Discussions on rights, including on orientation, identity, and employment (eg. sex work).
National Post writer Christie Blatchford passed away last month, resulting in a flurry of articles praising her career in Canadian mainstream media.
The experience of reading Blatchford’s articles was very different as a trans person. She regularly used her platform to advocate for a world free of those perceived to be gender non-conforming. In her estimation, it was those who advocated for the erasure of the gender diverse who were the true victims.
I mapped out some of the ways that high-profile anti-trans advocates in Canada are related. The chart is a mess because these transphobes are highly interconnected:
While there are hundreds of thousands of trans or gender non-conforming people in Canada, it only takes a handful of cisgender individuals to harass people at Pride parades, fill newspapers with transphobic vitriol, and architect an opposition to our rights in Parliament. This handful amplify each other while occupying positions of power furthering the very reach that is denied to the hundreds of thousands of voices they lobby against.
In such a ecosystem, it becomes very easy for a previously unknown person with views that are marketable by these anti-trans advocates to be amplified and in turn be made an amplifier. This is what happened with Lindsay Shepherd, whose only involvement was that she was a T/A that was reprimanded by her university administrators for showing without context a transphobic exchange featuring Jordan Peterson, another member of this ecosystem. The National Post wrote 29 articles supporting Lindsay Shepherd from authors like Barbara Kay and her son Jonathan Kay. Now Lindsay Shepherd an author with the National Post, is an author with The Post Millennial (Barbara Kay is a contributor there), is a fellow with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (Barbara Kay is on the boards of directors there), is a writer at Quillette (Jonathan Kay is an editor there). Shepherd promotes other members of this ecosystem like Meghan Murphy in her work. This past fall Jonathan Kay and Meghan Murphy were on a panel together moderated by Lindsay Shepherd named “How Media Bias Shapes the Gender Identity Debate“. The self-amplification is constant.
It is frustrating that a handful of cisgender people are able to have such a disproportionate influence in shaping the dialog around the rights of hundreds of thousands of trans and gender non-conforming individuals. On the outset, they appear to be independent voices representing many more, when in reality, they’re only representing each other.
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.“
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I recited the following at our 5 pm church service, which brings in a different guest to speak every week. The lectionary reading that day was Luke 20:27-38.
One of the things that I like about coming to a church like ours is hearing people’s stories. Every one of you has something to share. Stories are important. I’ve seen them subdue the impulse to ridicule, fear, and avoid those who’ve had a different life journey.
No one is owed stories. If sharing a story requires vulnerability from the speaker, then the recipients too must demonstrate equal care in listening. This has not been the case in a lot of churches when it comes to the stories of women, indigenous members, sexual and gender diverse Christians and/or those who have experienced homelessness. And I would add to that sex workers. Or as we have called them from our readings on Sunday mornings, whores, prostitutes and sexually immoral.
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Christian white supremacy has been part of the fabric of Turtle Island since colonization. The short history of Canada includes the genocide of Indigenous people, concentration camps for those of Japanese descent, and legislated exclusion of those who weren’t white from immigration. This isn’t the distant past; there are many alive today who have been personally impacted by these policies.
Political discourse had been slow to acknowledge these wrongs but in the mid-2010’s there was a return to Christian white supremacy talking points following a global wave of neo-nationalist sentiment. Of note was the Conservative anti-Muslim rhetoric of the 2015 Canadian federal election, the anti-Muslim rhetoric and actions in the campaign and subsequent presidency of Donald Trump, and the implementation of Quebec’s anti-Muslim niqab ban.
The end result has been that more Canadians today have anti-immigrant sentiments than five years ago, that 37% view immigration as a threat to white Canadians, and that 68% of Canadians want a ban on Muslim religious wear. Meanwhile in 2017, a white Canadian murdered six and injured nineteen at a mosque in Quebec City.
Corresponding with this rhetoric has been an explosion of Christian white supremacist groups:
Three political parties have also been formed and are running in the 2019 Canadian federal election:
There was a further entrenchment of Christian white supremacist views in the political discourse when the People’s Party of Canada was invited to the leader’s debate. The official platform for the People’s Party of Canada states that they would:
Founding party members include a former leader of a Neo-Nazi group, a former member of Soldiers of Odin, and a Pegida Canada official. The party’s leader, Maxime Bernier, has also been promoting anti-Muslim conspiracy theories about “infiltration”, defended posing for photos with members of the ultra-nationalist Northern Guard, and refused to denounce the Islamophobic attack that killed fifty-one worshipers at a mosque in Christchurch.
The decision to give the People’s Party a seat at the nationally aired debates will by association normalize the racist, Islamophobic and transphobic views espoused by the party. This will increase the number of violent acts against the targeted communities.
It was a mistake to invite the People’s Party to the leader’s debate. What I want to examine in this article is why this outcome was deemed acceptable in the first place.
One way of conceptualizing the mechanics of prejudice is with the following pyramid:
In this model each layer enables the layer above it; the more widespread the acts in one layer, the greater the likelihood of acts in the layer above. There’s also a point in time in which each layer becomes socially unacceptable.
It’s arguable where each political party stands in this pyramid, although all are represented. What I can say with certainty is that Christian white supremacist groups dabble in the upper two tranches, and their contemporaries on the political side seem to be vying for the layer below. That said, the ultimate political aspirations of the nationalist parties is quite clear: the elimination of visible Muslims and trans people from Canada.
There exists an opportunity right now to curtail the spread of these views. This would require the Leaders’ Debate Commission and media organisations to decline giving white supremacists a platform and lend credibility to their views. The People’s Party is still relatively obscure, the project of a Conservative defector following a failed leadership bid. It has no seats in Parliament. If mainstream organisations keep breathing life into these views, however, there runs the risk of the People’s Party becoming too big to ignore.
Yet organizations have chosen to support the People’s Party. I posit that this is for reasons related to perception: the image of Maxime Bernier and the appearance of fairness.
Let’s start with Maxime Bernier. The imagery disseminated of him is largely indistinguishable from that of the leaders of mainline parties. Contrast that with the visuals of the leader for the Nationalist Party which is more aligned with what white people imagine a white supremacist to look like.
When Maxime Bernier is interviewed on television, he has a calm disposition, his tone is soft, he is jovial, and affirms his points using language familiar to mainline politicians. He appears respectable.
That leads to the perception of fairness. The decision to invite Bernier to the national debate stage was at the discretion of the Leaders’ Debates Commission. They said that it was based on 30% of constituents in two electoral ridings stating they were considering voting for the People’s Party, enough for the party to potentially win a seat. I speculate that the number was this high among constituents because unlike leaders of other fringe parties Bernier appears respectable. I suspect that the Leader’s Debate Commission then decided upon this outcome for the same reason. This was subsequently framed in the media as a fair decision.
I argue that this respectability and fairness is based on an incomplete picture rooted in white Christian sensibilities. If those were expanded to be inclusive of Muslim and trans viewpoints, I don’t believe that Maxime Bernier and the People’s Party would appear respectful. His candidates are openly harassing Muslim Canadians and members of the 2SLGBTQ community. They are unabashedly racist. His own rhetoric peddles in fear mongering and conspiracies.
In the end, saying things with a smile goes a long way towards legitimizing what’s uttered with those who aren’t targeted by the thinly-veiled vitriol. Mainstream organisations that provide a platforms already vet their invitees based on perceptions of respectability as they don’t wish to place their own organisation in disrepute. These organisations must be representative of more than white Christian viewpoints when making such judgments, or they inadvertently become amplifiers of this Christian white supremacy.