Manufacturing Authority: The Case of Aaron Holly Devor (part 3)

Devor has attracted substantial financial support from Canadian governments on the strength of the credibility created as Chair of Transgender Studies at UVic. Her online CV shows that her average grant amounts jumped from five figures to six in 2014 — from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), The Vancouver Foundation, The BC Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction (SPDR), the Silver Gummy Foundation and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Research & Teaching Grants Received

2020-2025SSHRC Insight Grant Collaborator, “The LGBTQ+ Oral History Digital Collaboratory: 2.0”$303,381.

2020-2023Silver Gummy Foundation Grant. Co-Principle Applicant, “Trans+ People in Forced Labour in Canada.”$197,100.

2020-2022BC Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction Grant.Principal Applicant “Improving labour market participation for Trans+ people.”$200,000 (1)

2020-2021CIHR Operating Grant: COVID-19 May 2020 Rapid Research. Co-Applicant, “The COVID-19Pandemic Among Sexual and Gender Marginalized Populations in Canada: Physical Distancing Impacts,SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence, and Health and Wellness Needs.” $661,542. (2)

In 2019 she appeared before the senate committee to speak about putting males in women’s prisons. After referencing her experience of 30 years earlier, she speaks of her happiness that men are being placed in women’s prisons. As for the women?

“What I hear is that we need to protect women in the prisons — cisgender women in the prisons, non-trans women in the prisons — many of whom have histories of abuse by men, sexual assault by men, and that they will be triggered and fearful if someone comes into the prison as an inmate who appears to them to be a man. I completely agree that we need to take that very seriously, and there are ways to take that seriously without throwing those trans women into a prison where they will be raped and physically assaulted. Trans inmates are no more likely to violate cisgender women in women’s prisons than any other people in those prisons, and we have procedures in place to deal with those who do violate.” [italics mine]

What she is saying is that women violate each other as much and to the same degree as men violate women. Among all the forms of denial embodied in this statement, Devor ignores

“former Deputy Commissioner for Women, Kelly Blanchette,[who] reported that of all transfer requests from men’s prisons, 50 percent came from sex offenders who offended as men. 50 percent! This number overrepresents sex offenders who account for 20 percent of the male prison population overall.”

After a lifetime of apologizing for men, Devor has at last come to giving them free rights to prey on captive women.

 In 2003, she told Vivian Smith there was only one thing preventing life as a man from being completely happy, and that was : “He [sic] will miss the intimate friendships women have in which they talk about their feelings openly…’That’s a big price to pay’.” It seems in the intervening years she has learned to stop listening to them.

Devor is arguably among the most prominent gender activists in Canada. Might it be fair to wonder if she was groomed by two “sugar daddies”, Rothblatt and Pritzker, to be a female voice for the gender industry?

The billionaires pushing gender ideology wear their breasts like others wear branded t-shirts – to promote their product, which in this case includes poisonous drugs, hormones and increasing varieties of surgeries to create manufactured “men” and “women”.

Devor’s beard accomplishes pretty much the same thing.

This year Devor’s contract as Chair was renewed for another five years, and she was given an award by the University of Minnesota. Ho hum – thus does the machine keep churning out certificates of ersatz authority on vaporous identities with very real consequences on the material reality of women and children. All to ensure the very real profits keep rolling in.

1. Both BC and Canadian governments make public records of their spending via open-access websites. I have been unable to confirm this grant from government records. There is a record only of a grant for just under $45,000
2. An access to information request produced a government record only for a $50,000 grant.

see part two here

see part one here

Manufacturing Authority: The case of Aaron Holly Devor (part 2)

felicia rembrandt

In 1999 Devor went to work for the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association — which later became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) — as coauthor of its standards of care (SOC). She has continued her association ever since, and also joined the research committee of the Canadian Professional Association for Transgender Health (CPATH) in 2014.

Lisa MacRichards has written extensively on WPATH. In her article for Canadian Gender Report in 2019,   she wrote:

“WPATH is not the typical professional organization that develops clinical practice guidelines.  WPATH is a hybrid professional and activist organization, where activists have become voting members and have served as president. In fact, it can be argued that WPATH is activist-led rather than evidence-led, as witnessed at their conferences. Their guidelines are just following what is being performed in gender clinics based on informed consent.“

Not only that, but members of the WPATH SOC Committee revealed massive conflicts of interests.

“When looking at the WPATH committee who worked on the current SOC document [2011], a cursory examination of the members reveals that every one of the members have significant COIs.  All of them either receive income based on recommendations in the guidelines, work at clinics or universities who receive funds from advocacy groups, foundations, or pharmaceutical companies who heavily favour a certain treatment paradigm,  or have received grants and published papers or research in transgender care.”

As Chair of Transgender Studies and owner of the Transgender  Archives, Devor’s  career is dependent on a large and growing population of “transgender” people. The conflict of interest is obvious.

Jennifer (James) Pritzker

WPATH is funded by prominent trans activist Jennifer (James) Pritzker, a member of the powerful and influential American family of billionaires and politicians. Pritzker, a former colonel in the US Army, founded the acquisitions company Squadron Capital in 2012. Squadron invests in a handful of medical tech companies. Jennifer Bilek has done extensive research on the funders (and founders) of the gender industry.  She has written of Pritzker:

“Once a family man and a decorated member of the armed forces, Jennifer Pritzker now identifies as transgender. He has made transgenderism a high note in philanthropic funding through his Tawani Foundation. He is one of the largest contributors to transgender causes and, with his family, an enormous influence in the rapid institutionalization of transgenderism.

“Some of the organizations Jennifer owns and funds are especially noteworthy to examining the rapid induction of transgender ideology into medical, legal and educational institutions. Pritzker owns Squadron Capital, an acquisitions corporation, with a focus on medical technology, medical devices, and orthopedic implants, and the Tawani Foundation, a philanthropic organization with a grants focus on Gender & Human Sexuality.”

Thus, already in Pritzker’s employ since 1999 and immersed in gender ideology through her work with WPATH, Devor finally petitioned her employer, the University of Victoria (UVic), to create a Chair of Transgender Studies. She had a million dollars in her back pocket to seal the deal. The media reported:

 “The position emerged largely from the efforts of Devor himself [sic]. As a gender non-conforming person, he has always been interested in gender. “I saw the need for [the position],” he  said. “I set out to make it happen . . . [and put] a proposal before the Senate and the Board of Governors.”

Devor said that UVic proved to be very welcoming and supportive of the proposal for a new Chair, and he faced no trouble while trying to establish this position.

“When [the proposal] came before the Senate [on Oct. 2 last year] . . . the vote went through unanimously in support. And there was a very big round of applause, followed by [President Jamie Cassels] making some lovely comments . . . You couldn’t get a better experience.”

The chair was funded by Pritzker’s Tawani Foundation, to the tune of $1 million, with a further million available through matching funds. With that kind of money on offer,  it’s not surprising UVic was pleased.

In 2016 Devor was named the first Chair in Transgender Studies. Sitting beside her at the official opening ceremony was her near neighbour, New Democratic Party (NDP) Member of Parliament (MP) Randall Garrison, architect of Bill C16, which added gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act the following year.

 One of the regular marketing activities of the chair is hosting a biennial Moving Trans History Forward conference which has been running since 2014. Devor hired Martine Rothblatt, billionaire trans-identified man and proponent of transhumanism as her  featured speaker in 2016, and followed that up by awarding him an honorary degree in 2019.

(Some believe that transgenderism is only a stepping stone to transhumanism, in which human brains will eventually be housed in robotic bodies. With transgender ideology we are encouraged to dissociate from our bodies and see them as products we are free to cut up as we wish. It’s notable that a “transgender woman” is the world’s leading proponent of transhumanism.)

The Chair’s website says its work is  fostering research and scholarship in Transgender Studies

• Encouraging both existing and new scholars to pursue careers in Transgender Studies and building local, national and international linkages with others working in Transgender Studies
• Hosting visiting academic and community scholars
• Proactive community outreach and knowledge mobilization
• Teaching and mentoring related to the area of Transgender Studies
• Assisting faculty to integrate Transgender Studies content into their courses
• Subject matter expert of the Transgender Archives
• Fundraising in support of the Chair in Transgender Studies and the Transgender Archives

In other words, if the money flowing north across the Canada/US border can be visualized as a pipeline, Devor  functions as a shower head, sprinkling money and influence to water the gender ideology field in Canada through community outreach, fundraising, propaganda and networking. Her CV, available online, details media appearances all over the country. Even the tiniest references to her are included.

 And so, step-by-step, is credibility and authority manufactured. A woman working for a lobby group calling itself a medical association, funded by a man who calls himself a woman and is financially invested in the medical equipment sector, is eventually handed a million dollars by the same man to get set up as a highly prestigious chair at a university – instant credibility.

Part Three Next

Manufacturing Authority: The Case of Aaron Holly Devor

felicia rembrandt

Back in 1989 when she was still a lesbian and a young PhD student at the University of Washington, about to begin her teaching career at the University of Victoria, Holly Devor picked up a contract to teach inmates at a men’s prison. Most of them were convicted sex offenders. She enjoyed the experience, and described how she “made it a priority that they understand how feminist propositions offer them both increased adaptability in a changing world and increased freedom from the restrictions of their own gender roles” (Abbotsford News, Sept. 13, 1989).

She told the newspaper  that “We raise men in our society to be ignorant of the lives of women” and “men have few legitimately masculine ways to learn to understand women and sexual offences are one result of that state of affairs. I believe that much masculine hatred and fear of women comes from men’s need of feminine acceptance and their concomitant vulnerability to rejection by women.” She concluded that men had to learn to be more responsible for their own emotional lives.

Jump forward to 2003 and Devor (now renamed Aaron) is described by Victoria Times Colonist columnist and Globe and Mail correspondent Vivian Smith as “ happy to conform to a conservative image more typical of men who run $3-million enterprises: Striding into his spare, elegant office, Mr. Devor projects confidence and control. He wears a dark grey suit and black tie with a blue shirt just over-large enough to hide any shape that might suggest he was once a woman… In the manner of men used to commanding space, even at 5-feet-6, his hand gestures are expansive, the right leg crosses the left widely when he sits, he shrugs his shoulders loosely. Aaron Devor is a man in full, if not in anatomy.

This description is stunningly sexist – so much so that we have to wonder what cave Smith was sleeping in through the 80s and 90s, those decades in which women thundered into Canadian universities to occupy as many seats as men, led men in starting up businesses, and entered all the professions. But maybe Devor herself was projecting this sexist image for all she was worth. Afterall she was claiming to be a man based on masculine stereotypes like these. Maybe Smith was just overwhelmed by the Devor’s ‘will to power’.

Aaron Devor

Leaving aside the sexism, we have to wonder what changed for Devor in the intervening 14 years – aside from getting married (to another woman) and converting to Judaism.

In 1995 she expressed approval of cross-dressing, calling it “healthy”. When it is suppressed, “the result is male shame”. By this time, she would rather see “masculine” and “feminine” as innate genders, with cross dressers expressing both genders together, rather than look for at cross-dressing as a symptom of a psychological disorder (Van Sun, Aug 19, 1995).

In 1996 Devor described pedophiles as “ideal teachers” because they are people who “understand children, who know what children want, who know how to relate to them on their own level” (Victoria Times Colonist Sept. 7, 1996). She comes close to blaming their victims when she says they are often needy children who may give in to some adult demands to get the love and attention they crave.

By 1997 Devor was weighing in on the medical treatment of people born with ambiguous genitalia. She deplored the practice of surgically altering such children based on the size of the phallus, to make them more clearly male or female.  She was already claiming that scientists were confronting the idea that “there can be more than two sexes, more than two genders.” “What we should celebrate,” she said “is that there is a whole spectrum of human diversity – a splendor of genders, a rainbow of genders” (Vancouver Sun, April 7, 1997).

In these comments over a span of a few years, Devor is following what is becoming a discernable and predictable path for gender ideologists. It involves approving of  (male) sexual kink, sympathizing with pedophiles, and extrapolating from people with disorders of sexual development to the general population.

She’s also on record that year [1997] for not wanting to eliminate masculine and feminine gender roles, but only to add a lot of other options (Times Colonist Jan 10, 1997) .“I have become convinced that not only can men and women live in bodies of any sex but that we go against reality when we insist there are only two sexes and two genders,” she said in a public lecture at the University of Victoria.

Perhaps her change of position is best exemplified by the two books she wrote prior to “becoming a man”.   In 1989 Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality compiled the experiences of 25 women who were regularly mistaken for men.  Then In 1997 FTM –Female to Male Transsexuals in Society consisted of interviews with 45 trans men – women who had mistaken themselves for men. Only the latter has been reprinted (in 2014).

Part Two Next

ARC International: Canada’s Dark Rainbow

In 2008 the Arcus Foundation, which bills itself as an American philanthropic organization, gave its first large donation to ARC International, a Canadian corporation located in Dartmouth, NS (pop 92,000).

Its first two donations of $198,000 in 2008 and $200,000 in 2009 were both routed through the go-between Tides Foundation. Then in 2013 it gave another $400,000 and in 2017 another $100,000. On both those occasions, the money went directly from Arcus to ARC International (https://www.arcusfoundation.org/grantees/).

Canadians might wonder why such large sums of money are being pipelined across the border, to a tiny organization, ostensibly for charitable purposes.

 ARC’s official name is  Allied Rainbow Communities International and it is registered in Canada as a tax-exempt private corporation. Its executive director is Kim Vance Mubanga, who founded ARC in 2003 with John Fisher (now Director of Human Rights Watch) to promote “LGBT” rights. Its website states that it “played a key role in the various phases of the Yogyakarta Principles.”

The Website also makes clear how the first two donations were used. It states that “2009-2010 was a pivotal period, as we moved into the implementation phase of the UN human rights reform process, and work with NGOs to address the implications of these reforms for LGBT equality rights, build global support for the Yogyakarta Principles, and develop a coordinated strategic vision for advancing these issues through the years ahead.”

This tells us that ARC International is a propaganda and lobbying firm, and that the first two donations financed the propagation of Yogyakarta Principles around the world.

 The Yogyakarta Principles outline a list of rights for gays, lesbians and trans people. Initiated by John Fisher and Michael O’Flaherty of Ireland, the Principles were created in 2006 by a select group of individuals primarily from non-western countries — including Botswana, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey — who met in Indonesia specifically because it is a Muslim country, the principles mirror human rights language that the UN has affirmed.

The crucial addition The Principles make is to assert the existence of “gender identity”, and this is why they are a problem. There is no scientific basis for the idea that people are born with an innate sense of gender. Many people dispute the idea. And if gender means socially constructed roles and expectations associated with the sexes, which has been the definition for 150 years, then it’s illogical to claim anyone is born with it.

So the Yogyakarta Principles are claiming human rights for something that cannot be scientifically or logically shown to exist. But without the assertion of innate gender identity, there can be no claim that anyone’s gender does not match their sex, thus no transgender identity.

The ARC International website states that the Yogyakarta Principles are “a universal guide to human rights which affirm binding international legal standards with which all States must comply.”

But the principles are not a UN document, and have never been discussed or ratified by any UN body. This is made clear  in the document detailing how they came to be created, available at Outright International Org. (https://outrightinternational.org/content/international-role-yogyakarta-principles).  The Wikipedia entry for them also states that “the attempt to make gender identity and sexual orientation new categories of non-discrimination has been repeatedly rejected by the General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council and other UN bodies.   (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogyakarta_Principles#Reception)

Thus they are not binding, and have no more weight than any child’s Christmas wish list.

Nevertheless ARC International’s mission, its sole mission,  is to spread the document’s influence around the world by targeting top level institutions — policy makers, institutions, courts, parliaments, constitution makers, law enforcement, justice departments as well as influential NGOs.

The company has been wildly successful in its mission.

The Yogyakarta Principles were expanded in 2017 to add gender expression and “sex characteristics”, which explains the purpose of the 2017 Arcus donation. According to International Women’s rights legal expert, Anna Zobnina, the ultimate goal is to eliminate the categories of sex and socially-constructed gender, and replace them with the artificial categories of gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics. These last are the qualities that together determine sex – genitalia, chromosones, hormones. So sex will be a defunct legal category,  replaced by chopped up bits of human biology ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk0ga6PX2Kc&t=129s).

With the addition of “sex characteristics”, it seems we may assume that words such as “man” and “woman” will  be replaced by such terms as “menstruator”, “gestational carrier”, “uterus-haver”. Those terms are already in use on social media, although the category “men” has yet to be replaced by “ejaculators” or “penis-havers”. As trans people mask the sex they are,  sex itself will be masked.

But who is behind this? Arcus is owned by Jon Stryker,  of the American  medical tech company, the Stryker Corporation. Its money comes from the Stryker Corporation. Arcus donates that money mostly to the sorts of organizations that might provide a market for the family business – LGBTQ centres and charities. To regard Arcus as anything other than a marketing and lobby organization for the American medical industrial complex is clearly naïve.

When a tiny Canadian corporation and citizens of the global South are nominated to craft the principles and lobby for them, we can legitimately regard them as the vehicles of an imperialism meant to hide that gender ideology is an American invention being sold with American financial backing for the ultimate profit of American companies. Like all imperialists, Americans employ “the natives” as front-line soldiers in the war against their citizens.

From its office on the edge of parkland that cradles 50 lakes, where birdsong laces heaven to earth, ARC International’s team has ensured that Canadian primary schools teach children to uncouple themselves from nature.

Their bodies have nothing to do with their sex, SOGI school curriculums insist. They can be boy or girl regardless of their sex characteristics. Their bodies are theirs to cannibalize. If they experience psychological distress as they transition from child to adolescent to adult, drugs and surgery are a quick solution.

And ARC has paved the way for Canadian doctors to step forward to become the drug dealers that ensure children will not have the time to work through their discomfort. Perhaps the scalpels they finally wield will bear the imprint, “Stryker”.

Cohen’s Straight Talk

I recently came across a copy of Deborah Cohen’s 2013 book, Family Secrets — living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day in my local library. What a fortuitous find. I’m so thankful that women decided to become historians and I could stop reading lists of famous male brutes presented as aspirational heroes.

After chapters on Eurasian children brought back to Britain by their fathers, intellectually disabled children and illegitimate children, Cohen’s settles in for a chat on male homosexuality.

She describes working-class men and boys, ‘rough trade’ who moved back and forth between homo and hetero sex. These were distinguished from the ‘poufs’ or ‘queans’ “whose woman-like character, proclaimed by make-up, a ‘mincing’ gait or a sing-song manner of speech, announced their feminine desires”. Last were the largely middle-class “inverts” “for whom homosexuality was becoming an identity defined by their exclusive attraction to other men.”

What strikes me is her tone and language. She writes with neither judgement nor apology about responses to shame that some might now consider shameful themselves — hiding children away in institutions, forcing unmarried women to give up their children.

The social media language of censure is completely absent, and that is most striking in her descriptions of male homosexuality. The book was published only seven years ago but she could write about ‘pansies’ in make-up and frocks without incurring the wrath of thousands of social justice warriors swarming her and her publisher, demanding the book be burned. And most significantly, without anyone demanding she acknowledge at least one of her homosexual categories should be renamed ‘transwomen’.

BC Centre for Disease Control urges people to abandon ethics for Covid

The B.C. Centre for Disease Control has come out with a Language Guide for covid 19, prescribing language that it would like us all to use during the Covid crisis. Presumably health care workers should use this language, but it is being distributed to the media to influence how people are referred to there.

The most troubling aspect of this guide is the abandonment of ethics as the foundation for how we refer to and interact with others. Lead author, Harlan Pruden, educator with the Chee Mamuk program at the BC Centre for Disease Control, wants to ditch the Golden Rule ( treat others as you wish to be treated yourself) for what he calls the Platinum Rule (treat others as they wish to be treated). What he means is to replace ethics with mindless politeness.

The Golden Rule, as a code of ethics, has been around for at least 2500 years. Societies around the world have discovered and rediscovered it both in its positive and negative form (don’t treat others as you don’t want to be treated). My quick Google search identified ten religions, from Buddhism to Christianity, that include the proposition.

There’s a simple reason for this. To treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves is the best that we can offer each other. At its root, it means we treat other humans with respect, regardless of what we think of their actions, words or beliefs. It allows us to separate the sin from the sinner, the crime from the criminal so to speak. It’s because of the Golden Rule that we don’t throw the corpses of pedophiles and mass murderers in dumpsters or landfills. Or that we attempt to have humane prisons, rather than penning up a few thousand hardened criminals without any supervision and letting them go at each other.

To treat others as we would like to be treated requires thought. It does not always give us an easy answer. What feels like respect to me may not feel like respect to you. And so there may need to be some negotiation, and we may need to work hard to tease out respect from behind bias or prejudice.

The BCCDC would like us to retire it.  It offers a new rule, formulated neither by a philosopher, theologian nor ethicist, but by LGBTIQ+ political activist Harlan Pruden: “Treat others as they wish to be treated.”

This sort of rule would have us starve anorexics – it is, afterall, what they want. If we truly are to treat others as they wish to be treated, we’d have to leave murderers and rapists free to wander our cities. Ask a thief how he would like to be treated, and I’m sure he would like to be given keys to all the locks in the city.

You think this is absurd? Yes, it is and it’s hard to see how this got by any medical ethicists at the BCCDC. Do they not employ any?

But the “Platinum Rule” is not just absurd. By juxtaposing it with the Golden Rule, the BCCDC is positioning it as an ethical rule. It is not. It has nothing to do with ethics. It is amoral. Whether we do good or do harm by treating others as they wish to be treated depends on the context. Buying drugs or alcohol for a minor because they ask you to outside the shop door – beneficial or harmful?

It may be that by treating others as they wish to be treated, we enable them to continue in a course of destructive behaviour. Anyone who’s ever lived with an alcoholic, anyone who’s ever attended al anon meetings will recognize the potential for the “Platinum Rule” to prevent people from having to confront their problems, face the consequences of their actions, or mature and grow.

At its worse, enabling behaviour robs us of our own integrity. The enabler lies to “protect” the person being enabled.

So who would seriously propose we all act according to this rule? That we stop thinking about whether we are helping or harming the person we are treating, society at large, or ourselves?

It should be obvious that there are people who want to be enabled and pandered to. People, like the alcoholic, who want to be surrounded by those willing to lie for them, cheat for them, even steal for them to enable them to continue in their addiction or other harmful behaviour.

One can well imagine addicts of all kinds shouting “treat me as I want to be treated”, excuse my absences from work because I’m hungover, excuse my non-payment of rent or the mortgage because I spend all my money on the drug, excuse my unreliability because my fix is more important to me than your needs.

It’s interesting that most of the language guide obeys, not the “Platinum Rule”,  but the Golden Rule.

Asking people to use “people-first” language goes a long way to ensuring that. Usually referring to people as people with some attribute (a person with disabilities), rather than as the attribute (the disabled) feels more respectful. And it allows our humanity to be the dominant feature.

So why did the CDC feel a need to promote this new rule?

Is there any part of the guide for which the Golden Rule would be insufficient, where a group of people might want to be enabled rather than simply respected?

It would seem there is — the community that Harlan Pruden advocates on behalf of — the LGBTIQ+ community.

Here the authors of the guide find it necessary to teach readers “concepts” before teaching the language. These concepts, together, form a view of humanity that reduces sex categories to meaninglessness, replacing them with “gender identity”. These concepts are presented as if they are established facts rather than controversial opinions, omitting the fact that they have no scientific support, and that leading scientists around the world deny their validity.

In this section of the guide we are asked to suspend our critical faculties, to believe things many find unbelievable – for example, that we are not born male and female, but assigned a sex category at birth by doctors or midwives. We are supposed to accept that everyone has an internal gender identity at birth,  that may or may not match our “assigned” sex.

In accordance with this ideological package,  the guide wants us to refer to people as “he” or “she” depending on a non-material, invisible criteria rather than what stares us in the face. All of us are asked to announce “our pronouns” in our greetings to each other, and to ask others before referring to them by any pronouns. And then, we are told not to think of ourselves as male or female,  but as “cisgender”. The guide teaches us this label means we have accepted societal stereotypes and roles that match our sex.

Reading this section makes clear with brilliant clarity the agenda of the new LGBTIG+ community – the community that began to evolve after T was added to LGB. This community bears little relationship to the old LGB associations that struggled to help gay men and lesbians who often suffered severe discrimination. The LGBTIG+ associations are increasingly looking like Men’s Rights associations and would more appropriately be called “Trans groups”. There’s no room for lesbians, because there’s no room for women. And much of the language the trans movement wants eliminates women – as adult human females – from view.

We are now supposed to refer to breastfeeding as chestfeeding and the women who do it as people, rather than women. We are supposed to stop naming vaginas, vulvas, clitorises and penises and refer instead to internal genitalia and external genitalia.  Women have spent decades learning to use specific sexual vocabulary without embarrassment. How else can we have open discussions with our doctors? How can children, teens and adult women report sexual abuse if they’re not comfortable using the language?

This guide is preparing us to reject sex altogether as a way of categorizing people and replace it, as the trans community wishes, with gender id, which has no physical manifestations at all.

Women object. We exist, as distinct from men, no matter how the men identify, and we are oppressed by men because of our sex. We can’t identify out of that oppression. Accurate language that reflects scientifically verifiable facts is important. The CDC Language Guide, with its “Platinum Rule” wants us to accept lies, and to lie ourselves for the sake of being nice.

Pronouns and Me — Open Letter to CBC

The CBC has invited Canadians to express their thoughts on pronouns. I wonder if this is a good-faith invitation expressing a real desire to hear a diverse range of opinions, or if it’s just the CBC doing what it does so frequently, which is act as a booster club for the trans community.

I suspect that you have no interest in my opinion, but just in case you feel it’s important that all Canadians be heard, I will tell you what I think. As a taxpayer, I can at least insist on my right to speak to the institution I fund.

As a writer, educator and grammarian, I can tell you that the only bit of language that anybody can “own” is their own name. Pronouns belong, not to people, but to the language. English is a sexed language, unfortunately, which means that male humans (and in some contexts animals) are referred to as “he”. Females are referred to as “she”.

For anyone to refer to a person they perceive as male — regardless of what that person is wearing — as “she” requires splitting the brain and pitting parts of it against other parts. The part that registers sense impressions will note the person is male, another part of the brain will stop the automatic cascade of perceptions/associations/language following from that observation. Another part of the brain will substitute an alternate “reality”, resulting in a desired (or coerced) cascade that differs from the natural one, that the self recognizes as manufactured. This splitting and dividing process is the definition of loss of integrity, integrity being the state of all parts working as a harmonious whole. This loss of integrity is harmful. It causes confusion. It causes uncertainty and insecurity.

Something more than that happens too. We don’t just speak language, we also think it. We think of males as “he” and females as “she”. So if we refer to a male as “she” we know we are saying that a male is a female.  And we cannot think that –it’s a logical impossibility. Human brains have been primed to classify and categorize correctly for the sake of survival. And this skill is not confined to the brain. The body is involved; deeply felt emotions are attached to knowing whether or not we are classifying correctly.

No matter how lovely we may feel trans people are, the statement “trans women are women” is an ideological nightmare. Affirming it disconnects us from reality.

Affirming it means removing women’s rights to say “no” and to have boundaries. It results in intact males in women’s sports, showers, rape crisis centres, prisons, DV shelters — spaces set up for the exclusive use of females in recognition of the oppression we face as females from males.

Affirming it results in headlines such as “Woman sues salon for refusing to wax her scrotum” and “Woman takes selfie of her erect penis in a woman’s shelter bathroom”.

As a lesbian feminist, I belong to a demographic that is particularly gender-nonconforming. Personally I enjoy what used to be called androgyny in both males and females. I would love to see the world open up to a greater diversity of gender expression. But, sex is important. Barring a tiny fraction of people with sexual development disorders, all mammals are either male or female.

If we stop being able to recognize and name male and female, we stop procreating, and that will be the end of us.

For further reading:

Banned from Medium: Pronouns are Rohypnol

Defund police? Not on this woman’s life.

In the midst of world-wide protests against racism, specifically against police systems that target people of colour, a central demand has emerged — that states defund the police. I have been aghast at this demand, which is made primarily, of course, by men.

Rahila Gupta, writing in the British newspaper, the Independent , this weekend, at last contemplated a woman’s response. She referred to American black feminist Angela Davis who is on record as calling for the abolition of police forces. She reported Davis as saying “Abolition feminism counters carceral feminism, which has unfortunately assumed that issues such as violence against women can be effectively addressed by using police force, by using imprisonment as a solution,” she says.

I’ve been seeing this phrase “carceral feminism” used on social media a fair bit lately, usually thrown as a smear against feminists of the pearl-clutching variety (read ‘white’, read ‘middle-class’) who actually want to throw men in jail, out of sheer maliciousness?

Both “carceral feminism” and calls to defund police are American discussions, emerging in the context of an imperialist nation built on slavery and genocide, in which thousands of ex-soldiers have infiltrated every aspect of life, and likewise in which massive amounts of military gear are circulating among the population. Black people are policed much more heavily than white people with predictable consequences. Propogandize however they like, police are used *against* the oppressed populations of people of colour.

In the case of women, the opposite situation prevails. Police forces are not deployed disproportionately in places where women congregate — which is where exactly? Yoga studios? Knit nights at yarn stores? Women are found most often in isolated locations —  family homes — rather than in certain parts of town, and police are not prowling privately-owned living rooms and kitchens even though the disproportionate amount of violence against women occurs in those locations.

I think there are no parallels between the situation regarding black people in the U.S., and the situation regarding women in any western country. Police in the U.S. purport to patrol black neighbourhoods and stop black people more because, they say, there is more black crime, including black on black crime.  No one tries to make any such claims regarding women, as if there were a problem with woman-on-woman crime, or woman against men crime.

Here the problem is insufficient policing of men who harm women, rather than over-policing of women. Proponents of defunding the police argue that the money should be spent instead on social services and education, and this is true when there is over-policing of an oppressed group. Much crime committed by oppressed people is committed because of poverty, lack of choice, hopelessness,  in other words, lack of real agency on the part of the oppressed.

With regards to crimes committed against women, no amount of education or social welfare will stop the oppressor group (men) from harming women. We don’t need to throw more taxpayer money at men, and providing more help for women will not stop the abuse they suffer at the hands of men. We know this because educated women in high status professions are still sexually harassed and raped in the public world, and beaten up and murdered at home. Women are not harmed because they lack genuine agency — in some cases they are harmed precisely because they have gained agency.

Gupta writes that women are in “the paradoxical situation of needing a system which also oppresses us.” It is true that the judicial system oppresses women, often through the failure to protect women from male violence. When the entire society is saturated with patriachal prejudices against women, those prejudices will pervade the justice system as they pervade every other institution. And we need to remember that rapists include police officers, judges, lawyers, prison guards, social workers, advocates for women’s rights, politicians, social justice warriors. A rapist cannot be depended on to write a law against rape, to enact such a law, to police those who break the law, or to assist the victim.

But I think there is a solution, one that matches the precise parameters of violence against women, as defunding some police departments might match the parameters of the black/white problem in the U.S.

We need a separate top to bottom judicial system specifically for crimes against women, populated entirely by women. Women police, lawyers, judges, lawmakers, politicians. When there is a 911 call  about domestic violence, about rape, about stalking, about possible femicide, women take the call. The victims and the suspects are all dealt with by women.

It took European states hundreds of years to persuade men to stop seeking private justice and vengeance against other men and to leave justice to the state. Gradually this reduced murder and mayhem. No state has had to persuade women to leave justice to the state, and maybe that’s why there is precious little justice for women.

If men who harm women, and even those simply suspected of harming women, need to face the power of women with the authority to punish them, something will change. When one small slice of the state bears a female face, there will be effects that ripple outwards.

It will not be enough, of course. The problem is the system underneath all the systems of every state, the system of patriarchy which, among other ills, leads men to direct their rage at women, often against women they don’t know. It’s been common knowledge for a long time that men see three archetypes in women: the virgin, the whore and the mother. I think it’s more accurate to say that patriarchy divides women into two types: those who serve as instruments of male need/desire, and those who don’t and are thus the enemy. When that changes we can talk about eliminating police forces.

 

 

Does The Globe and Mail Recognize a Woman?

This is a reply to an opinion piece in The Globe and Mail by Denise Balkissoon. A lack of logic has to be called out. See the article here.

 

1. “Woman” has never ever been “an evolving, contentious term,” contrary to Denise Balkissoon’s contention. The following sentence in her illogical opinion piece purports to offer evidence, but arguments that women are inherently physically or intellectual weaker than men are not arguments that women are not women. If anything, they are arguments that women are not quite human. People have never had the slightest problem distinguishing women from men when they have wanted to oppress or exploit them. Is it an accident that sex trafficking rings never capture a few males in their net that they have to throw overboard like undersize fish? Simple good luck that men intent on raping a woman don’t go through a male or two before they finally find the female they want?
2. Balkissoon then defines feminism as “truly equity-seeking”. This may be her definition, but it is not the foundational definition of feminism, which was originally also called the “women’s liberation movement”. Feminism strives to liberate females from male oppression. If boys and men are also liberated, so much the better, but that is a bonus.
3. Ms.B. then condemns MM for targeting “sex workers”, including by calling them prostitutes. Feminists do not refer to prostituted women as “sex workers” because that is a euphemism coined by pimps to erase the boundary between the exploited and the exploiters. The voices of the exploited have been amply recorded – they want out of the sex trade.
4. Ms.B.Ms says MM claims (confusingly??) that “sharing protections largely won by non-transgender women with trans and non-binary people somehow dilutes them”. Uh huh. By “non-transgender woman”, Ms. B presumably means “woman”? To share protections won by women with males does by definition and logic not just dilute them but eliminate them — since the protections are for women from men. Can we not all agree with that?
5. Ms.B. asks to be spared discussions of biology. May I ask what Ms. B. thinks the purpose, in evolutionary terms, of sex categories is? AfaIk, they has only one purpose, which is reproduction of the species. We reproduce with our bodies. Thus only discussions of biology apply. One adult human female copulating with one adult human male can result in the creation of a third human. This is biology. And infertile and menopausal females remain part of their biological class in the same way that infertile and even castrated men remain male
6. We use bodies rather than minds to procreate. But we use our minds to desire, to want and to imagine. When a man imagines woman, imagines he can be a woman, desires to be a woman, desires to be recognized as a woman and applies his will to making this happen, well that is when he creates a totalitarian trans cult. And that’s where we are today.

When Journalism Fails: The Tyee’s Article on Jenn Smith’s Victoria Talk

Time was newspaper journalists were expected to cover the news without bias. That they failed to do so because they couldn’t recognize their own bias was an important insight that feminists recognized in the seventies. Enough has not been done to right the wrongs committed against women when majority male journalists still dominate the major news channels.

It is clear by now that one factor that contributed to Hilary Clinton’s loss in the U.S. was that no one could hear her message. Despite a website that detailed that message in numerous pages full of detail (too full of detail some men griped) neither men nor women can “hear” when a woman speaks. Sometimes I think we might as well just open and close our mouths silently for all the good our words do.

Still, when journalists do know their own biases and allow them to infiltrate their  writing when that writing is still posing as “objective”, there is a significant danger to the public. There must be some way that we can receive descriptions of current events as stripped as possible of prejudice and self-interest. It’s only with the assistance of untainted facts that the public can try to make up its own mind about current issues.

So Andrew MacLeod’s article in the latest issue of The Tyee, a generally respected Vancouver online newspaper, was just the latest failure to give the public what it needs – this time about an issue that  threatens to remake societies to an unprecedented degree and which most Canadians remain unaware of precisely because mainstream media is ignoring it .

Look at the title:

BC’s Increasingly Bizarre Anti-SOGI Bandwagon

Foes of teaching inclusive sexual identity now include a transgender man guarded by Soldiers of Odin, and other alt-righters.

Calling a movement a “bandwagon” immediately positions it as lacking credibility, something that ignorant people jump onto without insight or analysis. It suggests that there is no credible analysis of SOGI (the province’s sexual orientation and gender identity guidance) that could conclude that it has problems. And the sub-heading makes clear that this article will characterize those critical of SOGI as far-right neo-nazi males (and perhaps their female handmaidens).

MacLeod reports that Jenn Smith is opposed to teaching children about sexual orientation and gender identity. I suspect that is not correct. I suspect that Smith opposes only the teachings regarding gender identity, which MacLeod quotes in the following paragraph. I am particularly interested in the next paragraph, where MacLeod paraphrases Smith’s position:

“He denies outright that people can transition their gender, and it’s that lack of acceptance, the assertion that transgender people are not who they believe they are, that people on the other side of the debate find hateful.”

It’s in regard to claims like this that journalists really do their jobs – to research the claims and report on their veracity or lack thereof. MacLeod does not; in fact he augments that claim with his own interpretations, that a denial that people can transition their gender marks a  “lack of acceptance” and includes a claim that “trans people are not who they believe they are.” I’m not sure what he means by a “lack of acceptance”. If he means the denial of the idea marks a lack of acceptance of that idea, well that would seem tautological. So why does he say it?

His comment that a denial that people can transition their gender includes the belief that trans people are not “who” they are is not justified and adds an incendiary element to Smith’s assertions. Smith is denying not who but what trans people are. Trans-identified males. are. not . females. That is his assertion.

Can this claim be found to be true or false? It can be. Mainstream, reputable scientists are united in stating that humans, like all mammals, are sexually dimorphous. That is, we come in two and only two sexes. Male and female are exclusive categories, defined by a cluster of attributes, all relating to reproduction. Though not every male or every female has all the attributes of the cluster, in general we can say that all males and no females have the y chromosome.

It is impossible for a male. to be or to become. female.

This is what the trans lobby finds hateful, and what they would like to shut down. This statement of scientific fact should be included in every article and news video about trans issues. It is never included.

Instead the unproven and unprovable myths of the trans activists are repeated – “I am a woman in a man’s body”, or “I’m female so my testicles and penis are female” or “I have a female brain in a male body”. That there are at least three different claims is simply evidence that there is nothing to hang any of the claims on.

But then science can only prove hypotheses about material, physical reality. Like sex. Everything else is metaphysical — pertaining to such non physical possibilities as soul, spirit, consciousness, mind, an afterlife. SOGI is a metaphysical document, beginning with its starting claim that we all have a gender identity.

But the bulk of the article returns to discussion of the threat of far right extremism and insists on linking far right extremism with the criticisms of those, like Smith, who are critical of the education ministry’s teaching of the trans ideology to children. This exemplifies the refusal to not just ignore women’s voices, but to not even hear them. When education minister Rob Fleming says it’s not surprising one extremist group should attract others, he is displaying a breathtakingly misogynist attitude.

Anyone paying attention should know by now that increasing numbers of women – feminists, lesbians and mothers – are alarmed by the giving away of women’s rights as well as the endangering of children by the trans ideology’s adherents.  And Smith himself is part of a growing group of  transsexual males who know they are male. All of these critics of trans ideology are more likely to vote to the left of centre than to the right.

But characterize your opponents arguments as “phobic”, and your opponents as scary alt-rigters and you don’t have to deal with them or their arguments. The protesters at Smith’s talk prevented him from speaking. They considered that a victory. And now the BC NPD, through its Vice President, is trying to make the dissemination of biological facts, as well as debates about the impact of trans rights on women’s rights a hate crime. As I speak, The Tyee has removed all comments critical of gender ideology from its comments page, marking them as spam.

That the government is pushing dogma and censoring speech is alarming enough, but when the free press aids in this crime instead of challenging it, liberal democracy is quivering on the floor. They can shoot the messenger with a hail of bullets, but the only corpse is  democracy.

Follow this link to facts and myths about trans ideology. http://transfacts.blogspot.com/