Yesterday, Canadians turned out by the thousands in cities and towns across the country for the 1 Million March 4 Children — the most visible pushback to date against what many Canadians see as indoctrination into a radical set of new beliefs about sex and gender being pushed on their children in schools and healthcare settings.
Now, it seems as though Canada’s long and uncomfortable silence on gender is breaking down quickly.
Just a few days ago, the National Post put Canada’s long-simmering gender wars on the front cover. As far as awareness-raising goes, the Post’s contribution is riddled with gender-friendly (read: misleading) jargon like “trans teens” and “assigned female at birth” that prejudge open questions and obscure the stakes, with the paper offering numerous undue concessions. The front page story about mastectomies was accompanied by an anxious editorial providing the “National Post View”:
Still, the National Post’s reporting on the surge of teenage girls seeking mastectomies is a meaningful contribution to a long overdue public dialogue. When it comes to gender, Canada is special — which is to say, the country’s situation is particularly sticky. For one thing, media capture in Canada is almost total, with government-subsidised outlets pumping out “gender propaganda”. And — much like its neighbour to the south — Canadian politics is increasingly polarised on the trans issue, with criticism largely owned by the Right-leaning Conservative Party.
Just last week, at the Conservative Party’s policy convention, delegates voted in favour of placing age restrictions on transition — a move sure to stoke tensions. In such a divisive political climate, there’s little space for dissent in progressive circles, with the result that partisans tend to double down when they really ought to back away from poorly thought-out positions like violent males in women’s prisons and triple-Z prosthetic breasts in high-school shop classes.
Then there’s the healthcare side. Even as other countries in which the government foots the bill for healthcare services reevaluate the safety and effectiveness of “gender-affirming” interventions, Canadian health authorities have yet to reckon with the burden that publicly-funded gender self-actualisation places on already strained healthcare resources.
Canadians in provinces like Quebec wait years to be assigned a family doctor. In the province of Ontario, over 200,000 people are on the waiting list for surgeries — and that includes patients waiting on life-saving procedures. The last few years have also heralded the dystopian rise of Maid, Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying programme, which has seen a surge of applications from patients with unmet needs for healthcare and social services.
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