Transphobia in the National Post

The National Post publishes articles with titles such as “How trans activists are unethically influencing autistic children to change genders“, “Pronouns are ruining the best thing about hockey” and “Are zee ready for the dictatorship of the gender warriors?” The newspaper has published at least 131 opinion pieces that normalize the rejection of trans and non-binary people since 2011. Twenty-four of those have been in the past year.

The advocated rejection appears to be deliberate. The staff at the National Post brings in contributors known specifically for their transphobic views to opine on current events involving trans or non-binary people. Among them is Susan Bradley, who oversaw conversion therapy of trans youth. She wrote in the National Post that trans people were “recruiting” children. Also featured is Jordan Peterson who was made rich when his rejection of non-binary students at the University of Toronto went viral. He wrote in the National Post that he “hates” non-binary pronouns and equated their use to “the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.“

The publication profits from this fear mongering. The incendiary headlines generate clicks and the pages ad revenue. The misconceptions willfully perpetuated by this newspaper contributes cruelty experienced by those who are not cisgender. The National Post are not observers but participants in the rejection that’s killing trans people.

The incentive structure at the National Post is such that they won’t stop disseminating falsehoods. So for now, I am documenting what they do. This is a follow up to last year’s Trans People According to the National Post.

The Articles

Articles are almost all negative

The National Post communicated its opposition to the acceptance of trans and non-binary people in 131 articles from July 2011 until December 2019. It published only nine articles supporting acceptance over the same period.

The articles opposing acceptance were penned by at least 37 different authors. The most prolific named contributors were Barbara Kay (29 articles), Christie Blatchford (25 articles), Rex Murphy (14 articles), and Conrad Black (8 articles).

See the References section at the end for a full list of articles and the criteria for “communicated its opposition to the acceptance of trans people”.

Cis people are heroes, trans people zeroes

Individuals known for their transphobic actions were given exclusively favourable coverage in the National Post. Trans and non-binary individuals were largely portrayed negatively.

Cisgender individuals known for their transphobia were also spoken of far more frequently than transgender individuals. Jordan Peterson alone was mentioned 257 times in 59 articles. All other named trans and non-binary individuals were mentioned a total of 180 times in 31 articles.

To compare the nature of the coverage, take this paragraph describing Jordan Peterson in Embattled U of T professor a warrior for common sense and plain speech:

He’s a hurricane of fresh air, this university professor who baldly says that one of the many reasons he won’t adopt the faddish new non-binary gender pronouns is that “the people who made those words are possessed by ideology and not to be trusted anyway.”

Contrast this to the coverage given to a trans person having a baby in the article Sex and the troubled mind:

It’s not every day a man has a baby. Which is why Neil Hope and “his” baby are in the news. Neil Hope, now 37, is a transsexual female who underwent gender-reassignment surgery in his 20s, but left her uterus intact.

In the old days, it would have been quite acceptable to call Neil Hope’s bizarre experiment freakish, not only in the literal dictionary sense – “a very unusual and unexpected event” – but as an assessment of the psychological state of the individual behind the decision.

That is certainly Neil Hope’s take on his/her situation. He/she says: “Trans people make amazing parents, the same way they make amazing children and they make amazing siblings and husbands and wives.” No suggestion here that believing you were born in the wrong body is in any sense a tragedy, or something one might wish to seek psychiatric help for. It’s all good!

Instead of pretending that a “man” having a baby is something to celebrate, we should lend our efforts to research that will lead to a cure for this terribly sad psychological problem.

Trans women and non-binary people are portrayed as a threat to cisgender individuals

The National Post employs extreme language when discussing its opposition to the respectful treatment of trans women and non-binary people. The newspaper has regularly drawn comparisons to the most violent tyrants of the 20th century.

For example, take the following paragraph from The right to be politically incorrect:

I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words “zhe” and “zher.” These words are at the vanguard of a post-modern, radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.

This is part of a larger pattern of presenting trans women and non-binary people as a threat to cisgender individuals. For example, the newspaper mentioned “bathroom” or “washroom” on 17 different occasions, all in the context of opposing the inclusion of trans individuals, such as in The silencing campaign against Meghan Murphy is a disgrace:

In almost all cases I have witnessed … feminists … (rightly) point out that a policy of no-questions-asked gender self-identification can put girls and women at risk in prisons, rape-crisis shelters and even shared bathrooms.

This quote from A National Post debate about gender identity and free speech summarizes the stance on trans women:

Women should not have to share spaces where they are vulnerable with male-bodied individuals, full stop.

Trans men are largely spared of this rhetoric, the reason elaborated upon in the same article:

I’ve known plenty of trans men who’ve sought out male spaces, but nobody ever says anything about it, because nobody assumes that trans men are predators who are inherently dangerous to cis men.

Advocates for the acceptance of trans people are also ascribed malicious intent by the National Post. They are mentioned 24 times in the newspaper by the moniker “transactivists” or “trans activists”. The portrayal of them is exclusively negative.

For example, take this quote from Douglas Murray is a writer who says what the rest of us would like to:

It looks like trans activists hate women — hate them — can’t bear them — find women disgusting. That’s what we see going on. We see people born women being bullied.

Or this other quote from Diluting the meaning of ‘woman,’ to appease transgender activists, is misogyny:

Radical transactivists, with the complicity of progressives earnestly attempting to support what they perceive as a vulnerable victim group, are guilty of the worst form of misogyny in their ruthless campaign to erase from our thoughts the human female body as a unique life form. Many feminists understand this, and they comprise the frontlines of resistance to this movement.

The acceptance of trans people being harmful to women and children is a recurring theme in the National Post, with advocates presented as enablers, such as in Suggestions for the new Ontario sex-ed curriculum:

Much of what children are learning about transgenderism today, at a very tender age, is not science-based, but activist-dictated theory that can result in psychological harm.

Articles only mention transphobia to deny it

The words “transphobia” and “transphobic” appear forty times in National Post articles. However, in all but one case the invocation is in the context of dismissing the claim as illegitimate or non-existent.

Example from Campus free speech advocates owe pro-life students their help:

In my observation, whatever their experiences off-campus, the least “vulnerable” and “marginalized” people on campuses today — if we are using those words in a systemic sense, as we must, if we are to make group comparisons — are those in the trans community. Their professors, the administration and equity officers are falling over themselves to make life “safe” for them. We saw proof of that in the Maoist “struggle session” Lindsay Shepherd experienced. Her interrogators demonstrated that they consider “transphobia” to be an egregious thoughtcrime.

Another example from Diluting the meaning of ‘woman,’ to appease transgender activists, is misogyny:

Transactivists bristle at the very idea that girls and women may be at risk in single-sex environments when biological males have access to them. But the concern does not spring from transphobia.

Contributors are brought in explicitly for their transphobic views

The newspaper invites public figures known for their non-acceptance of trans and non-binary people to opine on issues relating to those populations. This explains, in part, the animus expressed in the publication.

Susan Bradley

First National Post Article: January 12, 2017

Susan Bradley co-founded the Gender Identity Clinic at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. The clinic practiced conversion therapy on trans youth and was shut down in December 2015. Her first article in the National Post came a year later.

From her article How trans activists are unethically influencing autistic children to change genders:

A recent article by Elise Ehrhard in Crisis Magazine, a Catholic periodical, addresses the aggressive approach by adult trans activists in recruiting adolescents with Asperger’s Syndrome or other types of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to their cause.

Jordan Peterson

First National Post Article: November 8, 2016

Jordan Peterson achieved international fame after his videos portraying gender neutral pronouns as nefarious went viral in September 2016. Two months later, he had his first National Post article. He testified against Bill C-16 before the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs committee.

From his article The right to be politically incorrect:

Bill C-16 is dangerous legislation. Those who formulated it and who are pushing it and its sister legislation are dangerous people. I’m not going to use their words.

Lindsay Shepherd

First National Post Article: December 4, 2017

Lindsay Shepherd was a teaching assistant who showed a video clip of a debate about the worth of non-binary people in class in November 2017. The National Post gave her disproportionate coverage over the reprimand her superiors gave for not contextualizing the debate. Her name has been mentioned 179 times in 29 articles, roughly equivalent to all other named trans and non-binary people combined (180 times in 31 articles.) She was given her first article in the National Post a month later. More recently she wrote a piece in another publication advocating for the repeal of Bill C-16 by presenting trans women as threats to cis women in change rooms, washrooms, prisons and shelters.

From her article My Laurier interrogation shows universities have lost sight of their purpose:

I ended up being hauled before a three-person panel that many have described as “Orwellian,” “Maoist,” and “Kafkaesque.” I was told that playing the TVO clip was tantamount to violence, and that I had created a toxic climate and unsafe learning environment. I was also told that I had violated everything from the university’s Gendered Violence and Sexual Assault Policy to the Ontario Human Rights Code to Bill C-16.

Bruce Pardy

First National Post Article: June 19, 2017

Bruce Pardy is a law professor at Queen’s University. He testified against Bill C-16 before the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs committee in May of 2017. A month later, he had his first National Post article.

Bruce Pardy is also on the board of directors for the The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF). The JCCF argued in support of Bill Whatcott at the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal who had accused trans people of “disgusting characteristics, inherent deficiencies [and] immoral propensities which are too vile in nature to be shared” and had organized a campaign of harassment against a woman because she was trans. Whatcott lost, the tribunal finding that he had exposed “transgender people to hatred or contempt“. Bruce Pardy decried the outcome in the National Post article You have free speech, so long as you think the right thoughts.

From his article Meet the new ‘human rights’ — where you are forced by law to use ‘reasonable’ pronouns:

On Thursday, the Senate passed Bill C-16, the Liberal government’s legislation that adds “gender identity or expression” to grounds of discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act. … Few Canadians realize how seriously these statutes infringe upon freedom of speech.

Meghan Murphy

First National Post Article: March 27, 2014

Meghan Murphy founded the Feminist Current in June 2012. That year she gave sympathetic coverage to an organisation in Vancouver who fired a worker explicitly for being trans. She would continue advocating against the acceptance of trans people on her website. More recently, she testified against Bill C-16, and is currently touring the country advocating against the acceptance of trans women with her event “Gender Identity: What Does It Mean for Society, Law, and Women?”

From her National Post article A slow slide into censorship:

Will discussions of vaginas, for example, be removed from the curriculum on account of “cissexism”? What about discussions of eating disorders or war or suicide or racism?

Trans people are only spoken of in the context of cis people being victimized

The writers at the National Post only discuss trans issues when there’s a way to frame cis people as victims. This pattern reveals itself in the six spikes of news coverage related to trans and non-binary people since 2011.

The first spike occurred in 2012 Jenna Talackova took legal action against Miss Universe for disqualifying her on the grounds she was trans. The newspaper posited her subsequent victory as an incursion on the rights of private businesses (Disqualifying a transgender person from a female beauty contest isn’t discrimination). The National Post also considered her inclusion as undermining beauty contests for cis people, as per the article Jenna Talackova goes double dipping in the theatre of gender politics:

I should think that amongst the diminishing coterie of non-ideologues for whom beauty contests still hold significance, Ms Talackova’s presence was a joke. A joke, mind you, they have been well trained in political correctness enough to understand they mustn’t laugh out loud at, but a joke nonetheless.

The second flurry of coverage took place in 2015 when Caitlyn Jenner came out. The argument then was that trans women like Ms. Jenner debased womanhood for cis people. The case was made in articles such as This is what Bruce Jenner thought women were? and Caitlyn Jenner trivializes the momentousness of what it means to be a woman.

The third spate of coverage came in 2016, when Jordan Peterson went viral. The newspaper echoed Peterson’s claims that anti-discrimination legislation protecting trans and non-binary people assailed cis people’s freedom of speech (Jordan Peterson — a real professor, at last). The Lindsay Shepherd incident followed a year later with its own set of coverage, and with it the argument that academic freedom was being stifled (Time to move on from the Shepherd affair? Hardly) in addition to freedom of speech.

This year (2019) came with a spike in coverage focusing on both Jessica Yaniv and Meghan Murphy. Jessica Yaniv is a trans woman that’s been depicted as preying on vulnerable cisgender women using the human rights tribunal to do so, as alleged in B.C. Human Rights Tribunal is the real villain of the Jessica Yaniv farce. Meghan Murphy meanwhile has been on tour to argue that anti-discrimination protections for trans people pose a danger to cis women (How feminist Meghan Murphy fell victim to progressives’ double standards). The newspaper has presented the protesting of her engagements as undermining freedom of speech for cis people such as in Attack on public libraries for letting Meghan Murphy speak is a nauseating spectacle.

Functionally absent of the National Post was positive coverage of trans people or where cis people weren’t portrayed as being wronged.

This bias means that despite being spoken of extensively in other media outlets, the Transgender Day of Remembrance wasn’t mentioned once in the National Posts’ 140 articles, 2,141 paragraphs and 150,423 words that touched on trans and non-binary people. Nor was any of the names of the trans women of colour who had been murdered over the past decade in Canada. Nor was TransPULSE, despite being arguably the most well-publicized research on trans people in Canada from the past decade. By contrast, the discredited Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria which portrays being trans as a “social contagion” harmful to cis children, was mentioned 16 times.

The National Post’s denigration of trans and non-binary people

The National Post uses subtle techniques to communicate its opposition to the acceptance of trans and non-binary people, such as invoking transphobia only in the context of denying it. This bias doesn’t reveal itself except in the aggregate, which is what makes it so pernicious.

The newspaper employs other methods to communicate their prejudice that are more difficult to demonstrate by way of statistics, but that become evident reading through the articles from the past decade.

Outsourcing the worst comments

There is a pattern of the authors quoting others for the most disparaging remarks about trans women in particular and then indicating that they personally agree with the statements. For example, Jen Gerson quotes Germaine Greer in Is noted feminist Germaine Greer a hateful anti-transgender misogynist?:

“Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a f***ing woman,” she’s said.

“Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women’s names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn’t polite to say so.”

Jen Gerson then justifies Greer’s viewpoint and referring to trans women as men. Her approval is tacit:

She objects to transgender men appropriating her gender and flaunting a surgically enhanced caricature of it. They are engaging in a fantasy of womanhood free of its dangers and pitfalls.

Here’s another example from How feminist Meghan Murphy fell victim to progressives’ double standards:

Bill C-16 and political progressives accept that a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman. Murphy, her fellow TERFs and lots of ordinary Canadians disagree, including me. The official definition threatens women’s safety and human rights.

Invoking alarmist imagery in the titles

The writers at the National Post sometimes more directly communicate their bias, such as with the alarmist descriptors they employ in their titles:

Some of the descriptors from the titles of the 131 articles communicating opposition to the acceptance of trans and non-binary people include: absurd, abusing, attack, besieged, bullies, bullying, cancer, censorship, chilling, contemptible, cultural genocide, dangerous overreach, dictatorship, forced, gender Marxists, gender politics, gender warriors, grim, laughing, laughing stock, misogyny, mockery, nauseating, ominous, post-truth, ruining, social-justice Maoists, social-justice warrior, thought police, too far, unethically, villain, war, wasted.

Using mockery to deride trans people

The writers also use mockery to communicate their own contempt for trans people. Take this quote from Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Dolezal and the identity double standard:

And if you can change your sex just by saying “Ecce femina” why not your race while you’re at it? And your height. I always wanted to be tall.

Or this quote from Hillary’s hypocrisy:

I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that won’t turn me into a fucking cocker spaniel.

Or this quote from The confusion of raising genderless children and the time I was ‘Jack’:

I can’t even get my head around what it must be like trying to determine what “they” want for dinner; it must be like an endless game of who’s-on-first.

Or this quote from A National Post debate about gender identity and free speech:

The admission of male-bodied competitors into female athletics has produced scenes of grotesque farce. What’s more, the media pretends that we are supposed to applaud these farcical scenes as Stunning And Brave — when pretty much everyone involved finds them mortifying at best, utterly misogynistic at worst.

Or this quote from One gay man’s lonely fight against Ontario’s new law banning ‘mother’ and ‘father’:

Mocking the transgender argument that people are whatever gender they feel they are — male, female, something in between, or none of the above — Clark refuses to concede longstanding facts of life: “Men don’t have vaginas or female anatomy … and women don’t have penises,” he says.

“Gays and lesbians should have had an amicable separation from transgenders many years ago,” Clark believes (I’ve also long held this opinion).

There’s a fundamental lack of understanding about trans people evident in the 131 articles that communicate an opposition to the acceptance of trans people. This ignorance is highlighted in commentary such as in Between two sexes:

Biological homelessness — “gender identity disorder” in the jargon — is a very real, biologically rooted condition, but it is nothing to celebrate or encourage. … Yet the message we are getting from academics and pedagogues fixated on gender equality is that biological ambiguity should be valorized and even encouraged, at any rate certainly not discouraged.

Targeting non-binary individuals

Non-binary people are another frequent target of the National Post. Authors personally advocate against using their pronouns, such as in Prof. Peterson must not face this assault on reason and his rights alone:

I have and continue to urge against and dismiss as absurd and outrageous the demand that those who purport to be in a transgender condition that is neither male nor female, have a right to be addressed in a new vocabulary of their devising.

Writers also intentionally misgender trans people, such as in If gender identity debate at U of T was about free speech, then the battle is truly lost:

Bryson’s official profile on the UBC site uses the pronoun “they” to refer to her, as in, “Throughout Mary’s 27 years at UBC, they have served in many senior administrative roles…” I take from this that “they” is her preferred pronoun, but I decline to use it.

As with before, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the experience of non-binary individuals, as evidenced with this quote from Jordan Peterson speaks for those of us that refuse to follow the ‘great liberal death wish’:

“Ze” for he or she and “Zir” in place of his or him are the sticking points, but what is accumulating behind these imbecilic distinctions is quite sinister.

But there are only two genders, two sexes; our species and all other mammals are “gender-binary.” All people may state their sex, and if that is contrary to physical appearances, that remains their right. But no individual or group has the right to invent a new vocabulary and a new co-equal gender because of a state of ambivalence or confusion about which sex they are.

Trans and non-binary youth aren’t spared

The National Post supports conversion therapy. For example, the author of Stop being a jerk over someone’s pronoun preference — they’re human beings, not issues calls it a “useful brand of treatment” and then quotes Ray Blanchard. Blanchard is known for his theory that there’s two types of trans women: homosexual men, and straight men who fetishize women’s bodies. From the article:

“Let’s say it were possible to take a 10-year-old kid and make them either a well-adjusted lesbian or turn them into a female-to-male transsexual,” Blanchard told Rogan. “I don’t see anything wrong with saying it’s better to make this kid into a lesbian, because being a lesbian doesn’t require breast amputation, the construction of a not-very-convincing false penis, and a lifetime of testosterone shots.”

Advocates for conversion therapy believe that trans youth are cis youth who are corrupted. Barbara Kay, who has penned 29 of the articles opposing trans acceptance in the National Post, exemplifies this belief system with her Twitter post:

The newspaper publicly supporting conversion therapy is harmful given that in Canada 8% of trans and non-binary youth ages 14-24 have already undergone conversion therapy.

Perhaps most egregious is how the newspaper handles suicide. The newspaper mentions the higher prevalence of suicide in the trans community 13 times. In 9 of those 13 times, it was done in the context of imploring parents not to accept their gender variant child, such as in A new report sounds the alarm on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria:

Almost a third of the [adolescents and young adults] brought up the threat of suicide as a reason for transitioning; this is also something they are coached in.

The suggestion is that parents should dismiss their adolescent or young adult’s suicide ideation as part of some conspiracy. This advice is dangerous. A TransPULSE survey in Ontario found that 57% of trans youth ages 16-24 with “somewhat to not at all supportive” parents had attempted suicide in the previous year. There was a “93% reduction in reported suicide attempts for youth who indicated their parents were strongly supportive of their gender identity and expression.” There is something truly perverse about using the elevated risk of suicide from non-acceptance to justify non-acceptance.

Discussion

This past year saw a wave of organized assaults and harassment of gender and sexual minorities across Canada, in addition to the daily ad hoc incidents of harassment.

The National Post legitimizes this violence. They portray the acceptance of trans women as a threat. They draw comparisons to the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. They willfully promulgate crackpot theories like autogynephilia (Parents face scorn for worrying about letting their children change genders, Sex and the troubled mind) and social contagion (A new report sounds the alarm on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, Delaware students can now choose their own race. This should end well). They avoid the large body of evidence that support accepting trans people for a handful of researchers with a pre-established anti-trans bias.

The articles at the National Post are consistent in their positioning:

They oppose anti-discrimination legislation that is inclusive of trans and non-binary people.
They oppose anti-bullying measures that protect trans and non-binary youth.
They oppose trans-inclusive sex ed.
They support conversion therapy.
They oppose parents accepting their gender variant children.
They oppose transgender studies programs.
They oppose trans women shopping in the women’s section.
They oppose trans women being able to participate in sports.
They oppose trans women using washrooms or change rooms.
They oppose gender-neutral washrooms.
They oppose trans women using crisis shelters.
They oppose trans women being incarcerated in women’s prisons.
They oppose trans people being in the military.
They oppose anyone using trans and non-binary people’s pronouns.
They oppose the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders dropping being trans as a mental health disorder.

In other words, the National Post advocates for a world where trans and non-binary people cease to functionally exist. It’s as cruel as it is misguided.

The writers at the National Post hold deep misconceptions about this segment of the population, and in their ignorance spread dehumanizing rhetoric that empowers hate. The inadequacy of their caricatures and pseudo-scientific theorizing would quickly become obvious if they got to know trans people. There does not appear to be a genuine interest in this connection, as the writers favour interviewing cisgender anti-trans advocates over trans people.

Still, those authors are not the ones I blame for this state of affairs. There’s always going to be people who think that those who are different don’t belong. Instead, I hold the chain of cis people required to publish these articles responsible. Their silence at every step, more than the predictable words of the bigots, is what I find most disheartening. Neutrality favours the transphobe, never the trans person.

I conclude with the National Post equating trans people’s pronouns with Hitler, in When the government tells us how to speak:

In the later years of Adolf Hitler’s Germany, the government made it compulsory for people to use the “Heil Hitler” salute in all public greetings.

Conscripted speech — of this sort, or any variety — violates people’s freedom of expression… When people are required to express themselves in certain ways, they become mouthpieces for the government’s ideological agenda, at the expense of their own.

What makes these transgender laws unique, though, is their potential to be interpreted in ways that interfere with people’s constitutionally protected freedom of expression. Forcing members of private organizations to call transgender people by the personal pronouns of their choosing is a form of conscripted speech.

While I was writing this article, the newspaper published the following in A National Post debate about gender identity and free speech:

And if your very “existence” as a trans person hangs on the question of whether some random person on social media uses the right syllable to refer to you, maybe you’re not quite so trans as you thought you were.

…or maybe ya know, Hitler.

Referenced articles

The National Post communicated its opposition to the acceptance of trans and non-binary people in 131 opinion pieces from July 2011 until December 2019.

The National Post published nine opinion pieces accepting that trans and non-binary people are just a normal variation of diversity in the same period:

The criteria for “communicated its opposition to the acceptance of trans and non-binary people” is for the purposes of this article defined as:

Not accepting trans women as equal to cis women.
Treating trans and non-binary people’s pronouns as less legitimate than cis people’s.
Supporting parents in not accepting their child’s gender non-conformity.
Portraying individuals constrained from disseminating transphobic material as victims of overreach.
Presenting an equivalency between the right to discriminate against gender diverse individuals and the right of that minority to live free of discrimination.