The writings of Barbara Kay – Maëlys McArdle

If anyone ever wanted to study attitudes on gender nonconformity in Canada during in this period in history, I’d point them to opinion writer Barbara Kay. Her prominence is fading now that newspapers and books are losing ground to competing forms of entertainment, but not too long ago she was one of the few authoritative voices Canadians might hear discuss gay or trans issues.

What she had to say was not particularly kind. She beckoned readers to purge society of these people using a litany of ever changing pretences. Now her latest diatribes are aimed at trans women. The story here though isn’t about her. It’s about the chain of people required to publish these dog whistles: folks who consider themselves supportive of diversity working for companies that claim to be inclusive of “LGBT” people, all the while making money by advocating for their eradication.

I believe these enablers and the apparent contradiction of their actions with their beliefs has more to tell us than the enmity of a single person. After all, it’s inevitable for cruel people to exist, but for others to monetize this antisocial behaviour is not. Nonetheless we can’t talk about that and the very real harm it causes without first talking about her.

Obsession

Barbara Kay has tweeted about, retweeted about, or replied to tweets about, trans and non-binary people over 1,000 times in the last eight months. That’s a third of all her posts during this period, and over 4 tweets every single day on average.*

Some examples include:

She’s also co-written a book called “Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport“. The cover features a female athlete who is trans (caricatured to look like a man but she’s wearing a trans flag) portrayed as stealing a trophy from two cisgender women.

In addition to all of that, Barbara Kay has also written nine articles in the National Post about trans people in the past year**, or about a third of the 29 articles she published with them. These were either supporting involuntary conversion therapy of gender diverse youth or advocating for purging trans women from women’s sports and prisons:

Similarly, a quarter of her articles for The Post Millennial (7 of 28 articles) in the past year** were also about trans people:

The sport and prison thing are her new dog whistles. Previously she argued that using a trans persons pronouns was part of a marxist plot (“For gender Marxists, pronouns are the latest patch of hotly contested terrain in the revolution“), that recognizing trans women as such was part of an Orwellian plot (“Diluting the meaning of ‘woman,’ to appease transgender activists, is misogyny“) and that acknowledging trans people corrupts cisgender children (“Transgendered advocacy has gone too far“, “When gender identity education and theory goes wrong“).

While it’s hard to understate the extent to which Barbara Kay devotes to disparaging trans people these days, I don’t think she actually cares about these issues, anymore than a schoolyard bully cares about glasses when they call someone four-eyes. I suspect it’s a kind of opportunism where she’s only picking on trans people because that’s what’s in the news. Once trans issues stop getting clicks I fully expect she’ll move on to the next minority grabbing headlines, just as she once progressed from attacking gay people to maligning trans folk.

If someone made wild conspiratorial allegations about entire minorities at a workplace while simultaneously invoking Marxism and the Taliban, you’d think that this person is a) pretty unwell and b) without credibility. So why then is she rewarded with a bully pulpit?

*1,076 tweets of a total 3,178 from the period of February 4, 2021 to October 7, 2021 for account @BarbaraRKay. Data available on demand.

**Covering the period between October 10, 2020 to October 10, 2021.

The enablers

I think part of it comes from the impunity that one gets from labeling themselves a conservative opinion writer.

If you say something incredibly racist, or advocate for the suppression of an entire religious group, or bash gays, wielding that label of conservative writer largely gets you a free pass. Other news organizations will ignore it for fear of being branded as partisan and any grassroots response becomes cause to claim victimhood. In a society that normalizes and regularly peddles this type of prejudice, amplifying it then is no different than printing the business section.

So you end up with, say, cruel attacks on individual people being printed hundreds of thousands of times over and distributed across Canada for mass consumption through outlets such as the National Post. Like this attack on Neil Hope, a trans man who had a baby. Where most would see joy, Barbara Kay chose to belittle:

It’s not every day a man has a baby. Which is why Neil Hope and “his” baby are in the news.
Sex and the troubled mind

In the old days, it would have been quite acceptable to call Neil Hope’s bizarre experiment freakish … as an assessment of the psychological state of the individual behind the decision.
Sex and the troubled mind

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!
Sex and the troubled mind

Barbara Kay never even met the man she’s so publicly excoriating. His only offense appears to be that he’s happy to have a child. Or take her words about Jenna Talackova, a trans woman who ran in a beauty pageant:

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.
Jenna Talackova goes double dipping in the theatre of gender politics

What an awful thing to say about anyone. Or take these words about Alana McLaughlin, a trans woman who won an MMA fight. Barbara Kay was “so sickened by the optics” of McLaughlin’s win and equated it with violence against women:

Genevieve Gluck … read my mind. In her post on the fight, she linked McLaughlin’s actions to the kind of sadomasochism that is featured in pornography, “where violence against women is eroticized to an unprecedented degree.”
MMA chokehold highlights the problem with porn

Or take Kay’s description of Laurel Hubbard, one of the first trans athletes to ever participate in the Olympics:

If Hubbard wins, observers will see that an aging natal-male athlete who could never hope to be on an Olympic men’s podium can win a medal in the women’s division.
Transgender weightlifter may expose the unfairness of trans athletes in Tokyo

Or take her words about parents Kathy Witterick and David Stocker who didn’t disclose their baby’s gender:

Their birth announcement to family and friends explains: “We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now…”
A child’s biology is not a matter of choice

Deny it as they will, Witterick and Stocker are ideologically programming their children… This is a “progressive” ideology that would happily sacrifice a child’s identity on the altar of bogus social engineering.
A child’s biology is not a matter of choice

Up to now, according to a media report, some of Witterick’s and Stocker’s friends and family have chosen to be supportive of the couple’s experiment. They would do those children a greater service if they deferred to their judgmental gut instincts.
A child’s biology is not a matter of choice

The young family Barbara implored her hundreds of thousands of readers to be judgemental towards later recounted the harassment they faced because of just that:

People delivered angry letters to the family’s door. Drivers slowed to shout “Boy!” from their windows at Storm, as the family was en route to the pool or the library.
Baby Storm five years later: Preschooler on top of the world

Barbara Kay got paid for her attacks, but it’s important to recognize that this isn’t just her doing. It’s also the work of the editors, type setters, online platform staff, printers, administrators, that gave this cruelty reach. Without them, she’s just that person in the comment section.

Fading

As dispiriting it is to witness a person having made a career of bullying others, Barbara Kay’s tenure in the mainstream is nearly over.

She has 14,000 followers on Twitter, which is less than a number of obscure trans writers in Canada. Her book has 8 reviews on GoodReads; by contrast “I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World” has 198. Evermore anachronistic, Kay’s turn to fringe outlets such as Rebel News to circulate her grievances means that she’s increasingly preaching to the choir. She’s also pushing eighty.

Which begets the question – why write about someone like her at all. Well, because so many people were comfortable amplifying the message that we should wipe out a minority in all but name. Sure, it probably didn’t seem that way to them; each having a seemingly inconsequential role and Barbara Kay’s words being obfuscated by dog whistles common to contemporary conservative politics. But this only came to be because they all went along with it.

I started this article by stating that if you wanted to understand the attitudes towards gender nonconforming people in Canada, to look at Barbara Kay. I think that the takeaway is that while there may not be that many loud devoted bigots, Canada is full of ordinary people just doing their jobs willing to propagate cruelty.

No one is immune and I think that’s a lesson we need to sit with.