Some important news and analysis from around the interwebs.
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Meghan Murphy—the feminist de-platformed by Twitter for refusing to accept biological males as her sisters—has a terrifying article over at Unherd, where she details what the Trudeau government’s Bill C-6 will accomplish:
Bill C-6 proposes to criminalise those who profit from or advertise “conversion therapy”, which would include therapists and medical practitioners who do not practice the “affirmative model” — which means confirming “trans identity” unquestioningly. Choosing not to encourage a child to transition; suggesting a teen wait, and see if the “gender dysphoria” sticks a few years before beginning the process of transitioning; and challenging the concept of “gender identity” itself would potentially set a therapist or medical practitioner up for criminal sanctions.
It is already difficult to question the legitimacy of gender identity ideology in this climate, and it is practically impossible to access therapy that might allow a teen to grow out of their desire to transition, as so manydo. Bill C-6 will make it illegal to offer therapy that does not approach transition as the best path.
If you want a sense of what this will mean, consider the example Murphy begins her column with:
“Transition was a very temporary, superficial fix for a very complex identity issue,” recalls Kiera Bell, who transitioned as a teenager and then decided, some years on, that she’d made the wrong decision.
After being prescribed puberty blockers at 16, and undergoing a double mastectomy when she was 20, last year Bell decided to detransition, at 23. She is now taking action against the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust, which operates gender identity clinics in Britain, to stop them from ‘rushing’ other teenagers down the same path.
“There was no exploration of the feelings that I had, no psychiatric assessment,” Bell told This Morning. “It was very brief and based on my recent past. There was no in-depth discussion.”
As a result of her decision to transition, Bell will probably never be able to reproduce, nor will her body or voice recover completely from the impacts of testosterone and surgery. Many other girls are having similar changes of mind; more and more are coming forward to say they were sent down the path to transitioning with little information or warning of the long-term implications.
This is happening to real children, real teens, real people. Where are the protections for them?
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It gets worse. The Trudeau government’s proposed euthanasia expansion is being almost universally condemned by disability activists and advocates, who are calling it “norm-shattering legislation.” The proposal is so awful that even the former justice minister who worked on the initial (also terrible) assisted suicide law, Jody Wilson-Raybould, condemned it. From the National Post:
Wilson-Raybould, meanwhile, used her time in Monday’s question period to demand Lametti explain why Bill C-7 scraps the 10-day reflection period for patients close to death.
“Nothing in the Truchon decision of the Quebec (court), which the government chose not to appeal, requires this, and the Supreme Court of Canada, in Carter, insisted on the requirement of clear consent,” Wilson-Raybould said. “Palliative care physicians, disability advocates and other experts insist that this is an important safeguard.”
This parliamentary session has been a disaster for social conservatives and all Canadians. Unfortunately, with the NDP and the Liberals in lockstep, they have a de facto majority government capable of passing whatever legislation they want.
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Ross Douthat of the New York Times has a phenomenal essay titled “The Case for One More Child,” on big families and how our society seems stacked against them. To whet your appetite:
Families can be over-sentimentalized, imprisoning, exhausting. But they supply goods that few alternative arrangements can hope to match. No public program could have replaced the network of relatives that helped my grandfather live independently until his death – even if, yes, his five children, my mother and aunts and uncles, had often feuded with him and each other over the years. No classroom is likely to supply the education in living intimately with other human beings that my children gain from growing up together – even if the virtue of forbearance is not always perfectly manifest in their interactions.
Yea, thou shalt see thy children’s children, and peace upon Israel, runs the Psalmist’s blessing. A society of plunging birthrates withdraws the first blessing, and compromises the second day by day.
Read the whole thing. It really is worth your time.
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This long-form piece on the future of the Democratic Party over at The Nation is very interesting. Excerpt:
Democrats, then, find themselves in a precarious position. Many of the constituencies held to be central to the Obama coalition have been drifting away from the party. Even under Trump, Democrats’ erosion among minority voters has continued unabated. They are seeing consistent attrition among people of faith too—not just with Christians, but also Muslims, Jews and other believers. The energy the party built with young people in 2018 already seems to be fading. However, Democrats have not pulled in new constituencies to offset the declining allegiance of these voters. Instead, many of those who helped Democrats pull off wins in 2018 and 2020 seem likely to migrate back toward the GOP when Trump is no longer on the ballot.
Read the whole thing. The future may not be as grim for the GOP—or as bright for the Dems—as some seem to think.
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Judith Jarvis Thomson, the philosopher who came up with the infamous “violinist analogy” in defence of abortion, has passed away at the age of 91:
Professor Thomson was known for her work on a variety of issues in normative ethics, applied ethics, metaethics, and metaphysics. She is the author of Normativity, The Realm of Rights, Rights, Restitution, and Risk, among many other works. One of her articles, “A Defense of Abortion,” which appeared in the inaugural issue of Philosophy and Public Affairs, may be one of the most well-known pieces of applied moral philosophy of the 20th Century.
Tragically, her key contribution to moral philosophy was the justification of the destruction of millions of pre-born children.
