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Barbara Kay: Trans activist files human rights complaints against media for failing to deny reality

'Prolific litigant' Jessica Simpson is attempting to silence critics of gender mysticism

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In Jonathan Swift’s satirical 18th century masterpiece, “Gulliver’s Travels,” his sea-faring protagonist visits various fictional lands, whose inhabitants represent facets of human nature that range from the merely irksome to the grimly repulsive. In the final chapter, we meet the noble race of Houyhnhnms — clean, attractive, kind, intelligent horses who are capable of conversing with Gulliver.

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The Houyhnhnms do not represent humans as they are, but as Swift wishes they were. They shine in contrast with the land’s other inhabitants — filthy, human-like Yahoos (the origin of the familiar trope), a symbol of Swift’s disgust for mankind’s most irrational and aggressive traits.

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Describing his species to the curious Houyhnhnms, Gulliver mentions the human penchant for “lying and false representation.” The horses are baffled. Having no word for “lying,” since lying runs contrary to the whole purpose of language, they express the concept as “the thing which is not.”

Satire is the humorous exaggeration of reality as a palatable vehicle for warning of the dangers inherent in a social, cultural or political trend. When I consider the various domains in postmodern society in which “the thing which is not” prevails over objective truth, I find myself in old age more conscious of the warning than the humour that dominated my undergrad self’s encounter with Swift’s mordant view of humanity.

Our society’s official understanding of gender ideology, for example, is predicated on the assumption that it is entirely normal for one’s gender — a subjective and fungible sense of one’s masculine or feminine or mixed identity — to float free of corporeal or genetic influence, even though the sex and gender identity of the vast majority of humanity is congruent. “A transwoman is a woman,” we are instructed to believe. It is obvious to anyone who remains faithful to language norms that to say a male “is” a female is to say “the thing which is not.”

Nevertheless, highly educated people, including trained legal minds, have not only endorsed this linguistic product of gender mysticism, they have endorsed its alleged attendant social crimes: “misgendering” trans-identifying males (TIMs) — even rapists and mass murderers — who claim to be female, and trans-identifying females (TIFs) who claim to be male; critiquing ideology-as-science in the classroom; resisting “gender-affirming” interventions that include fertility-threatening drugs to alter children’s natural growth cycles or mutilate their bodies; and — worst of all, in some people’s offence hierarchy — “deadnaming” them by publicly referencing their pre-transition names.

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This last social crime is rather curious. An adopted child may consider her adoptive parents to be her literal mom and dad in every way that matters to her. She may fervently wish they were her biological parents. But have any adopted children ever filed a complaint to a human rights tribunal against someone who referred to them publicly as “adopted” or named their already known biological parents?

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TIMs and TIFs own their wishes and feelings, but they do not own their pasts or our common language, where changes traditionally occur organically, not by fiat. In the 1977 play, “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” set in a Soviet mental hospital (hellholes where political dissenters were incarcerated, often for life), a doctor refers to an inmate’s “symptoms.” The patient says: “I have no symptoms, I have opinions.” The doctor responds: “Your opinions are your symptoms.” The forms of persecution differ today, but the mindset is all too familiar.

Last month, Jessica Simpson, previously identified in legal documents as Jessica Yaniv and Jonathan Yaniv, sent me copies of three complaints filed at the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal over my social media posts and public commentary. The details are fleshed out in an April 15 press release from the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), which kindly offered to defend me and several other vocal dissenters from gender mysticism, who received similar notices.

In the complaints, discrimination is alleged on the grounds that my public commentary questions Simpson’s gender identity by using biological language, using male pronouns or referencing a prior name. Simpson has been described by courts as a “prolific litigant,” having been involved in numerous unsuccessful human rights and civil proceedings.

As a separate JCCF press release responding to a complaint Simpson filed against the publisher of the Western Standard notes, “Simpson has also been involved in criminal proceedings, including a conviction related to possession of a prohibited weapon and a separate assault conviction arising from an incident involving a journalist.”

My JCCF-affiliated constitutional lawyer advised me that I had two options: ask for a dismissal of the complaints, or go forward and challenge them on their merits. I chose the latter. I agree with the JCCF that these cases highlight the “growing tension between human rights legislation and the Charter freedom of expression, which protects the right of Canadians to discuss, debate and even criticize ideas on controversial social issues.”

If asked at a putative Human Rights Tribunal hearing for a defence of my statements, I will say that, “I would never give credence to something as a reality when it is not a reality.” Call it the Houyhnhnms gambit.

National Postkaybarb@gmail.comTwitter.com/BarbaraRKay

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