Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s tenure began, Canada has become something of an international laughingstock—a fundamentally frivolous country obsessed with the dictates of wokeness.
When Canada makes the news, it is generally for something stupid, which is why The Telegraph in the United Kingdom ran an editorial last year declaring that “Canada is the world’s first woke nation.” Only the Freedom Convoy—much to the horror of Canada’s bloated, self-satisfied elites—briefly broke that cycle.
But much to the relief of the progressive punditry, the latest international news stories that talk about Canada are back to normal, which is to say, deeply bizarre and ridiculous. The University of Waterloo, it turns out, is advertising for a tenure track assistant professor with a specialization in science and engineering, but it has some odd specifications that have nothing to do with either science or engineering.
Britain’s Daily Mail is reporting that, according to a March listing from the University of Waterloo, the position (which pays between $90k and $120k) is restricted to women or “qualified individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, non-binary, or two-spirit.” Two-spirit, for those who aren’t keeping up, is an Indigenous term which translates roughly to transgender. The university provides a “self-identification form” to ascertain whether the applicants actually fall into these four categories, which they note is an attempt to “address underrepresentation of individuals from equity deserving groups among our Canada Research chairs.”
As the ad notes: “Because this is a special opportunity for a specific member of the four designated groups, applicant self-identification information will be used for the purposes of screening and consideration. As such, this opportunity is open only to individuals who self-identify as women, transgender, non-binary, or two-spirit.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. First of all, how was it determined which groups were “equity deserving”? Was there some sort of calculus that confirmed that non-binary or transgender-identifying people were more “deserving” of equity than men, who are explicitly excluded from this category regardless of their skills in science or engineering? I was, before now, unaware that some groups were more deserving of equity than others, and it seems an odd thing for a university to be championing.
The good news for men who want the job, of course, is that they can now simply identify as women and, regardless of whether they change their clothes or get surgery or even bother to try to be convincing, their new identity must be accepted as actual, physical reality based exclusively on their say-so. Those are the rules now. If you “self-identify” as a woman, you are a woman. More than that—you are an especially oppressed woman, because you aren’t really a woman but want to be. This means that you are likely to succeed in getting this job over an actual woman, who hasn’t had to suffer in the same way.
Even more evidence that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is not worth the paper it’s printed on.