A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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This is very suspicious, and I suspect it indicates that California Governor Gavin Newsom is running for president:
Deviating from his past legislative support of transgender youth in California, Democratic governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have required parents to demonstrate affirmation of their child’s gender identity in custody court battles.
Under California Bill AB957, judges would have been legally obligated to specifically consider whether parents have affirmed their child’s gender identity or gender expression in determining “the health, safety, and welfare of the child.” The California State Assembly passed the bill along strictly party lines earlier this month, hoping to advance transgender rights in the state.
Newsom said in a statement late Friday night he appreciates “the passion and values” of Democratic assembly member Lori Wilson for authoring the bill but disclosed he couldn’t sign it.
This essay at Quillette by Jonathan Kay, “Canadian Parents (Finally) Push Back Against Gender Cultism,” is a must-read. An excerpt:
This week, Canadian parents who oppose school curricula that push born-in-the-wrong-body propaganda staged a nation-wide series of protests under the banner of “#1MillionMarch4Children.” The surprisingly large multicultural turnout, much like the survey results cited above, clearly indicate that this is a mainstream movement. But that hasn’t stopped the Canadian political, activist, academic, and corporate establishments—all of which adopted gender cultism as an official in-house faith in the late 2010s—from denouncing the protesters as peddlers of “hate.”
On a leaked Zoom call conducted by labour leaders seeking to thwart the protests, Vicky Smallman, National Director of Women’s and Human Rights for the Canadian Labour Congress, assured participants that the protesters represented “fringe voices.” Another labour leader on the call, Anthony Marco, offered to recruit (ahem) “seasoned activists” who could follow protesters around and take pictures of their licence plates.
Meanwhile, Toronto’s Globe & Mail newspaper tried to pretend the national event was an “anti-LGBTQ protest,” even though some of the most enthusiastic participants were lesbians and transgender. For its part, the rival Toronto Star offered readers an op-ed titled, It’s a privilege, not a right, to know your kid’s gender identity, which argued that if teachers help transition a child without telling the family about it, well, that just means mom and dad must be garbage parents.
Canada’s leading mental-health hospital suggested to employees that a failure to oppose the protests could make them complicit in trans suicides. Bell, a large telecommunications company, held “healing sessions” so that employees could palliate the (apparently devastating) psychic effects of the protests. A power utility in Atlantic Canada denounced the protests with the hashtag #NoSpaceForHate. Vancouver Coastal Health, one of Canada’s largest health providers, sent out a mass mailing asking employees to shed a tear for board-of-directors members “who are part of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.” Not to be outdone, the Undergraduate Program Office of the Education Faculty at York University in Ontario not only denounced the “hateful” march, but ominously predicted that its horrifying emotional effects could make students “feel unsafe trying to complete program requirements.” (The director also promised to do more to fight something called “cis-hetero hegemony.”)
If one didn’t know that a large majority of Canadians supported the protesters’ principal demand, one might have thought that our cities were being overrun by white supremacists. But of course, that’s the point of this kind of propaganda: to discourage dissent through collective public shaming.
This dishonest PR strategy won’t save the gender cult in the long run. In fact, it’s hard not to notice the somewhat desperate-seeming nature of the rhetoric being hurled at the protesters—not to mention the heavy whiff of class snobbery.
The Winnipeg Free Sun has an editorial making more or less the same point—and I find it encouraging that this view, once almost entirely ignored, is becoming normative: “Anti-parental rights rhetoric undermines public education.”
