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The first cropped photo is what activists would like you to see.
The unedited version of the same photo is what pride is at the moment and what they do not want you to see.
There is no pride in ‘liberating’ activities that do not belong in the public sphere.
Be discerning and realize that the current incarnation of Pride shares very little with its roots of gay equality, rights, and marriage. This new pride is very much based on the picture below.
Today’s installment of crazy from the Activist Left.
I was going to explain each of this person’s statements, but then reconsidered. Instead I’ll leave you with this thought. How this point of view works is about constructing an baseless imaginary threat pointing out how oppressive that constructed threat is and then slip in the actual reality of the situation. In this case women (adult human females) need to work and educate themselves and readjust their attitudes to allow men who call themselves women to use their spaces and services and to be recognized as women (because oppression).
Like most queer theory the example above is firmly in the bullshit baffles brains/emotional blackmail zone.
React appropriately. Name it for what it is and reject the queer premise. In this case – men regardless of how they feel about their subjective gender identity can not change their sex and become women. Nothing else needs to be said.
Identity politics sow division and strife within society. We need to revisit the idea that we are all Canadians first and foremost. We come in all different shapes, beliefs, and abilities. Those differences and the acceptance of our actual diversity is what makes Canada a wonderful place to live and prosper.
Josh Denaas writes at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute about the change in activism over the years and how it has become less about gaining acceptance in society more about demanding to be accommodated regardless of the validity of the claim.
“I’m pleased that in 2023 LGBT people can be themselves in public, and that there is zero tolerance for bullying in schools and workplaces. That said, I’m starting to worry that some LGBT people are becoming the new bullies.
Rather than demand that we be free from discrimination, many LGBT activists now demand that people profess allegiance to a highly contested set of ideas about gender and sexuality by wearing the rainbow on their uniforms, hoisting the Pride Progress flag, or sending their children to schools where they’re required to sit through performances by drag queens. The message has shifted from “love is love and everyone is equal” to “you will endorse the most radical viewpoints on sexuality and gender or else.”
This change was captured recently in a viral recording of an Edmonton teacher berating Muslim students for skipping Pride celebrations at school. “We believe in freedom, we believe that people can marry whomever they want,” she said. “That is in the law, and if you don’t think that should be the law, you can’t be Canadian, you don’t belong here.”
People who hold different viewpoints not only belong in Canada, they’re protected by our constitution. In Canada, while people have a right to be treated equally under the law, they also have the right to freedom of religion and conscience, and freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression. These rights are infringed when people are forced to profess or actively support ideas that they don’t believe.
For many, a recent sign that the goalposts had shifted was when National Hockey League goalie James Reimer refused to wear the rainbow symbol because it conflicted with his Christian beliefs. Rather than using this as an opportunity to engage in dialogue to try to understand and possibly change his views, the self-appointed spokespeople for the LGBT community labelled Reimer a bigot and said he should comply or lose his job.
There is no reason to believe Reimer is hateful. He said he wouldn’t wear the rainbow because he doesn’t support an “activity or lifestyle” but that he strongly believes that every person has value and that LGBT people should be welcome in hockey. Reimer did not say that LGBT people should have fewer legal rights or be excluded. Rather, he seemed to be saying that he doesn’t want to endorse gay sex or gay marriage. For many Canadians, these are incorrect or hurtful viewpoints, but the only way to change others’ minds about them is through good-faith dialogue.
Another sign that the goalposts had shifted was when the York Catholic District School Board decided not to raise the Pride Progress flag outside its headquarters. Politicians like New Democratic MPP Kristyn Wong-Tam responded by demanding that flying the flag be mandated at every school. Doug Eyolfson, a former Liberal MP from Manitoba, expressed a common sentiment in a tweet that tied the flag to LGBT suicide rates. “To resist a simple gesture like a Pride flag is hate,” Eyolfson wrote. “It is not ‘a difference of opinion’. It is not ‘religious principle’. It is hate, and it kills young people.”
Refusing to raise the rainbow flag or the Pride Progress flag is not inherently hateful, and it’s hard to believe kids would kill themselves because they don’t see a flag in front of their schools. What’s clear is that raising the flag is not a “simple gesture” for many people from religious backgrounds. To them, it amounts to actively participating in celebrating something that is inconsistent with sincerely held beliefs.
The politicians raising Pride Progress flags at schools, hospitals and police stations claim they are being “inclusive,” but it’s clear that they are making many Canadians feel excluded. When the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board announced Pride celebrations — a week after telling staff that students may not opt out of “2SLGBTQ+ learnings” — more than 40 per cent of kids at nine schools and more than 60 per cent of kids at two others stayed home.”
Keeping the communication going. It is your child’s lifeline to you and the reality you want them to embrace.
“My son hadn’t socially transitioned, he still looked like a boy. By midsummer, his exploratory therapist said that he had a breakthrough. The therapist wasn’t worried about him wanting to medicalize, but he was also not sufficiently aware of the immensity of the ideological brainwashing. He thought my son was too smart to be captured. I was aware though—and I was worried. I knew how many smart kids were captured. But my son seemed happy, entirely unconcerned about being called “sir” on occasion. He was growing into a handsome young man. We didn’t talk about gender ideology. On Sasha Ayad’s advice, gender topics were for him and his therapist to discuss.
Then the too familiar punch in the gut came in the Fall, when he started a part time job and was adored and praised by everyone there—he was still thinking of himself as transgender, and this was not going to change. Ever. He was impatient to socially transition and start taking hormones at 18. On the outside nothing changed. I still saw a happy teen. I had less than 6 months left.
I tried to calm myself with thoughts that this was the often-mentioned Boomerang Effect. My little home-grown, intuition-based “theory”, which I wrote about for PITT, was that The Boomerang Phase was actually The Uncertainty Phase, where teens double down on gender ideology to combat fading conviction and a growing sense of cognitive dissonance. It is a difficult, emotional phase, and probably the phase when they are most easily influenced.
I didn’t know whether my “theory” was correct, but I also felt I had little choice but to push back during this phase. I wasn’t going to stand idly by, watching him being led deeper into the cult by trans influencers. I started to integrate information on the trans ideology into our homeschooling via different podcasts and documentaries by figures including Helen Joyce, Stephanie Davies-Arai, Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, Barry Wall, John Uhler, Chloe Cole, Kellie-Jay Keen, etc. It was scary at first, as I was worried about his reaction and our relationship. Some days he would pull his hood over his head, but I saw that he was still listening, and he would perk up within minutes after a podcast or a documentary was over. We watched What is a Woman, and he lived, but we skipped the intro and the ending. Whatever bad mood they caused, it didn’t linger. I never made it personal and never asked him where he was at with his own gender identity.
We watched hours of podcasts and the manner of how he was sitting at the table started to change. He didn’t cover his face anymore, he sat straighter.
His 18th birthday came and went, with no big announcement, but the uncertainty was still overwhelming. By February I was telling myself that I should stop with the gender critical stuff and we should focus on something else, but then The Affirmation Generation came out, and I just had to show it to him. When I asked what he thought about it, he said there was nothing there that he didn’t already know. I was still too anxious to ask what it all meant for him. If he was still thinking of himself as transgender, I didn’t want him to verbalize these thoughts to me, thus potentially making them something he needed to defend.
Then at some point in early spring he laughed at a gender critical meme I sent him. Then he made a couple of gender critical jokes. But when I casually said that gender was just a modern and ideological term for personality, he rejected the idea. This made me doubt everything yet again. A month or two later he made fun of the idea that biological sex was nonbinary, and I felt in my bones that this was over. The curse was lifted. I exhaled.
Are we there yet? I wish I knew. From what I’ve read, some never leave the cult entirely and come back to it in the times of stress. But for now, I won’t think about that. I too need a break. In retrospect, he has been incrementally desisting for the last nine months—there were little signs all along, but how do you trust them when you are on a rollercoaster? I’m sure that if I were to ask him about his desistance a year from now, he’d say that he made up his mind entirely on his own and that all the podcasts we listened to didn’t matter. Maybe he’d say that he simply grew up, and he would be right. But I would not have been able to live with myself if I didn’t make the information about the ideology and biological reality available to him.
The last year went by too slowly and yet too fast. I’m grateful, humbled, empowered, still not entirely back to normal. I know how lucky we are, how, in retrospect, comparatively easy it has been—a mere 21 months, and he hasn’t even worn a skirt or a bra. And now it is over, almost like it never happened, like a bad dream you’d rather forget.”
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