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The accompanying meme asks why women are increasingly described as “menstruators,” “pregnant people” and “cervix-havers,” while men appear less frequently as “ejaculators” or “penis people.”
The absolute comparison is imperfect. Some medical organizations now use expressions such as “people with prostates.” That does not answer the objection; it merely demonstrates that the same ideology can make language equally absurd in both directions.
Sex is a biological reality, not an identity. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research defines sex through biological attributes including chromosomes, hormones and reproductive anatomy.[1] Personal feelings may affect how someone wishes to dress, live or be addressed, but they cannot transform a male body into a female one or vice versa.
No male requires a Pap test, becomes pregnant or menstruates. No female develops prostate or testicular cancer. A female who identifies as a man may still require cervical screening, but that is because she remains female. Her identity does not make cervical cancer a male health issue.
Nor does saying that women menstruate imply that every woman currently menstruates. Children, post-menopausal women, women with certain medical conditions and women who have undergone surgery remain female. Ordinary category language has never required every member of a class to display every characteristic associated with it.
The linguistic transformation therefore serves another purpose. Once woman is redefined as an internal identity available to males, it can no longer reliably name the female sex. Yet medicine, law and politics still require a way to discuss female bodies. Women are consequently reassembled as lists of organs and functions: uterus-havers, menstruators and birthing bodies.
That is the anti-woman streak within transgender ideology. It does not merely ask that a small number of people be treated courteously. It demands that women surrender the language required to describe themselves as a sex class—and then presents their disappearance as inclusion.
This matters beyond wounded sensibilities. Women’s health research depends upon recognizing sex differences; Health Canada explicitly warns that failing to study women as a distinct sex can obscure clinically important differences in treatment and outcomes.[2] The same clarity is necessary when discussing pregnancy, sexual violence, sport and sex discrimination.
Courtesy toward individuals does not require institutions to falsify material reality. Medical professionals can treat every patient with dignity while recording sex accurately and speaking plainly about which sex is affected by a condition.
Women are not menstruators, cervix-havers or birthing bodies. They are women. Language that cannot say so is not inclusive; it has simply made women harder to name.
References
- Canadian Institutes of Health Research, “What is gender? What is sex?”
https://cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/48642.html - Health Canada, “Considerations for Inclusion of Women in Clinical Trials and Analysis of Data by Sex.”
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-health-products/drug-products/applications-submissions/guidance-documents/clinical-trials/considerations-inclusion-women-clinical-trials-analysis-data-sex-differences.html - Trans Care BC, “Gender-Inclusive Language: Clinical Settings.”
https://www.transcarebc.ca/sites/default/files/2024-03/Gender_Inclusive_Language_Clinical.pdf
One of the stranger features of the debate over gender identity is that women are still expected to apologize for noticing when policies affect them.
When male bodies enter female prisons, shelters, changing rooms or athletic categories, sex matters. When children are placed on a medical pathway with lifelong consequences, sex matters. When crime statistics, scholarships or political representation are organized by sex, definitions matter. Refusing to pretend otherwise is not hatred; it is the beginning of an honest discussion.
Women & Girls Alberta is an Alberta-based, women-led organization working to restore sex-based rights and protections in law, public policy and everyday life. Its platform reflects something I have argued repeatedly on this site: individual dignity does not require society to abandon material reality.
The organization focuses on the practical conflicts created when self-declared gender identity is allowed to override sex. These include women’s sports, prison safety, rape-crisis services, bodily privacy, lesbian boundaries, women’s scholarships, accurate crime statistics and single-sex spaces. Its issues section brings these concerns together rather than treating each controversy as an isolated incident.
That matters because institutional change often occurs quietly. A definition changes inside a policy manual. A reporting category becomes unreliable. A woman raises a privacy or safeguarding concern and discovers that the institution has already decided which questions may be asked. By the time the public notices, the new rule is presented as settled practice rather than a political choice that should have been debated.
Women & Girls Alberta is doing more than issuing statements. The organization collects legislation, policy developments, documented cases and Canadian news concerning the erosion of sex-based protections. Its stated mandate includes providing sex-based policy analysis, supporting legislative clarity and creating opportunities for public discussion. Readers can examine its sources and arguments for themselves rather than being asked to accept a slogan.
Especially valuable is its confidential reporting platform, through which women can document experiences involving prisons, hospitals, shelters, schools, workplaces, sports and government programs. The organization says submissions can be made without an account or a name through a system built on the open-source GlobaLeaks platform, and it provides additional precautions for people concerned about professional retaliation or identification.
The point is not to declare every allegation true merely because it has been submitted. The point is to gather accounts, documents and recurring patterns that institutions may otherwise ignore. Evidence cannot be examined until people are permitted to report it.
The strongest argument from the other side should be acknowledged: transgender people are entitled to safety, civil treatment and protection from genuine discrimination. Nothing about defending women’s sex-based rights requires cruelty toward anyone. But compassion cannot mean that every competing interest disappears. Nor can one group’s desire for recognition automatically override another group’s privacy, safety, freedom of association or right to fair competition.
A pluralistic society must be capable of protecting individuals without demanding that women surrender the language needed to describe their bodies, their boundaries and their rights.
That is why I support the work of Women & Girls Alberta. It is giving women a place to speak, documenting policies that deserve public scrutiny and insisting that biological sex remains a legitimate and sometimes indispensable legal category.
Visit the Women & Girls Alberta website, read its platform, examine the evidence and share its work. Those who agree with its mission can also subscribe, contribute or help ensure that women who have something important to report know where they can be heard.
Women should not need permission to defend rights that exist because they are women.

For decades, the political Left told women it alone could be trusted to defend their rights.
But the promise was narrower than advertised. In practice, women’s rights often meant abortion access, workplace rhetoric, and the expectation that women would keep voting for the party that claimed ownership over “women’s issues.”
Then a harder test arrived.
What happens when women ask for boundaries? What happens when girls say they do not want males in their changing rooms? What happens when female athletes say their category exists for a reason? What happens when women insist that privacy, dignity, safety, and fair competition are not bigotry?
The institutional Left’s answer has been revealing.
It did not defend women’s boundaries. It explained them away. It did not defend sex-based language. It tried to make it unspeakable. It did not defend the female category in law, sport, prisons, shelters, or public policy. It subordinated that category to gender identity and then demanded that women pretend nothing meaningful had changed.
That is the betrayal.
To be clear, no decent society should delight in the distress of young people struggling with identity. Even the Supreme Court majority in West Virginia v. B. P. J. emphasized that student-athletes on both sides deserve respect and should not be ostracized or vilified. (Supreme Court)
But respect is not the same thing as surrendering reality.
The question before the Court was whether schools may maintain women’s and girls’ sports teams for biological females under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause. (Supreme Court) The Court reversed the lower-court rulings, holding that states may preserve sex-separated athletic categories. Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson, concurred in part and dissented in part. (Supreme Court)
That legal result matters because it cuts through the fog.
Female bodies are not symbolic. Women’s spaces are not symbolic. Girls’ sports are not a therapeutic exercise for male validation. They are material institutions built around material differences.
The Left used to understand power when women named it. It used to understand boundaries when women asserted them. It used to understand that “no” is a complete sentence.
Now, too often, women are told that saying no is hateful. That naming sex is cruel. That defending female-only spaces is exclusionary. That fairness for girls must yield to affirmation for males.
A movement that cannot respect women’s boundaries cannot credibly claim to protect women.

The Left did not merely lose a court case.
It exposed the limits of its feminism.
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.
A recent post from a Women’s Liberation Front activist should be read less as a complaint than as a warning about how institutions train dissenters to accept contempt as normal.
She describes years of opposing gender-identity legislation in California: travelling to Sacramento, meeting legislative offices, testifying at hearings, and trying to explain to ordinary people what the policies actually mean. Female locker rooms become mixed-sex spaces by administrative decree. Girls’ sports and girls’ boundaries become conditional. Distressed young women are placed on medical pathways that can permanently alter healthy bodies.
The remarkable part is not merely that lawmakers disagree with her. Disagreement is expected in politics. What stands out is the air of pre-judgment around the process. She writes that legislators’ offices treat these women with “barely contained disdain.” Public hearings fill with activists who regard any defence of female boundaries as proof of bigotry. The women objecting are not received as citizens raising serious concerns about privacy, safeguarding, fairness, or medical ethics. They are treated as a nuisance class: managed, endured, and socially disqualified before the argument begins.
A functioning democracy does not require lawmakers to agree with every citizen. It does require them to hear citizens as citizens. When women raise concerns about intimate spaces, parental knowledge, fair competition, or irreversible interventions on minors, the answer cannot simply be a sneer and a label. “Bigot” is not an argument. “Hate” is not a policy analysis. “Inclusion” does not magically settle every conflict between competing rights.
Institutional capture often works this way. It does not begin by winning every argument in public. It begins by deciding which arguments are permitted to count. After that, the ordinary political process becomes strangely theatrical. Hearings still happen. Citizens still line up to speak. Legislators still nod along with the solemn expressions of people performing democratic patience. But the conclusion has already been filed away. These women are not constituents with claims on representation. They are obstacles to be routed around.
“A functioning democracy does not require lawmakers to agree with every citizen. It does require them to hear citizens as citizens.”
California is an especially sharp example because its political culture is so one-sided on this issue. The institutions are not neutral referees; they have chosen a side, and women who object are expected to absorb that fact politely. Over time, this wears people down. The WoLF activist’s most revealing line is not the one about crazy legislation. It is the moment of recognition: going to Washington, D.C. reminded her how badly she had become accustomed to being treated in California.
That is what contempt does over time. It lowers your expectations. It trains you to think basic respect is a luxury. It teaches you that being ignored is normal, that being caricatured is normal, that being called hateful for stating sex-based concerns is the price of admission.
This is especially perverse when the dissenters are women defending women’s boundaries. Feminism once insisted that female privacy, bodily integrity, and protection from male entitlement mattered. Now women who make those arguments are often treated as embarrassing relics, reactionaries, or moral contaminants. The old feminist vocabulary survives, but the sex class it was built to defend has been quietly replaced by a more fashionable abstraction.
The inversion should be obvious by now. Women are told they must be compassionate while their own concerns are dismissed. Girls are told inclusion matters while fairness and privacy are negotiated away on their behalf. Parents are told to trust institutions that increasingly treat hesitation as a threat. Citizens are told democracy is sacred while lawmakers learn to ignore the public on issues where the public is far less progressive than the activist class.
“The hearings still happen. Citizens still line up to speak. But the conclusion has already been filed away.”
This is why the fight matters even when a particular bill is lost. Public opposition creates a record. It denies consensus. It tells other women they are not alone. It forces legislators to own what they are doing rather than hiding behind bureaucratic language and moral fog.
Eventually, legislators need to pay a political price for treating women this way. Not because disagreement is forbidden. Not because every feminist objection should automatically prevail. But because a political class that can dismiss women’s sex-based concerns with contempt has learned something dangerous about power: the right moral vocabulary can make ordinary citizens disappear.
Women cannot win a fight they are shamed out of entering. They cannot defend boundaries they are not allowed to name. They cannot rely on institutions that have already decided their objections are evidence of guilt.
The point is not that every battle will be won in Sacramento. Some will be lost. Maybe many. But silence is how capture becomes permanent. Visibility is how it starts to crack.

Institutional capture rarely arrives breathing fire. More often, it brings a binder, a microphone, and a schedule.
Women do not need permission to define themselves.
The word woman already has a meaning. It is not hateful to say so, and it is not extremist to defend female boundaries, female privacy, female sports, or female-only spaces. Women are adult human females. That definition is not a slur. It is the basis on which women’s rights were built.
The public silence around this issue is starting to crack because too many people can now see where the trajectory leads. A society that cannot define women cannot reliably protect them. Rights tied to sex become fragile once sex itself is treated as optional language.
Enough of the intimidation. Enough of the compelled speech. Enough of the social blackmail that brands ordinary women as bigots for wanting boundaries previous generations understood as normal, necessary, and humane.
The next step is not private agreement. It is public resistance, steady enough that institutions can no longer pretend the objection belongs only to cranks and extremists.
Write to elected officials and demand that sex-based protections be clarified in law as applying to biological sex. Support groups defending women’s sports, shelters, prisons, and female-only services. Push back in schools, workplaces, unions, professional associations, and public consultations when policies dissolve female boundaries into identity claims. Refuse the language games that make reality harder to discuss. Speak plainly, calmly, and repeatedly.
Support the journalists, writers, academics, whistleblowers, parents, athletes, and ordinary women who are absorbing the punishment for saying what millions still believe. Do not leave them standing alone while quietly agreeing with them afterward in private.
That private agreement is one of the main things keeping this machine alive. Institutions interpret silence as consent. Bureaucracies advance until they meet resistance, and too many citizens have been trained to mistake politeness for surrender.
This resistance does not require rage or cruelty. It requires steadiness, numbers, and the willingness to stop pretending obvious things are unsayable.
The backlash already underway across the Western world is not driven by hatred. It is driven by exhaustion with the claim that female boundaries are negotiable, that biology is taboo, and that dissent itself is immoral.
Women have the right to their own spaces, language, associations, and political interests. No court ruling or policy document can erase that reality.






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