The Million Person March

In a couple of days, on September 20, a “Million Person March” is planned for cities across Canada, “against gender ideology in schools.” The claimed intent is to protect children against abuse by the schools; the common slogan is “leave our kids alone!” The concern is that schools and other authorities are encouraging children to question their gender, explore sexuality at very young ages, even in some cases undergo medical procedures to change their sex, and even without their parents being informed. 

Others are organizing against the march. Those opposed to it also say they are protecting children from abuse—protecting transgender children who might be abused by their own families, should their families be informed of their gender transition.

Who is right?

To begin with, the first question needs to be: who is more likely to have the best interests of the child at heart, the government and the school, or the parents?

Some parents are abusive; this is a truth too rarely acknowledged. On the other hand, historically speaking, most governments and government bureaucracies are openly abusive; most families, by contrast, do care for their children. It is instinctive. Accordingly, the family should be given precedence. There should be some clear reason to suspect abuse in a specific case before the state can intervene. 

Yet here, family abuse is the default assumption.

This looks like an attack on the family rather than a concern for the interests of children.

Beyond this, the concept of “gender” is arbitrary. It is in the first instance a grammatical term: words have gender, not people. “Bridge” is masculine in French. “Sea” is feminine. In this sense it is of course nonsensical to speak of a child changing his or her gender. Can we also ask a bridge what his preferred pronouns might be?

The second meaning of “gender” is as a cognate for the word “sex”: “males or females viewed as a group.” It is nonsensical to speak of children changing sex. Sex is a simple biological fact, programmed into every cell of your body. 

The third meaning first appeared, according to Oxford, in 1945. “The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones.” The term expresses the modern feminist claim that men and women are identical mentally and emotionally, and are arbitrarily forced into social roles based on their physical sex.

If you buy this claim, there is no justification for “gender transition.” Gender is purely a social construct. What is there to transition to or from, other than to deny and reject the construct? Women simply need to refuse to stay in the home, or be sexually passive, and so forth. Men only need to choose to wear nice clothes and cook and clean. Why would there be any sense in surgically altering body parts?

So the bottom line is that gender transition is logical nonsense. It is a mask concealing the sexual grooming of children. And perhaps worse: deliberate intent to do them permanent harm.