Pierre Wants To Eradicate “Woke Ideology”

 So, back in late March, Poilievre was unveiling his platform for Quebec, and in that speech he talked about eliminating “woke ideology” from university research. At first glance, you might look and say “meh, so what?”

The problem, of course, is that this puts the politicians in the position of being the arbiters of what is “worthy” of being studied.  As we have seen with Trump’s “campaign against Woke”, this goes much further than merely attacking research that involves transgender people.  No, in fact the Trump administration has published a list of words that it has now banned.  It is quite extensive - pretty much covering every area of discourse that conservatives have decided that they don’t like - climate change, equality, women, diversity, allergies, and even the analysis of applying science to either policy or medical treatment.  

At its core, the conservative assault on “Woke” turns out to be little more than re-litigating every rights and politics issue that they have lost the argument over in the last century.  “It’s gone too far!”, they declare.  They complain that the research itself should not be done because it offends their “feelings” about the subject.

But what price do these bans on certain subjects exact from society?  Well, in Trump’s America, it’s now next to impossible to study how drugs affect women versus how they work in men.  We have known for some time that women have very different responses to treatments than men do, and that’s in a wide range of topics including cardiac care.  But now that research is effectively halted in the US.  When Harper was Prime Minister, we saw him engage in overt suppression of climate science, even going so far as to prohibit scientists from speaking on the subject without political authorization. 

To posit a bit of a straw man, you might assert that Poilievre wouldn’t go as far as Trump has done on this file.  But what does that even mean?  Poilievre hasn’t shown us any evidence that he would moderate his behaviour, and in fact his willingness to emulate Trump on so many points suggests that in fact he would lift heavily from Trump.  

But think about it from a government policy perspective.  Do you think that a government should ignore science when forming policy?  Or should policy at least consider the scientific evidence in that domain?

To make a somewhat extreme example, consider the legislature deciding to pass legislation governing the treatment of heart attacks.  The evidence today around heart attacks is clear - treatment is urgent, and requires a combination of medicine and surgical interventions.  Long term follow-up is necessary, and the patient is encouraged to make major lifestyle changes, including exercise.  All of this has decades worth of research backing it up.  

Now consider the government decides in drafting its legislation that in fact all that research is wrong, and because the politicians believe that a heart attack is an event that the victim should “tough out”, they ban ambulances from responding to calls that are possible cardiac events. 

I would hope you would be outraged by such legislation, and you would be calling on the politicians to pay attention to the scientific literature on the subject.  Yet, that is exactly what we are seeing on so many levels with conservative politicians writing legislation on other matters - they are ignoring any kind scientific evidence in favour of their “feelings” about the subject.

To be clear, science doesn’t write policy, but science produces information that should be used to guide policy.  If a subject makes you uncomfortable, that doesn’t mean it should not be studied - in fact to me that makes it more important that it is studied actively.  Similarly, politicians should write policy, but not direct what _cannot_ be explored in research.

But what is this conservative “war on woke” really about? When I look at it broadly, it seems to boil down to unwinding equality because a bunch of white dudes are all butt-hurt that they aren’t the only ones with a say any more.

DEI - which is in many respects about dismantling the legacy of racism and marginalization that was pervasive in society even after the civil rights era supposedly made us all equal (it didn’t, it just knocked over the legal impediments to equality).  

Immigration - oh yes, the problem of “the immigrants”.  Whether this is “great replacement theory”, or other aspects of immigration like temporary foreign worker permits, at the end of the day it boils down to this existential fear that “white males” won’t be able to compete.  They might wrap it up in respectable looking terms, but it’s really just racism with a thin gauze of “concern” wrapped around it. 

Women’s reproductive rights - at its core, this is a matter of bodily autonomy.  The whole abortion fight has always been about regulating women’s bodies - a matter rooted in a myriad of ancient fears about the female body.  Medicine has gradually dismantled the superstitious beliefs that those fears once buttressed, but far too many still view women, sexuality, and pregnancy with deep mistrust.  But, as a central theme in conservative thinking, fighting abortion remains stubbornly consistent - even when the logic behind their claims is no longer relevant. 

Transgender people - like female reproductive rights, this is all about bodily autonomy.  The idea that transgender people exist poses a huge, complex problem for the conservative mind.  Not only does it connect back to women’s rights in general (because so much of women’s oppression in the past has to do with reproduction), but in fact transgender rights are inextricably connected because the transgender person represents a radical form of both bodily and social autonomy that centres on the individual. Conservatives tend to value conformity, and transgender people are the opposite of conformity.  In fact, transgender people push back on all the social pressures that they experience in the process of actualizing themselves as human beings.  

All of this connects back to an underlying fear on the part of conservative men that somehow these social changes make them “lesser” in society.  They don’t, of course - we still live in a society where being a white male carries an enormous amount of power and privilege.  Look at the people who are the biggest opponents of “woke” - almost inevitably they are anything but the “prime specimens” that they think themselves to be.  Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, Pierre Poilievre - none of them are ideal, and frankly if it weren’t for money or notoriety, any of them would be ignored as simply snivelling twits. 

The “war on woke” is really about restoring a social hierarchy that died out decades ago - and it’s being conducted at the cost of the rights and freedoms of real people. 

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.