I can’t imagine there is a single person in Canada—apart from the complainant’s mother—who didn’t feel a great wash of relief when transwoman Jessica “Jonathan” Yaniv lost the case brought to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal against the waxologists who refused to wax Yaniv’s balls.
Even the most fervent trans activist knows in his or her heart that, given Yaniv’s public truculence, combined with a weird and disturbing history of expressed fantasies around menstruation and adolescent girls, this individual does not project an image that is helpful to the transgender brand.
The sordid chronicle was covered by this publication in-depth, but it was hardly mentioned by our national broadcaster, the CBC, even though the preposterousness of all its elements had made it an international phenomenon. The only explanation is ideology, and the CBC is certainly not alone in its journalistic fail.
On Oct 23, Kara Dansky—a self-described left-winger and lifetime Democrat—representing the feminist organization Women’s Liberation Front, spoke to Fox News host Tucker Carlson about her organization’s objection to transwomen in sport. She cited transwoman Rachel McKinnon’s triumph in the Manchester, UK cycling championships, where McKinnon set a new world record for women, as a distressing example of the unlevel playing field trans entitlement has brought to sport.
Of course, McKinnon did not really set a new record for women, as she is a biological male, with all the attendant advantages that confers in athletics. I was very interested in what Dansky had to say. But I would not have known about her if I did not watch Fox News. Like other radical feminists such as Meghan Murphy, who has suffered and continues to suffer greatly for her common-sense views, Dansky and her organization don’t get the time of day from the mainstream media, apart from being criticized for transphobia.
Dansky thanked Carlson several times for having her on his show, stating that her organization’s views are routinely rebuffed by outlets such as NPR and the Washington Post. “No one will hear us … no one will publish us,” she said. Carlson expressed his complete bewilderment that even feminists of the left are cold-shouldered by media that are normally friendly to all things feminist.
Sometimes there really is a conspiracy. The left-leaning media has decided that in the battle for rankings on the intersectionality ladder, trans oppression trumps women oppression. Even when the CBC does report on trans stories, like the Toronto Public Library’s refusal to bow to pressure to cancel Meghan Murphy’s appearance Oct 29, the reportage is extremely skewed, as CBC host Carol Off’s interview with TPL librarian Vickery Bowles demonstrates in spades.
Don’t look for rationality or coherence in left-wing shunning of feminists who actually defend the natural rights of women over the alleged rights of men who want to be women. Any movement that is comfortable in defining a woman as a person with a vagina or a penis according to their subjective feeling—and fully on board for all the social and cultural and legal rights that follow from that definition, however harmful they are to women—is not receptive to rational debate on the subject. As the great satirist Jonathan Swift said, you cannot reason someone out of something he or she was not reasoned into in the first place.
The betrayal of women by the LGBT community, as well as by politicians, legislators, social service institutions, mental-health professionals, educational establishment, athletic associations and media is surely one of the great mysteries of our time, and will doubtless be remembered by historians as a shaming indictment of gender ideology run amok. Meanwhile, victims of the craziness are mown down with Leninesque satisfaction in the name of “equality” and “rights.”
Which is why the HRT decision against Yaniv is a beacon of hope in a dark place. HRTs are generally regarded as bastions of political correctness. If even a left-leaning HRT can so decisively rule against Yaniv, and can so plainly see the frivolousness of the complaint, and can come down so squarely on the side of a truth that is screamingly obvious to anyone with common sense—that no woman should ever be forced to handle male genitals against her will—then a useful precedent has been set.
Naturally, not all trans claims will be so black and white as the Yaniv case, and one could question why it should have been accepted for a hearing at all on those grounds, but we in the business of promoting reason must take what crumbs we can find. The important takeaway here is that the HRT recognized that trans entitlements have “reasonable limits,” according to the Charter, and that those limits are set by biology, not feelings. That is a victory for reason.
