Dead Wild Roses

I have been called “Maple MAGA.”

It is a silly phrase, but not an innocent one. Imported American static with a Canadian toque pulled over it, the label works less as description than as sorting device: once attached, it tells the room what to do with the person before anyone has to answer what he said. That is its usefulness.

The charge, as far as I can tell, is not that I am secretly American, or that I want Donald Trump to annex the Prairies, or that I am pining for red hats on Parliament Hill. It is not that I support theocracy, oppose women’s education, or want priests running the courts.

The charge is simpler. I keep saying things that no longer sit comfortably inside the approved progressive frame.

I defend freedom of expression, especially when the expression is rude, inconvenient, unfashionable, or badly timed. I think women and girls have sex-based rights that cannot be wished away by therapeutic language. I think female prisons should be for female prisoners. I think children should not be hurried into irreversible medical pathways to satisfy adult ideology. I think citizens should be free to read, think, doubt, argue, dissent, and change their minds without the state, the school board, the professional college, or the HR department treating their inner life as a compliance problem.

Apparently, this is enough now: not enough to make one wrong, which would require an argument; not enough to make one dangerous, which would require evidence; but enough to make one “far right,” “MAGA,” “reactionary,” “unsafe,” or whatever label is currently doing the work reasons used to do.

The insult is the visible part. Underneath it sits the relocation of the acceptable centre.

Cultures move. Language changes. Laws change. Public taste changes. Some changes are good and overdue; some are foolish; some begin as compassion and harden into coercion. There is nothing sacred about yesterday’s vocabulary merely because it is yesterday’s vocabulary, but cultural movement does not move reality.

That distinction is now being blurred. It is one thing for a society to change how it talks about sex, gender, identity, offence, harm, safety, and inclusion. It is another thing to pretend the underlying truths have changed because the approved language has changed.

A male body in a female prison does not become a female body because a policy manual has been updated. A teenage girl’s distress about her body does not become simple proof of a medical destiny because a professional association has learned a new script. A citizen’s refusal to repeat an ideological formula does not become hatred because an HR department calls the formula kindness.

The culture can change what is rewarded, what is punished, who gets invited to speak, who gets reported, who gets promoted, who gets quietly avoided, and who gets labelled a problem; it cannot change the truth.

Female prisons make the point concrete because, for most of living memory, saying that female prisons should be for female prisoners was not a right-wing position. It was barely a position at all. It sat in the background with other obvious assumptions: women’s shelters are for women, women’s sports are for women, and sex matters most in the places where privacy, vulnerability, male violence, and bodily difference are not abstractions.

“There is nothing sacred about yesterday’s vocabulary merely because it is yesterday’s vocabulary, but cultural movement does not move reality.”

Prisons are coercive institutions. Women inside them cannot simply leave, choose their neighbours, or opt out of policy experiments designed by people outside the walls. The state therefore has a heightened duty of care. Sex matters there; it matters when privacy is stripped away, when physical power is uneven, when trauma is common, and when the people affected have no meaningful escape route.

Yet once the vocabulary changes, the old safeguarding claim can be redescribed as extremism. Not because women became less vulnerable in prison, male-pattern violence disappeared, or sex stopped mattering in confined spaces; the argument is recoded because the permitted moral language changed around it.

This is the trick: move the official language, then treat unchanged reality as if it has been morally superseded.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. Free expression becomes “harm.” Privacy becomes “suspicion.” Doubt becomes “denial.” Genuine distress in young people is real, and compassion for it is necessary; but caution in youth medicine is not cruelty, and weak evidence does not become strong because the approved language insists it must. Refusing compelled belief becomes bigotry. The old liberal question — “Is this true, and may I say so?” — is replaced by a managerial one: “Does this comply with the approved moral vocabulary?”

There is a Gramscian flavour here. Gramsci understood something real about modern power: it does not operate only through police, courts, elections, and parliaments. It operates through culture; through schools, media, churches, universities, publishers, artists, professional bodies, and the people who teach society what respectable people are supposed to think.

Durable victory requires more than capturing the state; it requires shaping common sense. That is the part that feels familiar now: a workshop here, a policy update there, a glossary, a training module, a revised professional standard, a grant condition, a reputational warning. No jackboots required. Just enough pressure to teach ordinary people which sentences now come with consequences.

Most people understand the lesson. They have jobs, families, colleagues, reputations, mortgages, volunteer roles, and professional obligations. They do not want to be called hateful, unsafe, extremist, bigoted, MAGA, or far right; they do not want to become the example everyone else is warned about. So they move, or they fall silent.

Then comes the strange inversion. People who have not changed their minds are told they have moved to the far right. The old centre is renamed after the fact; positions that were once liberal, feminist, or civil-libertarian are reclassified as dangerous because the institutions around them have adopted a new script. The people did not move so much as find the centre moved around them.

That is why “Maple MAGA” is such a convenient little insult. It imports the emotional charge of American polarization and drops it onto Canadian disagreement. It lets the speaker skip the local argument: no need to examine the claim, no need to ask whether an older feminist concern might still be true, no need to wonder whether a civil-libertarian objection might have merit. The label supplies the answer before the question is allowed to form.

“Once that habit takes hold, precision disappears. These words become atmospheric; they create suspicion, not understanding, and suspicion is often all that is needed.”

This is especially poisonous in Canada, where we already borrow too many American reflexes. We take American slogans, American moral panics, American partisan categories, American racial scripts, American activist vocabulary, and American media obsessions, then pretend they map cleanly onto Canadian life. Usually they do not; but they are emotionally efficient, and that is often enough.

Once that habit takes hold, precision disappears. “MAGA” no longer means a specific American political movement. “Far right” no longer means a coherent political position. “Unsafe” no longer means a demonstrated danger. These words become atmospheric; they create suspicion, not understanding, and suspicion is often all that is needed.

A person does not have to be refuted if he has already been made socially radioactive. His argument does not have to be answered if the room has been taught to flinch before hearing it. That is the quiet power of these labels: they replace disagreement with contamination.

A free society cannot keep doing that and remain free in any serious sense. It cannot function if disagreement is treated as pollution, cannot remain liberal if every objection is recoded as harm, and cannot reason together if words are used to end thought rather than sharpen it.

Some people really are extremists. Some movements really are dangerous. Some ideas really do deserve fierce opposition; there is no virtue in pretending otherwise. But when the label comes before the argument, the argument never happens. Civic life begins to rot not when people disagree, but when they lose the habit of believing disagreement deserves an answer.

So no, I am not especially interested in proving that I am not “Maple MAGA.” The phrase is too silly to deserve that much respect. I am interested in why so many people now reach for labels instead of reasons: how free expression became suspect, how female rights became reactionary, how cognitive liberty became dangerous, and how ordinary citizens were told that standing still meant they had somehow moved to the far right.

The institutions moved the language, then pretended they had moved reality.

That is the lie at the centre of the whole exercise.

References / Further Reading

Correctional Service Canada — Commissioner’s Directive 100: Gender Diverse Offenders
Canada’s federal correctional policy on gender-diverse offenders, including placement according to gender identity or expression.

UK Ministry of Justice — New Transgender Prisoner Policy Comes Into Force
The 2023 England and Wales policy restricting placement of some transgender-identifying males in women’s prisons.

The Cass Review — Final Report
The 2024 independent review of gender identity services for children and young people in England, especially useful for the essay’s caution-in-youth-medicine point.

Ipsos Canada — Strong Majority of Canadians Continue to Support 2SLGBT+ Rights and Visibility
Useful public-opinion context showing broad support for LGBT rights alongside lower support for gender-identity-based rules in women’s sport.