Canada

It was like something out of an old Hollywood film. The mysterious leading man finally makes his move on the damsel, and the two embrace in a passionate kiss. The viral news smackaroo between an Irish lad, Jack Ring, and a young Canadian girl, Gillian McKeown, was distinctly modern but contained all of the elements of a classic romance. The scene unfolded as McKeown walked her dog through a park, not unlike Holly Golightly searching for her lost ‘cat’ in the rain. Ring approached McKeown as she was being interviewed by a local news outlet about coronavirus, clasped her head with both hands, and planted a wet one right on her mouth.

Racism was conquered today in Canada. After Vancouver-based Lululemon art director Trevor Fleming linked to a t-shirt design by California artist Jess Sluder, called ‘bat fried rice’, brave internet warriors took action, accusing the company responsible for turning yoga pants into streetwear of ‘insulting China’. The long-sleeved t-shirt showed an image of a pair of chopsticks with bat wings on the front and a Chinese takeout box with bat wings on the back, with the words, ‘No thank you’. On his website, Sluder was offering the shirt for $60, adding, ‘Where did COVID-19 come from? Nothing is certain, but we know a bat was involved. This quarantine offers a friendly reminder to avoid foods containing this nocturnal beast.

Some men, the saying goes, have to get married to grow up. So it has proven for HRH Prince Henry Charles Albert David. In the year and a half since marrying the actress, lifestyle blogger and (I’m just assuming) activist Meghan Markle, Harry has indeed left childish things behind. With the help of his wife, the reckless and rugged prince of a few years ago has swapped boozy evenings and weekends of naked billiards in Las Vegas for woke cupcakes and expensive home refurbishments.

Whoops! Turns out men are not women after all. Over a year after a man then-named Jonathan Yaniv filed multiple complaints against British Columbia estheticians who declined to wax his balls, the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has ruled against the now-named ‘Jessica.’ Back in August 2018, Yaniv told Canadian media he had been discriminated against based on ‘gender identity.’ In reality, the female estheticians he approached simply didn’t feel comfortable touching a man’s genitals.

This week, three Canadian writers launched a petition demanding the Toronto Public Library cancel a room rental for a sold-out event, ‘Gender Identity: What Does It Mean for Society, the Law, and Women?’ Sounds frightening, I know.The local women organizing the event, a group called Radical Feminists Unite, asked me in June if they could bring me to Toronto to speak about gender identity legislation and women’s rights, unhappy that the debate was not being given space in their city. This is not an uncommon sentiment. The events I have been asked to participate in generally have been organized by regular women who have serious concerns about how gender identity ideology and policy could affect, and already is affecting, women’s sex-based rights.

A photograph has been uncovered by TIME magazine which shows the Canadian prime minister attending an 'Arabian Nights'-themed costume gala at the West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver in 2001. Since the photograph came to light, Mr Trudeau has apologized. In a televised news conference on his campaign aircraft, he said: 'I take responsibility for my decision to do that. I shouldn't have done it. I should have known better. It was something that I didn't think was racist at the time, but now I recognize it was something racist to do and I am deeply sorry.' At the time the photograph was taken, Mr Trudeau was a 29-year-old teacher at the academy.

Dramatic accusations of ‘doxxing’ online annoy me no end. It may seem like a petty complaint to rail on about, but as a devoted fan of communicating in coherent ways, I continually insist that words mean things and that we use said words as accurately as possible. Today’s postmodern youth claim that disagreement is violence, men who enjoy femininity are literal females, and the reading of words that challenge their preferred narrative causes PTSD. But our dictionaries have not yet been burned, and so many of us know better.

In some ways, Jessica/Jonathan Yaniv is the most perfect gift. Not even Titania McGrath could have dreamed up a more effective character to demonstrate the dangers of gender identity ideology. Unbelievably, though, Yaniv is real. And the truth is that we could have predicted his story. In fact, we did. Until last week, Yaniv could only be referred to by the initials, ‘JY.’ A member of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, Devyn Cousineau, had determined that, as a ‘transgender woman,’ Yaniv would be vulnerable to threats and harassment identity were his ‘identity… published in connection with these complaints.’ Ironically, it is Yaniv who has been revealed as the perpetrator of harassment.

Refusing to wax a woman’s balls is transphobia at its most blatant… and yet here we are, in 2019, still disrespecting trans women’s rights by denying them a smooth nutsack. I’m referring of course to the recent publicity surrounding Jessica Yaniv, a stunning and brave trans woman who has filed complaints against more than a dozen female waxers with the Human Rights Council in British Columbia. And what is the justification these women have attempted to make in order to disguise their obvious bigotry?

I woke up this morning to a private message on Twitter from a young student. She had been warned that her account would be suspended if she ‘violated the rules’ again. Her crime? Tweeting details of Sheila Jeffreys’s book, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism. Refusing to accept the mantra ‘Trans women are women’ is, in the eyes of many now, a crime, for which there must be punishment. Everyone from massive corporate social media machines to well-meaning liberals seem to be toeing the line. But some of us resist. Meghan Murphy for example, a Vancouver-based feminist journalist, has been permanently banned from Twitter for referring to a man who identifies as a woman as a man.