Unpacking Gender Woo

For weeks now, I have been trying to write an essay on gender madness. It’s like shoveling in a non-stop blizzard. The new examples of peak trans moments are piling up faster than I can clear.

Just 2 mammals. Species are a social construct and do not really exist. All mammals are species-fluid as you can see here…

Initially, I was just going to focus on local episodes happening here in Nanaimo, BC, where I live:

Exhibit #1

At the beginning of 2023, we had the saga of the convicted male pedophile in a wig who was repeatedly using the women’s change-room to watch little girls undress at our public pool, the Nanaimo Aquatic Centre. When a local mother tried to escort him out to protect her nine-year-old daughter, the pool staff threatened to have the mother arrested for interfering with the man’s ‘right’ to be there. Eva Kurilova writing for Reduxx has done a good job of covering that story here and here.

From the Reduxx article:

Reduxx has now identified the man with the help of members of the community, and learned he is a convicted child sex offender. Jeremy Melvin Carlson now goes by Riley Otter — sometimes spelling his first name “Rhylie” or “Rhiley.”

In 2019, Carlson, who was 28 at the time, was sentenced to 14 months in jail and 24 months probation for sexual interference against a young person.

Jeremy Melvin Carlson, now goes by Riley Otter

Exhibit #2

Then in March, a former friend of mine, a Nanaimo schoolteacher, was caught on camera outside Tim Horton’s one night, where he thought he would be meeting a 14-year-old boy he had been messaging on Grindr. The video of the sting plus the 120 screenshots of their text exchange were posted to South Island Predator Publishing as Part #1 and Part #2. The teacher (Grindr name “Big Bear”) was placed on leave the next business day after the school district was flooded with complaints from parents over the weekend.

This former friend of mine, who I had spent many years bird-watching with and generally socializing with, had a significant and long-standing role in promoting the SOGI curriculum (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) in our local school district and beyond. Here is a two-minute BC Government Ministry of Education video in which he is one of three panelists discussing the importance of SOGI curriculum. He begins at 0:50. (Not Bob Esliger shown in first portion of video.)

This friend of mine was the official Social Justice Advocate for School District 68 (Nanaimo Ladysmith School District). In our 2018 local school board elections, he circulated an open letter advising people who to vote for and who not to vote for. He was critical of an incumbent who did not support the SOGI curriculum. That candidate lost his seat.

Exhibit #3

The following month, on April 22, a Vancouver Island peace group that had initially courted my participation, abruptly disinvited me from a meeting (literally told me not to attend, via a group email) with no explanation. I quickly discovered, via back-channel emails shared with me, that the reason was due to gender critical tweets of mine that some member had noticed a couple of weeks earlier. This peace group, the Freedom From War Coalition, is involved in screening and promoting the excellent documentary “Haiti Betrayed.” The group seeks to have Canada exit NATO and also stop funding NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine—goals I support.

Locally, this group is focusing its efforts on the decades-old Nanoose underwater weapons testing range on Vancouver Island. The range is used by the US Navy’s nuclear-powered and nuclear weapons-capable ships and submarines. I have written a book on the Nanoose test range and an earlier peace group’s efforts to demilitarize the facility (Submarine Dead Ahead! Waging Peace in America’s Nuclear Colony).

Hence the reason the Freedom From War Coalition was eager to have my participation in their current efforts, and in fact sought me out. It was a natural fit. I share their interests and have been a peace activist all my life. My mother moved us to Canada in the 1970s as war resisters to get my brother out of the United States before he would be drafted for the Vietnam War.

The work of the Freedom From War Coalition has nothing to do with gender ideology. And yet, to the consternation of some members, the group’s leadership is apparently filtering members on the basis of their views about biological sex.

On the day I was disinvited, I made this tweet, which quickly garnered 26,000 views:

“A Vancouver Island peace group that enthusiastically invited me to work with them because of my book & work on the Nanoose weapons testing range, has now uninvited me quite abruptly because of my gender-critical tweets. Probably for the best. I don't think they understand peace.”

Exhibit #4

The day after I tweeted about my expulsion from the peace group, a longtime poet friend who had asked me to line up a Nanaimo event with the two of us for his cross-Canada tour, canceled with a terse email. It certainly felt like a cancel culture action. But since that wasn’t explicitly stated, I will never know for sure. I decided to keep the booking I had made for the two of us and convert it to a multi-poet event on “Poetry of Resilience,” which will feature 15 local poets and musicians next Saturday (May 20) all using their creative abilities to explore and amplify the notion of resilience.

Exhibit #5

Which brings me to the item I finally decided could form the basis of a Substack essay on gender ideology. I had an occasion on twitter this morning to debunk some of the more common assertions of the ideology in a five-point list.

The Gay Times tweeted a link to an article titled “Majority of anti-trans adults don’t know any trans people, study finds.”

To which a respondent agreed “When I speak to transphobes online and those that have been indoctrinated into the GC right wing cult, when you ask them if they know any real trans people they either don’t answer or the answer is no…”

To which I decided to exercise my magical long-tweet powers (enabled by the notorious blue check on twitter) and replied with the following:

So many logical fallacies & non sequiturs in one short tweet. But yet these false premises are all part of the gender ideology belief system & are repeated ritualistically. Let's unpack:

1. Women not wanting men in their sports, locker rooms, prison cells, shelters, awards, etc. have not been "indoctrinated" to that viewpoint. It is a natural and logical response to physical risk, invasion of privacy or unfairness.

2. The response and push-back to male encroachment into women's single-sex spaces is not "right-wing." The women's rights movement of the LEFT has spent the last 100 years or so fighting for these rights and spaces for women.

3. Nor is the push-back on male invasion of women's single-sex spaces a "cult" any more than me reporting someone who has brazenly stolen my car is a cult.

4. The simple act of saying men cannot become women, children are not born in the wrong body, men do not belong in women's single-sex spaces, does not make people "transphobes." It makes them realists who understand basic biology (something we all understood 15 years ago).

5. And the coup de grâce... That people who speak out against the male invasion of women's single-sex spaces, and against irreversible sterilizations and surgeries on children, "don't know any real trans people." Of course we all know trans-identified people. That doesn't change our own awareness of biological reality and the inappropriateness of men in women's spaces and of children being mutilated and sterilized.

Mission accomplished! Thanks for joining me on the journey.

~

Kim Goldberg is a poet, journalist and author on Vancouver Island, Canada. Her latest book is Devolution, poems and fables of ecopocalypse (Caitlin Press).

Twitter: @KimPigSquash