possessions to be controlled” instead of independent human beings developing into adults.

I won’t go into the kind of social pressures that women who are in these contexts are subjected to. Beyond saying that in many of the groups I am familiar with, women are expected to conform to “Stepford Wives” standards - as creepy as that sounds.

There’s a reason I brought up the idea of appearances here. Women in these contexts are held to very specific standards of appearance. This makes it possible for the next vector of attack against trans women to emerge. Caricatures of trans women emerge within these circles. Trans women are then assumed to be little more than “men wearing a dress”, and anyone who isn’t 5’2” and wearing a specific style of clothing is looked upon with suspicion. Of course, women come in all sorts of shapes and sizes - this isn’t news.  But it serves as a handy “weapon” to use against anyone who is “trans” - suddenly “body policing” begins. If you don’t appear sufficiently “feminine” for someone else, you can find your presence in a public washroom challenged. 

But, the real beauty of this for the patriarchy types is that it focuses women on “identifying the threat in their midst” (as if trans women are somehow “wolves in sheep’s clothing”), and of course anybody who is remotely non-feminine suddenly finds themselves subjected to ridiculous levels of scrutiny, and they are distracted from the structures that patriarchies create specifically to marginalize and control women. 

Trans women in particular are a problem for proponents of religious patriarchy for several reasons.  First, like homosexual men, they defy the very narrow idea of what it means to be male. Gay men violate the concept of sexual power by being attracted to … well … other men. Trans women in particular go a step further and really confuse the patriarchy by stepping into a social role that is deemed “weaker” by the patriarchy. This kind of flexibility both socially and sexually is intrinsically threatening to the sense of structure that is relied upon to ensure the power of males in the social world. 

Then we get to the concept of bodily autonomy. Transgender people in general represent a generalization of the bodily autonomy that underpins many aspects of feminist thinking. Feminism itself arose out of a need to move beyond the “biology as destiny” world of the past, and forces the recognition of women as whole and equal members of society who exist at the same level of autonomy and ability as men do. Transgender people go much further with respect to the concept of bodily autonomy, essentially arguing that their bodies are in no way “destiny”, and that they should be able to move through society as equals regardless of their bodily configuration. This creates additional “threats” to traditional patriarchy because suddenly clear cut delineation between people and social roles disappear, replaced by self determination and actualization. For someone seeking a clear, well ordered, social world, that represents a dire threat indeed. 

These two reasons are why we now see religious figures at the forefront of demonizing trans women (and yes, to a certain extent, trans men get a pass here because patriarchy also requires mystifying the feminine while exalting the “power” of the masculine.  

This is also why trans women in elite sports became a flash point after Lia Thomas won a few medals at a competition.  Up to that point, trans women had been competing openly since the mid-2000s. Of course, they weren’t winning medals.  The moment one trans woman did start winning, the patriarchy driven notion that women are intrinsically “weaker” than men was leveraged to claim that somehow there was an “unfair advantage” (the science around this topic remains full of more questions than answers, and I’m not going to tackle it here).  Why? Because patriarchy demands that women compete separately from men - not really because women and men are “dramatically different”, but because in the rare event that a man would lose to a woman, that would threaten the very structures patriarchy demands in order to function. 

It is ironic to me that among the loudest voices attacking trans women are alleged “feminists”, who are ultimately operating hand-in-glove with the same people who would happily shove society forcefully back to the structures that held sway before women dared assert their right and ability to vote.

Of Campaigns, Bigotry, and Dog Whistles

So, with UCP leader Danielle Smith regularly playing dodge-em with her own statements in the past, it shouldn't come as any big surprise that something would come bubbling to the surface from one of the UCP candidates.  

This week's entry into the bigot olympics comes via the UCP candidate for Lacombe-Ponoka, Jennifer Johnson, who thought it would be "clever" to compare having transgender kids in schools to adding fecal matter to cookie dough. I'm not going to go into dismantling the rancid stupidity of her comments beyond borrowing from Lily Allen, and saying "Fuck You Very, Very Much", Ms Johnson. 

I've listened to the recording, and it was offensive to say the least, and the other people in the room are all giving her laughs and knowing chuckles. Every last person in that room should be ashamed of themselves. 

After bubbling around for a couple of days, today, on the day of the leader's debate, Danielle Smith issued the following as a statement on the matter:  

This thing is one giant dog whistle from start to finish. There are a number of things about it I want to highlight. 

First, it doesn't eject Ms. Johnson from the UCP candidate pool, it just says "well, when government first sits, you won't be part of caucus.  But it also clearly leaves open the door for her to join caucus later.  It doesn't stipulate any conditions around that return. 

The message here is clear enough: "What you said is bad, but we're going to give you a nudge and a wink as punishment". The intent is simple:  wait for the ruckus to die down, and we'll quietly bring you into caucus then. 

There is an underlying dog whistle here, and I suspect it comes from the Take Back Alberta crowd: "To the base:  Shut up about trans issues, they're political dynamite".  They're not wrong about this, but we also know that TBA organizers are in full agreement with Ms. Johnson - as can be seen carefully coded in the following message promoting one of their events: 

Lurking in there are not-so-subtly worded comments aimed at transgender people living normal lives (and doing things like say ... swimming - a reference to an alleged, and disproven, indecent exposure event at a pool in Calgary), and drag queen story time events at public libraries. 

The second part is that "there are valid discussions to be had" - this is a carefully worded dog whistle that is little different to the 2019 issue around GSAs.  "Oh, we're protecting the children!".  No, you're not. The only meaningful discussion related to transgender children is to be had between the children, their parents, and their doctors. The only public policy matter is the one that says "how do we support these families so that we don't end up traumatizing the children with our bullshit as adults?".

Smith's comments "encouraging" candidates to become more informed are, at best, a limp attempt to paper over the unbridled hatred racing around inside her party. I can't help but think of it as little different than her attempts to defend Hunsperger in 2012 by saying "well, he's entitled to hold those opinions".  

A Tale Of 3 Stories

Over the last several weeks, there have been a series of stories about alleged "indecent exposure" incidents in public change rooms involving transgender women.  

Incident 1:  January 27, 2023  https://thepostmillennial.com/canadian-parents-protest-after-trans-identified-male-allegedly-exposed-himself-to-young-girls-in-pool-change-room

https:thestarphoenix.com/opinion/columnists/phil-tank-saskatoon-needs-dialogue-not-threats-on-change-room-nudity

Incident 2:  February 6, 2023 https://www.westernstandard.news/alberta/parent-furious-transgendered-men-allowed-into-girls-changing-room-at-calgary-pools/article_fb95136a-a638-11ed-bf71-5bf32c6f642b.html

Incident 3:  February 7, 2023 https://www.cheknews.ca/mother-reports-nanaimo-aquatic-centre-change-room-incident-to-police-1139751/

https://www.westernstandard.news/bc/bc-mother-says-man-wearing-wig-peered-at-daughter-in-womens-change-room/article_12e9ad10-a8c2-11ed-9a16-27b394d7418a.html

*Note:  Dates are first time that articles were published, not necessarily the actual dates of the alleged events. 

With the exception of the event in Nanaimo, the complainant is anonymous. That's the first red flag here. The article doesn't say that the complainant asked to be anonymous, so we can assume that the writer is simply drawing from other unverified sources. In the case of the incident in Calgary, the story seems to have started a few days before Western Standard picks it up, and it's carefully anonymous. 

It's quite notable that the Western Standard appears to have basically copied this directly, and there's no sign of actual effort to contact the original source or to otherwise verify the content of the story. At least with the Nanaimo story we have an actual person named and (in theory) we could make some efforts to further corroborate their story. 

The degree of truth here is immediately suspect. We have essentially anonymous claims about the actions of another person, and no corroboration from other sources. There are a number of other issues here, including the use of language like "transgender man", when the more probable identity of the person being discussed here is female. Did the events described here take place at all, much less as described?

I would add to this that events like this are really prone to "telephone game" effects where it may change or become dramatically different as it travels around. So, what starts out as "I saw a trans person in the locker room" with one person goes through a few different sources, and becomes "I saw a transgender man in the locker room, and I saw their penis!" ... and you can imagine from there where it might go as further embellishment gets added. 

When we examine the Nanaimo story, the ChekNews article and the Western Standard article diverge from each other dramatically, and we should pay attention to the details.  First, ChekNews actually reached out to the local Pride organization, who commented as follows: 

The comments of the Pride Society are absolutely reasonable and correct.  We don't actually know anything about the alleged offender, or their motivations.  I'll come back to this a bit later, but transgender people have very complex relationships with their body, and there can be any number of explanations for the described behaviour that are completely benign. It is very dangerous to leap from "there was a transgender person in the locker room" to "they were being a sexual predator".  

In comparison, the Western Standard article on the same subject does not contain any reference to the Nanaimo Pride organization's statement, and more importantly immediately jumps to connecting the event with pedophilia: 

Further, Western Standard does some very sly "word weighting" here, by talking about the government's legislation and then noting that the Minister is now the Minister for Child care: 

In my opinion, this is not accidental. First, the role of that minister today is irrelevant to the story. Second, it clearly feeds a false narrative that there are connections between transgender people and pedophilia. 

The role of using pedophilia here is clear:  pedophilia provokes strong emotional reactions in most people, in particular reactions of disgust. It's an old trick to link people to pedophilia in order to justify marginalizing them. 

To be absolutely clear, there is no evidence that suggests that someone being transgender makes them more likely to be a pedophile, or hebephile. Assuming that a person who is transgender is somehow a "threat" in a change room is really unfounded. Further, I must point out that these accusations are almost always aimed at transgender women, and rarely at transgender men, which is more reflective of the attitudes of their accusers than of transgender women as a group. 

The fact that there is little, or no, corroborating evidence attached to any of these stories, including statements from police beyond "we're investigating", one is left with the distinct probability that the stories themselves are significantly embellished in their particulars.  When the news media carrying the story has failed entirely to reach out to community organizations and experts on the subject, it becomes even more suspicious that these stories are really part of a propaganda campaign.

Earlier, I said that transgender people have extremely complex relationships with their bodies. That is something of an understatement, perhaps even more so for transgender women.  Transgender women often face a multi-faceted set of obstacles relating to their bodies, combining both social and physical elements. 

Socially, transgender women face internal and external taboos about changing genders. The "feminine male" is a common subject of ridicule, and then there are the implicit and explicit barriers around clothing and make-up (although those are much less daunting than they used to be).  There is enormous social and psychological conditioning around these barriers that make the early stages of transition particularly daunting for transgender women. (Ironically, transgender men often have a much easier time of it because society has always made room for "masculine women").  

Places like locker rooms, washrooms, and so on, are strongly gendered spaces. This can make being transgender in one of them even more emotionally fraught. Many transgender people go through enormous amounts of anxiety learning to navigate highly gendered spaces like public washrooms or changing rooms. Add to that the degrees of discomfort with various aspects of their bodies, and many transgender women refuse to enter any space where nudity is likely until after they have had surgery to correct their body's configuration.  

Reflecting further on the Nanaimo story, there are several possibilities. Yes, it is possible that this was a case of what used to be called a “peeping Tom” who decided to appropriate a transgender identity. Another possibility is that this is an anti-transgender activist who decided to “create the problem” - discussions of doing just that have rolled around various corners of the religious right for years.  

If the person in Nanaimo is legitimately transgender, then we have to consider the possibility that they tried to take a step that was bigger than they were really prepared for, and they panicked. In which case, the mother’s reaction may have done an enormous amount of damage. Their behaviour is arguably inappropriate, but inappropriate behaviour is not the same thing as being a predator or being a pedophile. 

While there are some transgender women who take delight in having a penis, even there the vast majority reserve that for the most intimate of situations. So far, to this writer's knowledge, there has never been a confirmed case of a transgender woman exposing their male genitalia to others in a context like a locker room. Such allegations are far more likely to turn out to be vastly exaggerated by their accuser.

As with all such matters, the majority of transgender women are no more likely to be offenders in this regard than any other adults. The simple reality is that while they unquestionably challenge many societal norms and expectations, there is very little evidence that they represent an objective threat to others.