Meghan Murphy

Do you find yourself uninterested in jumping random men at your local coffee shop? Have you ever become interested in a person after getting to know them? Do you like to have a conversation with a person before ripping off all your clothes and showing them your most intimate body parts? Maybe even several conversations? Does the idea of having a strange dick in your mouth give you the yucks? Congratulations — you are completely normal. Which is, apparently, the worst thing to be in this day and age. So much so that the notion that one would form romantic connections after, not before, getting to know a person has been given its own special category on the LGBTQI&%$! spectrum. That’s right, your completely healthy behavior makes you a 'demisexual'.

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.

When I was 13, I wore my dad’s clothes to school every day. Men’s overalls, stinky old t-shirts, a flannel shirt tied around my waist...sometimes Dr Martens, sometimes too-big combat boots. If I was feeling bold, I’d ignore my insecurities about my bony knees and skinny legs and wear a skirt and tights with my unisex boots. It was called 'grunge.' No one ever thought of it as 'gender bending': it was just what we wore. Apparently, those of us who came of age in the Nineties, smoking on the corner instead of going to class, our second-hand itchy wool sweaters soaking up the stench of rain and cigarettes, were revolutionaries. This week, the New York Times, one of the world’s most-respected sources of journalism (or so they'll tell you), published a story about 'nonbinary fashion.

Apparently, there are still a few people left who did not get the memo about wrongthink. After Twitter dredged up an interview Mario Lopez did with conservative personality Candace Owens in June, he was promptly schooled: it is 2019, after all, and no longer acceptable to ask questions about transgender doctrine. In response to Owens’s comments about the ‘weird trend’ wherein celebrities believe their kids have the ‘mental authority’ to ‘pick their gender’, Lopez agreed, saying he was ‘blown away, too.’ The actor and host of Extra added that he thought it was ‘dangerous as a parent’ to accept a three-year-old’s announcement that they are the opposite sex as concrete fact.

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.