In a Canadian media industry that regularly lauds itself for courageous truth-telling, the goal is now to hide one’s true opinion rather than declare it.
“And so the range of permissible opinion shrinks daily. Many columns now read as if they were stitched together from the same few dozen bromides that one is still allowed to say. In a Canadian media industry that regularly lauds itself for courageous truth-telling, the goal is now to hide one’s true opinion rather than declare it.
[...] Since the early 2000s, journalists have anticipated the demise of their own industry. But we wrongly assumed that this decline would be driven exclusively by economic and technological factors. In recent months especially, it’s become clear that ideological purges have turned a gradual retreat into what now feels like a full-on rout.
[...] We are experiencing a dark period for free thought in Canada. But extremist movements always work in cycles. And one already can hear the gears of counterrevolution grinding into motion.”
The line, which she and others have misattributed to Voltaire, was originally penned to justify criticism of Jews.
“The philosopher Voltaire famously observed, ‘To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize,'” Barbara Kay wrote at the start of a recent column for Montreal-based news site The Post Millennial. “In Voltaire’s day, it was dangerous to criticize the Catholic Church and its dogmas. In our era, it is dangerous to criticize the Church of Gender Identity and its dogmas.”
The following week, the National Post columnist delivered an identical statement in the introduction to her speech at an event concerning the “Bill C-16 Controversy.” She had also shared the Voltairian epigram in an April 2017 tweet, although the context for that was somewhat less clear:
A problem, however: not only is there no evidence of Voltaire having made that statement — there is ample evidence that it originates from an American neo-Nazi, who specifically penned the line to justify criticism of Jews.
The complainant, Sarah Dowling, along with many others, strongly objected to Barbara Kay’s presence on a panel to discuss the change to the sex education curriculum in Ontario.
...The mandate of this office is to assess the CBC programming. Because [Barbara Kay’s] views were so vigorously disputed, there was no violation of CBC journalistic policy in this segment.
Conservatives love to pretend that the CBC is dominated by systemic left-wing bias, but the CBC just ruled that “hurtful” transphobia is acceptable on their platform as long as somebody else argues against it.
75 complaints were received by the CBC regarding Rebel Media contributor Barbara Kay, who refers to transgender people as “body-snatchers” on Twitter and uses neo-Nazi slogans to deflect criticism, and her participation on a CBC News panel. Even Twitter, which is notoriously lax when it comes to enforcing their rules regarding hate speech, forced Kay to delete her tweets. The least the CBC could do here is commit to removing Kay from consideration for future panels, but this response makes it clear that all they care about is their policy to “represent a range of views.”
The apparently neutral phrase, “gender inequality,” is not neutrally understood in our society. It normally conjures up women’s lower numbers in male-dominated corporate directorships and STEM professorships or other high-status domains that are in fact accessible only to a sliver of the male population, never mind the narrower female sliver.
Social scientists allegedly strive for a much more holistic picture, especially when setting nations beside each other for a global assessment of gender inequality. One frequently cited authority is the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), introduced in 2006, and relied on by policy makers worldwide. But a provocative new study, released Jan. 3, takes critical distance from GGGI premises, providing its own set of metrics for analyzing gender inequalities and arriving at some startlingly disparate conclusions.
Entitled “A Simplified Approach to Measuring National Gender Inequality,” authors Gijsbert Stoet from the U.K.’s University of Essex, and David C. Geary from the University of Missouri, contend that the GGGI is unreliable, because it is “biased to highlight women’s issues.” They argue that the GGGI does not measure men’s areas of disadvantage, such as compulsory military service, harsher punishments for the same crime, and workplace deaths — 95 per cent male.
By definition, they say, the GGGI “excludes the possibility that men can be less well off than women – this is because the GGGI focuses on women’s advancement.” As well, they contend that the GGGI uses indicators that are only relevant to elite women, and that the GGGI includes indicators more reflective of choice than of discrimination.
The researchers propose a truly gender-neutral set of metrics for calculating equality scores, named the Basic Index of Gender Inequality (BIGI). BIGI focuses on three factors: educational opportunities (literacy, years of primary and secondary education), healthy life expectancy (years expected to live in good health), and overall life satisfaction which, taken together, are the “minimum ingredients of a good life.”
These metrics can be applied anywhere, regardless of income level, cultural paradigm or national economic development tier. In the words of the study abstract, because of its focus on issues that are important to all men and women in any nation, BIGI “better captures variation in gender inequality than other measures, with inclusion of outcomes that can be favourable or unfavourable to either sex, not simply unfavourable to women.”
Stoet and Geary calculated BIGI scores over five years (2012 through 2016) for 134 nations, representing 6.8 billion people. They relied on GGGI reports published by the World Economic Forum and the Gallup World Poll for data. To their surprise, they found that using the BIGI as a yardstick, men are on average disadvantaged in 91 countries, while women are disadvantaged in 43 countries, most of them economically under-developed. Sometimes the deviations from parity are quite small or even negligible, as for example in the case of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Turkey, China and Switzerland.
Saudi Arabia? Parity? Yes. Because equality between the sexes does not mean men and women are doing equally well, on average, “just that they are more or less equal within their life circumstances.” While women in countries with a poor reputation for gender equality may fall behind men in one area, men may fall behind in another area, cancelling out both scores.
Saudi Arabia is a highly developed nation in which women fall behind in education, but score higher on healthy life expectancy and life satisfaction. This may seem counterintuitive to Western women, but culture, with the expectations it imposes, is a strong determinant of what constitutes “satisfaction.” A Saudi wife in a polygynous marriage to a wealthy husband might find life quite satisfying, while a poor Saudi man with almost no marriage prospects at all may find life quite unsatisfying.
Canada’s figures put it amongst the countries with a slight female advantage. Feminists may not be delighted to hear this. But given the BIGI metrics, it makes sense.
Canadian women’s life expectancy is seven years longer than men’s. Men’s health in Canada is on average poorer than women’s. They are more prone to alcoholism and drug abuse, and more vulnerable to violence. Male suicide rates are considerably higher, especially during Family Court battles, where women are greatly advantaged (and which causes great life dissatisfaction in fathers). Canadian men are nine times more likely than women to be imprisoned. They perpetrate more crimes, to be sure, but they also receive harsher sentences for the same crimes, even when committing the same crime in tandem. Men constitute about 85 per cent of homeless adults. Canadian men show higher dropout rates at every level from primary school to university. Canadian women own a disproportionate share of private wealth. (I could go on.)
This is an important study, not nearly as simplistic as it may seem in this reductive summary, and worth reading — without gender bias if possible — before judging.
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The Global Gender Gap Index is one of the best-known measures of national gender inequality, used by both academics and policy makers. We ar
Abstract
The Global Gender Gap Index is one of the best-known measures of national gender inequality, used by both academics and policy makers. We argue that that this measure has a number of problems and introduce a simpler measure of national levels of gender inequality. Our proposed measure is based on sex differences in the opportunity to lead a long healthy and satisfied life that is grounded on educational opportunities. The measure better captures variation in gender inequality than other measures, with inclusion of outcomes that can be favorable or unfavorable to either sex, not simply unfavorable to women. We focus on some of the most basic measures available for 134 countries from 2012–2016 (i.e., disadvantages in children’s basic education, life satisfaction, and healthy life span) and we relate these to various measures, including the United Nations' Human Development Index. We found that low levels of human development are typically associated with disadvantages for girls and women, while medium and high levels of development are typically associated with disadvantages for boys and men. Countries with the highest levels of human development are closest to gender parity, albeit typically with a slight advantage for women. We argue that the disparities, when they are found, are related to the sexual division of labor (i.e., traditional gender roles) in poorly developed countries as well as the underinvestment in preventative health care in more developed nations.
The radical gender theorists see a potential holy child in every crib.
By: Barbara Kay
Published: Sep 16, 2022
Billions of people believe in reincarnation. I can see that if one lived in a society where this belief was the norm, it would make perfect sense, a year or two after the spiritual leader of this vast community died, to assume the new leader might well be a toddler—“assigned at birth” as ordinary—but who was in fact hiding in plain sight as the reincarnated new leader.
That’s how it works for Tibetan Buddhists. A state oracle is consulted to guide the search party to the most likely district. They visit many homes. Once they get a strong vibe about a particular child, they present him with possessions from the former Dalai Lama, along with other unrelated objects. If the boy chooses the non-sacred objects to play with, he is ruled out as the former leader’s reincarnation. If he chooses the former Dalai Lama’s possessions, his world is turned upside down.
He is immediately removed from his parents’ home and set on his lifetime journey, segregated from the people and experiences he would otherwise have known. His parents may be saddened by this transfer of guardianship, but they are compensated for it by the honour and reverence their new status in their community bestows on them. Imagine—if you’re a believer—the thrill of having produced this holy child without realizing his uniqueness until “searchers” proclaimed it through their simple but infallible test.
On the other hand, if you happen not to believe in reincarnation, you don’t consider the child innately holy at all, but simply a victim of circumstances set in motion by a mere coincidence.
And furthermore, if you don’t believe in reincarnation, and you live in a culture formed under the (once) liberal rubrics of rationality, logic, and respect for individual rights, including children’s rights, you would be distressed by, rather than admiring of, any parents who handed their child over to the high priests of a belief system grounded in superstition.
I’m sure you can see where I am going here. So let’s say goodbye to the real Dalai Lama, and turn our attention to today’s myriad pseudo-Dalai Lamas, holy children, and their proud parents who constitute the faithful flock in a belief system that deserves exactly the same degree of intellectual respect as the theory of reincarnation—radical gender theory.
These “True Believer” parents are not only willing to turn their children over to the holiness “searchers” on the flimsiest of alleged signals of their child’s special aura, but they bruit their pride in doing so, and then bask in the sunshine of the honours heaped on them by their fellow “village” believers.
A case in point: Noella McMaher, a boy who identifies as a girl and was socially transitioned at the age of four, is now ten years old and reportedly the world’s “youngest transgender model.” By an amazing coincidence, Noella’s biological mother identifies as transgender and has a transgender spouse. According to Noella’s mother, Dee McMaher, the child knew he was meant to be a girl at two years old. Dee accordingly treated and dressed Noella as a girl and “apparently has plans for surgery when Noella turns 16.”
Dee told Forbes magazine in February: “At two years old, she started telling us she wasn’t a boy. At four and a half, she socially transitioned and at seven she legally transitioned.” Since then, Noella has become a seasoned runway performer.
Sure, it’s possible that Noella McMaher actually has gender dysphoria, and whatever she was “telling” her mother at age two coincided with reality, just as it is possible that every Dalai Lama chosen actually is the reincarnation of the former one. But based on what we actually know about children and their tender-age development, the odds are that Noella was going through a meaningless phase that his mother zapped into permanence by “affirming” and reinforcing the child’s perceived disparity between their psychology and anatomy. The Dalai Lama seems happy and serene. Maybe that’s his personality type, and he would have been a happy and serene farmer, husband and father. We’ll never know.
At least the Dalai Lama has led a physically healthy life. Who but a true believer in radical gender theory actually looks hopefully for signs that her child is destined for an identity that requires permanent dependence on drugs, sacrifice of sexual pleasure and fertility, and in this case a strong possibility of extreme, high-risk body modification?
Rather than simply judge Noella’s mother as a conduit for child abuse, which I believe she is, I’m more concerned for polemical reasons to know how she came to the understanding that, at the age of two, her child “started telling us she wasn’t a boy.” What does she mean by that? Did the child show an interest in dolls? Did he show a preference for the gender equivalent of the former Dalai Lama’s “real possessions”?
Where, any rational person must wonder, did the mother get the idea that any behaviour whatsoever at the age of two is a reliable predictor, worth taking drastic, life-altering action on, of a permanent, authentic identity that is completely at odds with his corporeal being?
She got the idea the same way as the parents of the Dalai Lama: from spiritual authority figures she was conditioned to trust. In the case of Ms McMaher, it is possible, even likely, that Dee McMaher has been exposed to the theories of “oracle” clinical and developmental psychologist Diane Ehrensaft, and author of The Gender Creative Child. Ehrensaft is one of the most influential voices in the pediatric transgender movement, yet her train of thinking on children and gender is so risibly anti-logical that she makes the searchers for the Dalai Lama look like Aristotelian geniuses.
My introduction to Ehrensaft came through a video of her presentation to 400 attendees at an all-day 2016 conference and continuing-education event in Santa Cruz in Feb, 2016. This presentation has been referenced many times by critics of radical gender theory. But it bears any amount of reinforcement, because what she says in it is the ne plus ultra of radical gender crazy. It’s voodoo psychology, but representative of the nonsense at the heart of this child-sacrificial belief system, so it really does need to be seen to be believed by the widest possible audience.
Ehrensaft is contemptuous of the “watchful waiting” school of thought in treating gender non-conforming children. A leading light in the affirmation model, her motto is “listen and act.” Ehrensaft is aware, and admits she is aware, that most children will outgrow their gender confusion in time. And yet, when asked in the Q and A following her presentation how one might know if a child is transgender when he or she is “pre-verbal,” here is her answer (starting at 2:06:08):
[Preverbal children] are very action oriented. This is where mirroring is really important. And listening to actions. ..
They can show you about what they want to play with…and if they feel uncomfortable about how you are responding to them and their gender… if you’re misgendering them. So you look for those kinds of actions….like tearing a skirt off. …There was one on that Barbara Walters special, this child wore the little onesie with the snap-ups between the legs. And at age one would unsnap them to make a dress, so the dress would flow. This is a child who was assigned male. That’s a communication, a pre-verbal communication about gender…. And children will know [they are transgender] by the second year of life…they probably know before that but that’s pre-pre verbal.
“ … TO make a dress, SO the dress would flow.”
With no evidence, she is connecting the baby’s action to a gendered motive. That’s her premise. You could put a onesie on a baby monkey, and it might unsnap the snap-ups. Would there be a motive in that case, or would the monkey be randomly playing with whatever his paws could reach? Her premise is crazy, right? So when she made these statements, I waited for audience laughter. But it was not forthcoming. When the camera panned the room, I saw thoughtful faces, nodding with pursed lips.
These were educated people. What had happened to their brains?
A baby is not aware until the age of seven months that he exists as a separate entity apart from his mother. And yet we are expected to believe that a mere five months later he not only knows he is separate, but he also knows he has something called a “gender” that is related to, but vastly different from, the little knobbly thing between his legs. Innately, we are to believe, the child realizes he should not have this funny little protuberance, but rather he should have nothing there. More than that, he also knows at the age of 12 months—according to the “onesie” snapper example—that the “gender” he belongs to wants to wear a garment that “flows.”
Of course, knowing this would also mean knowing that he lives in North America, and not, for example, in Saudi Arabia, where it is common for males to wear a flowing garment called a thawb. Or Pakistan, where both males and females wear the same pants-and-top combo called the Shalwar Kameeez.
So really, what a clever little tyke that was featured on that Barbara Walters special! And how lucky he is to be born in the age of snap-close onesies, instead of when I was born and there were only buttons that no infant could undo. He knows what his sex is, he knows it is different from his gender, he knows he would prefer to look like the opposite sex (whatever that is), even though at this stage of life only his genitals distinguish him from the opposite sex, and he has likely never seen any genitals but his own (and he hasn’t exactly “seen” them either). And of course he also knows that sartorial gender customs in his culture differ from cultures elsewhere. All this long before he knows what a toilet is for. And all this information he conveyed to his parents by unsnapping his onesie.
Sheesh, maybe this kid is the next Dalai Lama!
How is it that not a single person in that hall of 400 people stood up and yelled, “WTF?” I assume they were all reasonably well-educated people. Were they hypnotized? I realize it’s asking a lot to be the one person to stand up and tell the emperor he is naked, but how come there weren’t at the very least ripples of spontaneous laughter, or strong murmurings as a bunch of attendees turned to their neighbours and asked, “Is she kidding or for real?” and “I can’t believe I paid good money for this conference,” and “Beam me up, Scottie, this planet’s inhabitants are making me nervous.”
Is it any wonder, if 400 educated people sat there and listened to this bilge with furrowed brows and nodding heads, that a less-educated woman such as Dee McMaher might believe it is the most normal thing in the world for a somewhat verbal two-year old toddler (so much more advanced in his understanding of gender than a pre-verbal baby) to know with absolute certainty that he is meant to be a girl and live as a girl and then as a woman forever and ever?
I will say this for the Tibetan Buddhists: they only choose one child every 60 or 70 years to deny a normal life in order to perform the sacred task of spiritual leadership that binds their community in fellowship. But the radical gender theorists’ religion sees a potential Dalai Lama in every crib. Their “oracles” are preaching from a million pulpits, and their “searchers” are coming for your onesie-snapping babies. Please forego the “honour” of handing them over.
Public Jew-baiting is out of control in the United Kingdom and Europe. And in Canada’s big cities, unprecedented displays of anti-Semitism, including physical violence that has been well documented in these pages, has given Jewish-Canadians a taste of the rage that European Jews have faced for decades.
Nobody with eyes to see can press on with the myth that this is a political conflict. The anti-Semitism that lurks behind obsessive Israel-bashing can no longer be credibly passed off as “criticism of Israel.” It’s not about Israel and never was. It’s about those maddening Jews. Wherever they are, they make trouble. What is it with their stubborn insistence on their right to live and flourish in their homeland, when they know they are not wanted there?
Never mind the historical facts surrounding Jews’ indigenous rights, or the painstaking legal journey to national sovereignty (along with other newly minted Middle Eastern countries like Iraq and Syria, both of which have appalling human rights records, but never have their right to exist questioned). Treaties and international law are too dull, nuanced and complex. They take time and effort to understand. It’s very taxing for the brain. Narrative, though, takes no time at all to absorb. Stories of good and evil are simple, unnuanced and satisfyingly emotive.
Or here’s a thought: All this depression and anxiety 'may' come from female ideologues, who as educators and role models: routinely tell girls they can 'be anything' and 'have it all,' which causes anxiety when 'all' fails to emerge, as it almost invariably does; who encourage girls to explore their sexuality without letting emotion get in the way of healthy pleasure, but fail to warn them that promiscuity can leave them feeling sad and empty and humiliated; who valorize abortion, but fail to warn of abortion’s frequent psychological impact; who deplore early commitment, even when a young woman and man happen to be right for each other; who encourage misandry by belittling or ignoring men’s legitimate concerns, or fail to acknowledge men’s legitimate contributions to society; who value career ambitions over motherhood; who confuse girls regarding the difference between being wooing and sexual misconduct; and of course who persuade girls and women that if they are unhappy, the reason never lies within, or from poorly-considered choices, but is always the fault of a 'traditional' male asserting his privilege, or 'social construction' that thwarts their self-realization.
