It has been several days since Juno News broke the story that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s eldest daughter is a trans activist, and no mainstream Canadian outlets have covered the revelations or followed up. The Daily Mailis the only publication to have mentioned that the prime minister’s daughter identifies as non-binary in a story titled “Who is Mark Carney? Everything we know about Canada’s next Prime Minister and his family.”
It is understandable that most journalists want to avoid the story. Many who would find it very relevant if Pierre Poilievre had a 24-year-old daughter working as a writer and advocating against gender ideology wish to ignore it due to their own ideological precommitments. Others take the more principled approach of staying away from stories that appear to “attack” the family of a politician — and I would agree that attacking the family members of politicians is absolutely off limits. Those taking this approach should cease and desist immediately.
But as I explained in an earlier column, this is not a story about Juno News “attacking” a “child.” Sasha Carney is a writer, publishing in magazines, for general consumption. Carney wrote about receiving therapy (not, as some social media figures have wrongly concluded, “transition” treatments) at Tavistock, and has detailed experiences and perspectives due to a desire to have people read them. That is what writers do, and to claim that it is somehow off limits to comment on the writings of a 24-year-old (I don’t think that qualifies as a “child”) is part and parcel of the public engagement writers expect.
I believe Carney’s writing is worth reading for those interested in gaining insight into the Carneys. Sasha Carney, who is described in one writer’s bio as “a writer and editorial assistant from Ottawa,” is a two-time recipient of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, had poetry long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2019, and has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in The Yale Literary Magazine, The Forge, Barren Magazine, and others. Carney has also made many public statements on transgender activism, including at a vigil covered by the Yale Daily News. Carney stated:
I think now more than ever when transgender rights are being tangibly threatened by the Trump administration, when people’s access to healthcare, hormone therapy, name changes and legal gender recognition face a threat of all being swept away, it is more important than ever to force people to realize that this is something that impacts the communities around them.
In a 2022 essay titled “Formed this Way” for “Brink at Yale,” for example, Carney details her views on transgenderism in stark terms. In fact, Carney essentially makes the case for gender fluidity:
The belief in an innate gender is an understandable defense against a homophobic and transphobic world: Lady Gaga sang “Born This Way” to a pre-Obergefell v. Hodges America, after all. Queers are prickly in the face of conversion therapy logic, which is correctly perceived as the attempts of dominant society to nudge aberrant desires towards more palatable ones. If we as trans people did not choose our strangeness, if it is, instead, a naturalized, cradle-to-grave form of human difference, then it follows that it can be tolerated in the name of equality; maybe even, in extraordinary circumstances, embraced.
Carney then attacks the idea that trans-identifying children are somehow being victimized and dismisses Abigail Shrier’s landmark book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters as so much fearmongering — although Carney admits that it is an “anti-trans text that I have never read, and never will.” Carney then essentially defends both transgender “treatments” and the social contagion theory, writing:
Gender is inherently a process of social relation: who you are as a woman or man or otherwise forms in relation to the gendering of those around you. A cisgender man in a locker room may feel socially compelled toward certain motions, phrases, or stories to affirm and solidify their own manhood in the world. What is so “natural” about that? Ask yourself now: how do your friends perform, or ‘do,’ gender? Your mother, your father, your partner? Is the performance of cisgender heterosexual manhood, for instance, any less determined by who you are friends with, the insecurities you have around your body, or your desire to amass social capital? Brazilian waxes and pre-workout smoothies alike are gender-affirming processes; shaving your face or wearing a dress can be, too. We can scarcely conceive of gender without these social rituals and practices. There is no true Archimedean standpoint where we can live outside gender as we speak about it: cis or trans, we are, like Heidegger’s subject, always already thrown-into-the-world as gendered beings. To rephrase Christakis, I think there is a large element of social contagion with respect to gender — not specific to trans people, but with respect to the territory of gender itself.
This is all Judith Bulter-esque, queer studies gobbledygook, and much of it is internally contradictory. If we all merely “do” gender, why do we need surgeries and drugs to sync our bodies with our evolving sense of self? Indeed, many of the arguments that Shrier details so chillingly — about such treatments seem to be enhanced rather than contradicted by Carney’s central argument. Additionally, in all likelihood because Carney hasn’t actually read Shrier’s book, there is no engagement with the key premises of those warning about the long-term harms of “gender-affirming care,” such as the reality that many of its recipients will be rendered sterile and incapable of experiencing sexual intimacy before they are old enough to vote, drink, or drive.
It is entirely possible that Prime Minister Mark Carney does not share some or all of these views. But to claim that the public writing and activism of Sasha Carney has no bearing on how Mark Carney will approach these issues, even if, as Barbara Kay observed, he is merely doing so for the sake of Sasha, is utterly implausible. “We can forget about Mark Carney engaging with this subject in any substantive way, whatever his innermost beliefs are,” she wrote. “He will toe the party line in the interest of family peace.” She’s right.
