I kind of need to know now, what the fuck is going on in Ontario with their interpretation of Human Rights and Discrimination. What I do know is that we do not solve present day discrimination by race, by MORE discrimination by race. This bizarre Kafkaesque excerpt from the C2C website.
On November 10, 2022 – lightning fast by HRTO standards – I heard from the Tribunal again. It was a brief but formal Decision that reasserted the SummerUp program’s legality and ended with an Order declaring, “The Application is dismissed.” In her decision, adjudicator Eva Nichols took issue, again, with the idea that I had a right to bring forward such a case when I had not “faced any form of discrimination on a protected ground” and because I had confirmed I was not bringing the application forward on behalf of another person, namely my son.
But it was the Decision’s Kafkaesque mental process that stood out. Nichols pointed out that “colour and race are among the protected grounds” under which discrimination is prohibited. But, she wrote, “They are not terms that are defined in the Code.”
“No fixed definition”: The HRTO now holds that race is a “social construct” that can be based on mutable characteristics from beliefs and manner of speech to clothing, diet and leisure preferences – things long considered stereotypes.
Instead, the OHRC “offers the following definitions in its Policy and guidelines on racism and racial discrimination…The Commission has explained ‘race’ as socially constructed differences among people based on characteristics such as accent or manner of speech, name, clothing, diet, beliefs and practices, leisure preferences, places of origin and so forth…Recognizing that race is a social construct, the Commission describes people as ‘racialized person’ or ‘racialized group’ instead of the more outdated and inaccurate terms ‘racial minority,’ ‘visible minority,’ ‘person of colour’ or ‘non-White.’ There is no fixed definition of racial discrimination… [emphasis added].”
So race is a legal grounds on which discrimination is prohibited. But it has no definition – and in fact can be based on things like what we eat or what we do for fun. In other words, on racial stereotypes the use of which, in the not so distant past, would themselves have been considered outrageously racist. Nor is there a definition of racial discrimination per se. The Tribunal’s decision did, however, specify one thing racial discrimination can’t be: “[19] It is important to note in the Tribunal’s jurisprudence that an allegation of racial discrimination or discrimination on the grounds of colour is not one that can be or has been successfully claimed by persons who are white and non-racialized [emphasis added].”
In other words, according to the Tribunal, white people cannot be discriminated against on the basis of their whiteness. (It’s not true, however, that such a claim has never succeeded. A group of white employees in B.C. not only won their case against that province’s Human Rights Tribunal but also successfully defended their claim in court that they were unjustly fired due to their “wrong” race.)
The belief that white people cannot suffer discrimination because they are white is not only held by the HRTO, but is often expressed in the media and by activists. (Source of right photo: alecperkins, licensed under CC BY 2.0)
It’s difficult to grasp which of the two major elements of the HRTO’s decision is more troubling: that blatant acts of discrimination are excused, and in fact are not even considered worthy of consideration if the person discriminated against is white, or that the OHRC is redefining race and racism as based on “social constructs” – habits and practices, like clothing and leisure preferences, that long were considered stereotypes.
The majority of the studies on the “transgender brain” have a fatal flaw: they didn’t control for confounding variables like cross-sex hormone use and, most importantly, sexual orientation. When a study doesn’t control for confounding variables, it means that the researchers did not take into account other factors that could have affected the results of the study, which make it difficult or impossible to determine whether the relationship between the two variables being studied is truly causal or a byproduct of other unrelated factors.
Cross-sex hormone use can have effects on the brain, including changes in brain structure and function. But more importantly, many trans-identifying individuals are same-sex attracted, so the research on the “transgender brain” claiming to find structural regions that resemble the opposite sex are essentially rediscovering findings on the “gay brain” and reinterpreting the results to fit their preferred conclusion.
In the early nineties, neuroscientist and author Simon LeVay made the breakthrough discovery that the brains of homosexuals had structural differences that resembled that of straight members of the opposite sex. So it seems that while undertaking the hunt for the “transgender brain,” researchers have forgotten all about the discoveries made about the brains of same-sex attracted people.
The first “brain sex” study that did take into account the participants’ sexual orientation found that the brains of transgender individuals were similar to those of people of the same birth sex rather than the opposite sex.
When researchers scan the brains of heterosexual people who identify as transgender, they also find they are typical for their natal sex. Samuel Stagg, a U.K.-based Ph.D. student of neuroimmunology, explains: “The homosexual sub-group show brains skewed along the male-female dimension. However, this is predominantly due to their co-occurring homosexuality. When we scan the brains of the heterosexual type, we find they are more typical for their natal sex.”
“Gender identity” not gender dysphoria
Gender dysphoria, like other psychiatric conditions, may have some biological underpinnings. There are traits like neuroticism that can predispose people to psychiatric conditions and research suggests that neuroticism has a strong biological basis with both genetic and environmental factors contributing to its development.
But gender activists are not concerned with gender dysphoria, rather they aim to establish a biological basis for being transgender that ceases to categorize it as a mental illness. Activists have pushed for a more “inclusive” definition of what it means to be transgender that seeks to reduce stigma and perceived barriers to medical transition services.
After the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015, civil rights and gay rights organizations that may have otherwise had to shutter their doors pivoted to championing “trans rights.” The success of the “born this way” campaign in promoting the idea that sexual orientation is an innate, immutable aspect of identity has prompted activists to also present being transgender as innate and immutable.
Manhattan Institute fellow Leor Sapir wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the rapid proliferation of the “transgender rights movement” and its efforts to obtain civil rights jurisprudence for “gender identity.” To this end, they have attempted to prove that “gender identity” is an innate, immutable trait called “neurological sex” or “brain sex,” which they say should override natal sex.
“In the American civil rights tradition, if you can convince a judge that being transgender is like being black, then you can tap into this entire body of judicial precedent and civil rights laws that immediately applies and gives you all the policies you want,” Sapir told me. Leor Sapir has written a number of important articles on this topic for City Journal, be sure to read them for further understanding.
Well if your anxiety plate was not already full, how about a machine driven take over of the world? Unlikely, but yet another dystopian vision of the future that we humans could potentially realize. Yay Us!
“And of course, that’s almost the good news when, with our present all-too-Trumpian world in mind, you begin to think about how Artificial Intelligence might make political and social fools of us all. Given that I’m anything but one of the better-informed people when it comes to AI (though on Less Than Artificial Intelligence I would claim to know a fair amount more), I’m relieved not to be alone in my fears.
In fact, among those who have spoken out fearfully on the subject is the man known as “the godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. He only recently quit his job at Google to express his fears about where we might indeed be heading, artificially speaking. As he told the New York Times recently, “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that, but most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Now, he fears not just the coming of killer robots beyond human control but, as he told Geoff Bennett of the PBS NewsHour, “the risk of super intelligent AI taking over control from people… I think it’s an area in which we can actually have international collaboration, because the machines taking over is a threat for everybody. It’s a threat for the Chinese and for the Americans and for the Europeans, just like a global nuclear war was.”
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