Great dispatch. Some thoughts on the subject you didn’t want to talk about, but then talked about: trans and gender ID.
1) Of course, what happened in Waterloo is unacceptable.
2) Yes, as Matt said, we will unfortunately have more attacks like this because the rhetoric on both sides is getting more extreme.
3) About this being a moral panic. That implies no real harm is being done to anyone, and sadly, that’s not the case. It’s becoming clear that some young people who choose to transition (I’m talking about 18 and up, not minors) come to regret it. They feel they were harmed by doctors and psychologists who did not explain the medical risk involved. Even worse, transition exacerbated their mental health issues. (See Sinead Watson and Keira Bell in the U.K. and Michelle Avella in Canada). Also, pro-trans countries in Europe (The U.K., Sweden, Denmark and Finland) have put the brakes on youth transition, after careful government review that found no evidence of health benefit- but plenty of potential for harm- from gender-affirming procedures. See Time to Think, an inside account of the Tavistock gender clinic by an award winning journalist, Hanna Barnes.
4) You’re absolutely correct that the left will hear none of this; they call any concerns about young people and gender ID “transphobic”.
5) Yes transition will be the right choice for some. But not all. Transition regret is real and not nearly as rare as trans advocates say. There are kids who are gay or autistic or both, who are getting caught on the wrong side.
For you, it’s a culture war. Something that can be kept at arm’s length. Fine. I have skin in the game, a daughter with gender dysphoria. It’s impossible to get decent mental health support for her that’s not, just have surgery and take testosterone and you’ll be fine. Call me crazy, but that’s not proper medical advice. And no, I’m not homophobic. I don’t care if she’s a lesbian.
And yes, as you so eloquently put it, the gay rights movement led a 20-year campaign to genuinely persuade for the right to marry, etc. What we are seeing in schools and mainstream media today is the opposite of that. Among other things, this is a medical scandal of epic proportions, one that’s coming into focus as more and more detransitioners come forward to tell their stories.
Here’s a thought. If we had reasonable, thoughtful people like yourselves, people with a platform, speaking up to ask questions, and ask people to explain themselves (i.e. journalism), it would help lower the temperature and maybe bring some sanity to the conversation.
But I get it. This thing is totally fucked up. It’s a shit show and I certainly wouldn’t look at it if I didn’t have to.
Noting that something is a "moral panic" does not mean that no harm is being done. In fact, all moral panics are rooted in legitimate and perceived harms to the community; the dynamics of a moral panic exaggerate those harms, and then polarize the community around them, making nuanced discussion impossible.
To figure out if the harms are exaggerated, we need to be able to talk about it honestly, right? Most people think there is no harm to letting kids use an opposite sex name and pronouns. For some kids, it might be right. For some, it may be a phase. But for others, it sets them on a track to transition, and this may cause them harm.
Genspect has experts who are great on this.
Secondly, if men can self identify as women and immediately demand access to women’s private spaces (washrooms, change rooms, etc) there is an impact to women. That impact must be discussed and weighed carefully. This has never happened because the government caved to “no debate”.
To turn the temperature down on all this, reasonable people have to be willing to talk about it.
I think you all need to be less ready to dismiss the conspiracy theory angle to things since the state has used and is using the tag "it's a conspiracy" to dismiss real information that is inconvenient or not part of the elite narrative. In no way do I believe in flat earth or a 911 inside job, but I do think there's more there with regard to Kennedy, Hunter Biden and "Dad", Liberal Party involvement in Chinese interference, etc. and will continue to keep an open mind. Call me a nut if you wish, but I think that's reflective of the person throwing the label around rather than of me being aware that there a lots of unanswered questions and that I don't trust the state or media to give me the facts.
It just sounds like you're criticizing keeping an open mind. Yes, there's a risk of letting in junk, but that's what happens when the media fails to do its job. Smith, Rogan, etc doing better than most.
Yeah, that's ads and not what I'm referring to. I think it's a matter of cred, as you say, and who gets it. Getting back to a place where those with automatic cred don't abuse it might not be possible. Legacy institutions have abused it and those calling it out are attacked and dismissed and, lo and behold, they are now more on the side of freedom and facts. Sorting out the junk is a different process now.
Actually not too worried about the collapse of conventional media, remembering the Vancouver Sun’s role in the media crucifixion of Glen Clark, their collaboration in advertising for adoption the children taken in the Sixties Scoop, their hate campaign against the Doukhobors… Something will arise to take their place--it might be worse, but then again it might be better.
As a child in the late 60s, my family and I spent time in South Africa. I was sitting on a bus stop bench when an elderly woman spat on me and subjected me to a verbal undressing... in what I presume today was mostly indecipherable Africaans. Later, we figured out it must have been because I was sitting on the part of the bench 'reserved' for coloureds - I thought I had some colour from playing in the sun - and this deeply offended this pale woman. Go figure.
Two months later I was in the very hot parking lot of Auschwitz being told by an older sibling why I couldn't enter the main buildings, young as I was, and see the horrific holocaust displays and pictures that were later described to me in gruesome detail. Instead, I waited in the parking lot and was rewarded by an elderly German woman who spoke to me in what I presume today was mostly indecipherable German that resulted in her buying me an ice cream cone. Go figure.
I thought about this dichotomy of treatment rather deeply and came to the conclusion before I was 10 years of age that both systems that resulted in such different treatment of me - apartheid and totalitarianism - were expressions of the same thing, namely, a system that reduced real people in real life to representative cogs of some less-than-human group. And this varied treatment based on different social situations was reinforced in my young mind when we travelled through the Soviet Union constantly shadowed and monitored by state agents. Outside of Moscow, a Russian engineering student drew detailed diagrams of our potato peeler. He was taken away. Go figure.
Under the reign of Trudeau Prime, I wrote a letter to Maclean's in the late 70s raising the issue of why promoting the hyphenated Canadian was not a good idea. I was rather pleased the term gained entrance to the lexicon but disappointed that its warnings about how doing so elevated the danger to social cohesion and obstructed nation building was left at the doorstep.
In the 90s I wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper suggesting that legal rights based on blood percentages of tribal ancestors might not be the best way to establish equality rights in law. We had to move from the violent fallout of that. Go figure.
I have never forgotten this life lesson, that why believing that groups were real rather than artificial constructions constituted by real people with vast individual differences could lead to the very worst outcomes not just for the victims being assigned the 'They' part of this identity equation, but reducing the 'Us' component to the very lowest of morally depraved yet acceptable denominator of behaviour.
Lest we forget... but then, nothing has really changed. The seeds of believing in group-based identities are still there, still being fed by the Righteous. Now we are seeing the product of acting and passing laws and policies and procedures based on that belief in all kinds of ways. Division.
Belief in groups was then and remains today an existential threat not because the individuals of constructed groups by definition share certain attributes and/or characteristics but because doing so automatically and unthinkingly goes along with creating and believing in a divisive Us and Them. You need an Us and Them to have conflict and a target for assigning blame for problems. You need a We to build cohesion and find consensus and implement real solutions. There is no sense of We today in this country, which is why there is no cohesive Canadian identity.
When I read 50 years later about how everything seems broken today in Canada even after surviving a pair of Quebec separation referendums (referendi?), after the French-English narrative was replaced by today's ever so popular Indigenous-Colonial narrative, how every social problem, every political issue, every economic concern, every name for crying out loud, is now framed using these group identities (and sometimes intersectionalities and moral worthiness), when I see school children heavily indoctrinated into viewing their world as an Us/Them group-based narrative where Canadians are in some way always the Bad Guy, I am amazed that anyone would expect anything to improve. Gender is just the latest battlefield. I would define that expectation hoping for some other result other than what we have as truly delusional.
When I hear erudite people like our Line editors so easily dismiss the rise of belief in group identities as if real and meaningful descriptors of the people who constitute them - and the divisive effect this has in every field where it is allowed to take root - as if nothing more than an irritating part of some 'culture war' (that pops up here and there when something like the Laurier stabbing occurs or a teacher starts wearing incredibly large prosthetic breasts and the school board seems paralyzed to respond with anything other than affirmation), recast as just another version of some conspiracy belief rabbit hole into which The Line should not descend, I have to admit I am disappointed at yet another in a very long list of opportunities lost. This issuer matters.
I think the rise of belief in group-based identity is the story of how to destroy any liberal democratic state from within by going after and destroying individual rights and freedoms, the bedrock value upon which liberal democracies stand. This is the goal of Critical Theory, after all. And this reformatted belief in competing groups for positioning on the power hierarchy is a post modernist version of the belief in groups as if real things, real entities, that has slowly spread like malignant cancer through all of our public institutions and now into the wider community.
But it's the same thing I encountered way back then. Nobody seems to want to write about any of this. Or its inevitable divisive and destructive consequences. Let's get back to bitching! Nobody seems to have a clue about how to bring people - who make up every single disparate group - together. That makes Us the problem. And so we'll continue to watch the balkanization of Canada into its ever-shrinking competing groups and its current slide from international peace-keeping wunderkind through irrelevancy and into its inevitable fractured oblivion. On our watch. And that's our legacy. Maybe this will make 'the news' after someone asks what happened to that place that used to be called Canada?
I admit, I missed the part where we apparently "dismissed the rise of belief in group identities."
I'm not even sure what this is referring to.
We have concerns about weighing into a subject at the most fraught end of a raging culture war; mostly because we don't have very much of value to contribute to it. We don't avoid this issue entirely, and have written about trans stuff several times in the past. We just don't want to define ourselves by it. JG
You're not alone. Most media and public pundits have missed this slow moving revolution that replaces individual rights and freedoms in law with group rights and associated legal privileges for some while going along with permitted various legal discriminations to facilitate this fundamental change. This is not a culture war. This is a hostile takeover. It's an ideological war being played out in every institution and liberalism is losing at every turn. That's the common thread. I just think it's newsworthy but not being connected.
I think you can start to see this for yourself if you listen to how other newsworthy issues are being framed: is it being presented as conflict/effects between competing groups or as an issue involving real people in real life with real complexities? As liberalism loses ground to 'progressive' changes, so too do we lose the core values of what 'Canada' once represented. The 'state' becomes the reason individuals exist: to serve its parental needs. That's a story that simply isn't being covered even though the negative effects are all around us every day and lie behind so much of what is going on, be it gender issues, land claims, racial disparities, government spending, crime rates, elections, climate change... pick your issue. This group against that group. Problems and issues are constantly being framed using group identities, which is much easier to write about but notice that no workable solutions will surface under this method. See if you start to notice this framing in action.
As someone once said, the barbarians are breaking through the gates while the townsfolk argue about which pronouns to use to confront them. Or the house is burning down while we debate which room should be dusted first and why. If we're going to fix what's gone so wrong with Canada, we first have to understand what's breaking it. The culture war is just a symptom.
Great dispatch. Some thoughts on the subject you didn’t want to talk about, but then talked about: trans and gender ID.
1) Of course, what happened in Waterloo is unacceptable.
2) Yes, as Matt said, we will unfortunately have more attacks like this because the rhetoric on both sides is getting more extreme.
3) About this being a moral panic. That implies no real harm is being done to anyone, and sadly, that’s not the case. It’s becoming clear that some young people who choose to transition (I’m talking about 18 and up, not minors) come to regret it. They feel they were harmed by doctors and psychologists who did not explain the medical risk involved. Even worse, transition exacerbated their mental health issues. (See Sinead Watson and Keira Bell in the U.K. and Michelle Avella in Canada). Also, pro-trans countries in Europe (The U.K., Sweden, Denmark and Finland) have put the brakes on youth transition, after careful government review that found no evidence of health benefit- but plenty of potential for harm- from gender-affirming procedures. See Time to Think, an inside account of the Tavistock gender clinic by an award winning journalist, Hanna Barnes.
4) You’re absolutely correct that the left will hear none of this; they call any concerns about young people and gender ID “transphobic”.
5) Yes transition will be the right choice for some. But not all. Transition regret is real and not nearly as rare as trans advocates say. There are kids who are gay or autistic or both, who are getting caught on the wrong side.
For you, it’s a culture war. Something that can be kept at arm’s length. Fine. I have skin in the game, a daughter with gender dysphoria. It’s impossible to get decent mental health support for her that’s not, just have surgery and take testosterone and you’ll be fine. Call me crazy, but that’s not proper medical advice. And no, I’m not homophobic. I don’t care if she’s a lesbian.
And yes, as you so eloquently put it, the gay rights movement led a 20-year campaign to genuinely persuade for the right to marry, etc. What we are seeing in schools and mainstream media today is the opposite of that. Among other things, this is a medical scandal of epic proportions, one that’s coming into focus as more and more detransitioners come forward to tell their stories.
Here’s a thought. If we had reasonable, thoughtful people like yourselves, people with a platform, speaking up to ask questions, and ask people to explain themselves (i.e. journalism), it would help lower the temperature and maybe bring some sanity to the conversation.
But I get it. This thing is totally fucked up. It’s a shit show and I certainly wouldn’t look at it if I didn’t have to.
Sorry to go on and on. It’s lonely out here.
Thank you for reading. Enjoy your vacation.
Noting that something is a "moral panic" does not mean that no harm is being done. In fact, all moral panics are rooted in legitimate and perceived harms to the community; the dynamics of a moral panic exaggerate those harms, and then polarize the community around them, making nuanced discussion impossible.
JG
My bad Jen. Thank you for correcting me on that.
To figure out if the harms are exaggerated, we need to be able to talk about it honestly, right? Most people think there is no harm to letting kids use an opposite sex name and pronouns. For some kids, it might be right. For some, it may be a phase. But for others, it sets them on a track to transition, and this may cause them harm.
Genspect has experts who are great on this.
Secondly, if men can self identify as women and immediately demand access to women’s private spaces (washrooms, change rooms, etc) there is an impact to women. That impact must be discussed and weighed carefully. This has never happened because the government caved to “no debate”.
To turn the temperature down on all this, reasonable people have to be willing to talk about it.
Great dispatch. You called it a while ago, but I am not going to lie: I am enjoying watching minister Pablo Rodriguez twist in the wind.
Enjoy your vacations guys!
I think you all need to be less ready to dismiss the conspiracy theory angle to things since the state has used and is using the tag "it's a conspiracy" to dismiss real information that is inconvenient or not part of the elite narrative. In no way do I believe in flat earth or a 911 inside job, but I do think there's more there with regard to Kennedy, Hunter Biden and "Dad", Liberal Party involvement in Chinese interference, etc. and will continue to keep an open mind. Call me a nut if you wish, but I think that's reflective of the person throwing the label around rather than of me being aware that there a lots of unanswered questions and that I don't trust the state or media to give me the facts.
It just sounds like you're criticizing keeping an open mind. Yes, there's a risk of letting in junk, but that's what happens when the media fails to do its job. Smith, Rogan, etc doing better than most.
Yeah, that's ads and not what I'm referring to. I think it's a matter of cred, as you say, and who gets it. Getting back to a place where those with automatic cred don't abuse it might not be possible. Legacy institutions have abused it and those calling it out are attacked and dismissed and, lo and behold, they are now more on the side of freedom and facts. Sorting out the junk is a different process now.
Sorry. You lost me at Joe Rogain.
What's that
Actually not too worried about the collapse of conventional media, remembering the Vancouver Sun’s role in the media crucifixion of Glen Clark, their collaboration in advertising for adoption the children taken in the Sixties Scoop, their hate campaign against the Doukhobors… Something will arise to take their place--it might be worse, but then again it might be better.
WTF? That's an early surprise. No word of a lie, I am "dropping everything" to listen to this NOW! All the best and keep up the great work.
As a child in the late 60s, my family and I spent time in South Africa. I was sitting on a bus stop bench when an elderly woman spat on me and subjected me to a verbal undressing... in what I presume today was mostly indecipherable Africaans. Later, we figured out it must have been because I was sitting on the part of the bench 'reserved' for coloureds - I thought I had some colour from playing in the sun - and this deeply offended this pale woman. Go figure.
Two months later I was in the very hot parking lot of Auschwitz being told by an older sibling why I couldn't enter the main buildings, young as I was, and see the horrific holocaust displays and pictures that were later described to me in gruesome detail. Instead, I waited in the parking lot and was rewarded by an elderly German woman who spoke to me in what I presume today was mostly indecipherable German that resulted in her buying me an ice cream cone. Go figure.
I thought about this dichotomy of treatment rather deeply and came to the conclusion before I was 10 years of age that both systems that resulted in such different treatment of me - apartheid and totalitarianism - were expressions of the same thing, namely, a system that reduced real people in real life to representative cogs of some less-than-human group. And this varied treatment based on different social situations was reinforced in my young mind when we travelled through the Soviet Union constantly shadowed and monitored by state agents. Outside of Moscow, a Russian engineering student drew detailed diagrams of our potato peeler. He was taken away. Go figure.
Under the reign of Trudeau Prime, I wrote a letter to Maclean's in the late 70s raising the issue of why promoting the hyphenated Canadian was not a good idea. I was rather pleased the term gained entrance to the lexicon but disappointed that its warnings about how doing so elevated the danger to social cohesion and obstructed nation building was left at the doorstep.
In the 90s I wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper suggesting that legal rights based on blood percentages of tribal ancestors might not be the best way to establish equality rights in law. We had to move from the violent fallout of that. Go figure.
I have never forgotten this life lesson, that why believing that groups were real rather than artificial constructions constituted by real people with vast individual differences could lead to the very worst outcomes not just for the victims being assigned the 'They' part of this identity equation, but reducing the 'Us' component to the very lowest of morally depraved yet acceptable denominator of behaviour.
Lest we forget... but then, nothing has really changed. The seeds of believing in group-based identities are still there, still being fed by the Righteous. Now we are seeing the product of acting and passing laws and policies and procedures based on that belief in all kinds of ways. Division.
Belief in groups was then and remains today an existential threat not because the individuals of constructed groups by definition share certain attributes and/or characteristics but because doing so automatically and unthinkingly goes along with creating and believing in a divisive Us and Them. You need an Us and Them to have conflict and a target for assigning blame for problems. You need a We to build cohesion and find consensus and implement real solutions. There is no sense of We today in this country, which is why there is no cohesive Canadian identity.
When I read 50 years later about how everything seems broken today in Canada even after surviving a pair of Quebec separation referendums (referendi?), after the French-English narrative was replaced by today's ever so popular Indigenous-Colonial narrative, how every social problem, every political issue, every economic concern, every name for crying out loud, is now framed using these group identities (and sometimes intersectionalities and moral worthiness), when I see school children heavily indoctrinated into viewing their world as an Us/Them group-based narrative where Canadians are in some way always the Bad Guy, I am amazed that anyone would expect anything to improve. Gender is just the latest battlefield. I would define that expectation hoping for some other result other than what we have as truly delusional.
When I hear erudite people like our Line editors so easily dismiss the rise of belief in group identities as if real and meaningful descriptors of the people who constitute them - and the divisive effect this has in every field where it is allowed to take root - as if nothing more than an irritating part of some 'culture war' (that pops up here and there when something like the Laurier stabbing occurs or a teacher starts wearing incredibly large prosthetic breasts and the school board seems paralyzed to respond with anything other than affirmation), recast as just another version of some conspiracy belief rabbit hole into which The Line should not descend, I have to admit I am disappointed at yet another in a very long list of opportunities lost. This issuer matters.
I think the rise of belief in group-based identity is the story of how to destroy any liberal democratic state from within by going after and destroying individual rights and freedoms, the bedrock value upon which liberal democracies stand. This is the goal of Critical Theory, after all. And this reformatted belief in competing groups for positioning on the power hierarchy is a post modernist version of the belief in groups as if real things, real entities, that has slowly spread like malignant cancer through all of our public institutions and now into the wider community.
But it's the same thing I encountered way back then. Nobody seems to want to write about any of this. Or its inevitable divisive and destructive consequences. Let's get back to bitching! Nobody seems to have a clue about how to bring people - who make up every single disparate group - together. That makes Us the problem. And so we'll continue to watch the balkanization of Canada into its ever-shrinking competing groups and its current slide from international peace-keeping wunderkind through irrelevancy and into its inevitable fractured oblivion. On our watch. And that's our legacy. Maybe this will make 'the news' after someone asks what happened to that place that used to be called Canada?
I admit, I missed the part where we apparently "dismissed the rise of belief in group identities."
I'm not even sure what this is referring to.
We have concerns about weighing into a subject at the most fraught end of a raging culture war; mostly because we don't have very much of value to contribute to it. We don't avoid this issue entirely, and have written about trans stuff several times in the past. We just don't want to define ourselves by it. JG
Thanks for the update, glad I got on board before the apocalypse.
You're not alone. Most media and public pundits have missed this slow moving revolution that replaces individual rights and freedoms in law with group rights and associated legal privileges for some while going along with permitted various legal discriminations to facilitate this fundamental change. This is not a culture war. This is a hostile takeover. It's an ideological war being played out in every institution and liberalism is losing at every turn. That's the common thread. I just think it's newsworthy but not being connected.
I think you can start to see this for yourself if you listen to how other newsworthy issues are being framed: is it being presented as conflict/effects between competing groups or as an issue involving real people in real life with real complexities? As liberalism loses ground to 'progressive' changes, so too do we lose the core values of what 'Canada' once represented. The 'state' becomes the reason individuals exist: to serve its parental needs. That's a story that simply isn't being covered even though the negative effects are all around us every day and lie behind so much of what is going on, be it gender issues, land claims, racial disparities, government spending, crime rates, elections, climate change... pick your issue. This group against that group. Problems and issues are constantly being framed using group identities, which is much easier to write about but notice that no workable solutions will surface under this method. See if you start to notice this framing in action.
As someone once said, the barbarians are breaking through the gates while the townsfolk argue about which pronouns to use to confront them. Or the house is burning down while we debate which room should be dusted first and why. If we're going to fix what's gone so wrong with Canada, we first have to understand what's breaking it. The culture war is just a symptom.
I don’t think that Jenn speaks too quickly. I actually listen to the podcast at double speed. ;-)