Canada’s federal government has cheerfully proclaimed June to September to be Pride Season. Beyond the commonplace vulgarity in pride parades, one reasonably perceives a push to include new identities. And generous Canadians are inclusive.
But a push for inclusion is a push for power, and that makes inclusion a complex political beast. For starters, unless every person is included, any category is by nature exclusive of all others. The same is also true of new identities.
Liberal democratic societies wisely foster inclusion and avoid major social conflicts by respecting fundamental differences. Inclusion doesn’t mean accepting everything blindly, however. Liberal democracies support differences that uplift the humanity of individuals, understanding that all benefit in the defence of others’ rights and beliefs.
Consider the hallmark principle of liberal inclusivity: religious tolerance. Even anti-religious people who don’t agree with organized religion recognize that protecting religious beliefs strengthens the protection of all other beliefs.
The moral wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us that character is the successful benchmark for tolerance. His measure requires that people be judged not by their skin colour, but by their character.
Rights-seeking groups often use the successful strategies of the civil rights movement. However, it’s important to note that MLK’s wisdom, originally focused on race, has been misinterpreted as applied to sexual and other identities. King’s vision contemplated inclusion for creatures with a shared essence, not self-created persons.
Illustrating the inherent disconnect, discrimination based on sexual identity has been illegal for a generation, but the pursuit for “inclusivity” for myriad new sexual identities persists as though it were unlawful. This self-imposed victimhood is a self-excluding quest at various levels: It cuts itself off from common reality, from the complexities of rational language and dialogue, from the intricacies of justice founded on the Rule of Law, from the culture, and from nature itself.
The pursuit of inclusivity on narrow grounds thus leads to self-exclusion and clashes with other equality-seeking groups. Take, for instance, the likely collision between Ottawa’s Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia and the federal Secretariat for 2SLGBTQI+ when dealing with the Edmonton teacher (caught on tape) openly chastising Muslim students. The teacher branded the students’ opposition to homosexuality and transgender identities as un-Canadian. Her ultimatum was stark: either renounce those views or leave Canada.
Most egregious is the clash of new sexual identities with the hard-won rights of women, acquired after centuries of struggles for respect and safety. With respect and safety in mind, recall the case of the B.C. male claiming to be a woman, leveraging the human rights code to compel vulnerable immigrant women to wax his genitals. Or consider the less malevolent but more violent case of the man identifying as a woman who joined a women’s rugby team. His physical strength, far exceeding that of his female counterparts, resulted in several females being injured and subsequently excluded from the game.
The core issue isn’t with inclusivity itself, but the indulgence of a fantasy refusing common standards outside of feelings. In the dismissal of logic, the willful reluctance to define a woman is camouflage for the dogmatic affirmation that “trans women are women,” and for excluding those living in a common reality who reasonably disagree.
The push for untethered inclusivity also puts the most vulnerable at risk. Take, for example, sex reassignment in children. This practice, eerily reminiscent of the now-condemned eugenics movement, is a dangerous blend of social and medical experimentation. It inflicts profound damage on the children involved and often erases parental rights.
However, the nasty consequences of this form of “inclusivity” extend well beyond the eugenics comparison. Embracing unattainable fantasies as expressions of identity fosters neither equality nor understanding. The fallout of such unbound quest for inclusivity is producing a cocktail of bizarre unscientific beliefs and damaging practices.
By far the gravest danger is that a supposed feminist federal government is now willing to overlook the bedrock standards of common reality. On International Women’s Day, Justin Trudeau reaffirmed his own belief that “trans women are women,” and it is now federal policy to accept self-declared females into women’s prisons. Without a common reality, the rights of women and those of everyone else are compromised.
These arbitrary identity pursuits mirror the essence of tyranny—governance driven by capricious whims. The danger here is already manifest: These whims, now enforced by governments, are cleverly disguised as progressive ideologies, and dissenters are painted as enemies of tolerance and labelled fascists or racists. In disregard for positive and natural law, tradition, and the Constitution, Canada’s prime minister has already exemplified this danger when he suggested parents wishing to exercise their rights to guide their own children’s upbringing of being “far-right” extremists.
The promise of inclusion for the multiplying sexual identities, divorced from character, is a revolutionary quest that has become a gateway to abuse, division, and exclusion. Should governments continue this path, what awaits us instead of inclusion is a grim future of imposed whimsical dictates in the name of progress.
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