Canadian Diversity and Right Wing Hate of Justin Trudeau

Yes, Justin Trudeau is a mediocre Prime Minister, but that is not why the right hates him. Nor is it because of carbon taxes or provincial vaccine mandates or lockdowns. It is because of perhaps the one thing he has excelled at and that is promoting Canadian diversity.

There are those that claim that Canada has no culture and others that claim that Canadian culture is a white European culture and anyone who was here before or came after the colonizers needs to adapt to that culture. But the truth is Canadian culture is a culture of diversity starting before anyone lived on this land and enhanced by everyone who came after.

Canadian diversity starts with it’s geography. We are a geographically diverse country (from sea to sea to sea to American border) and that is reflected in the diversity of our first peoples, from the peoples of the north, to the coastal peoples, the peoples of the prairies and the boreal forest and so on. All of these peoples had their own social systems and systems of government, including legal systems based on healing and restorative justice that were, and still are, centuries ahead of the European colonizers.

Then came the colonizers and immigrants who added to the diversity of the country adding traditions, languages and religions from all over the world. But it is not only ethnic and religious diversity that make us the country we are. We also have a diversity of physical and mental abilities, including neurodivergent people, as well as peoples of different sexual orientations and gender identity, first recognized by Canada’s first people through the concept of two spirit people.

The Prime Minister has recognized that our diversity is our strength and that is one of the main reasons he has become the target of the hate of right wing extremists and white supremacists.

Postscript.

None of this is to deny Canada’s historical mistreatment of our indigenous peoples or it’s discriminatory treatment of newcomers or other vulnerable peoples. That is a whole treatise on it’s own. This is meant to be focused on Canadian ideals and how we move forward in the future.

On Gender Identity

I was born in 1950 at a time when spouses were specifically excluded from rape laws and homosexuality was illegal. Homosexuality was only whispered about in “polite company” and people with a gender identity or gender expression that differed from their assigned sex did not exist, and by that I mean their existence was not acknowledged by “mainstream society”. In the early 1950s only 25% of women were in the work force and most of those were doing women's work, in female dominated occupations.

Things have changed a lot since then as far as women's work roles and the acceptance of gay people as fully accepted members of society, even the terminology has changed with “homosexual” going the way of “negro”.

Society as a whole seems to have a harder time understanding and accepting transgender individuals. I can understand how it can be hard, especially for members of a certain generation (mine), to wrap your head around what is essentially a very complex concept that is foreign to a generation born when males mere males and females were females and the roles were very strictly defined.

That in a way was the most difficult thing for me to get my head around. I spent most of my life belonging to movements that opposed the concept of sex role stereotyping, such as the idea that there was men's work and women's work, that women belonged in the caring occupations like nursing and teaching while only men were suited for heavy industry or the police or military. We essentially argued that the way you acted, or who you were, was separate from your sex. We did not consider the concept or gender identity as we would describe it today.

However when one thinks about it more deeply one realizes that people are individuals and the idea of separating sex and gender from identity as a way of defining sexual equality may be the wrong way of looking at it.

For some women being able to work in a non-traditional job may be what they need to be fulfilled. For some men it may simply be not being required to act in society as a stereotypical macho male.

But for other people there is a much bigger disconnect between their assigned sex at birth and who they are as human beings. For them being their authentic self requires them to live life as a different gender than the sex assigned to them at birth, in some cases requiring surgery to align their outer bodies with their inner selves.

What the rest of us need to understand and accept is that people live more fulfilling lives when they can be their authentic selves, while miserable lives, possibly leading to suicide, is a real possibility if people are not allowed to be their authentic selves.

The rest of us have a choice. We can play word and definition games telling people they are wrong about themselves and that we know them better than they do, or we can be decent human beings and affirm their existence as who they are.

Definitions

Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender.[1] Gender identity can correlate with assigned sex at birth, or can differ from it.[2] All societies have a set of gender categories that can serve as the basis of the formation of a person's social identity in relation to other members of society.[3] In most societies, there is a basic division between gender attributes assigned to males and females,[4] a gender binary to which most people adhere and which includes expectations of masculinity and femininity in all aspects of sex and gender: biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression.[5] Some people do not identify with some, or all, of the aspects of gender assigned to their biological sex;[6] some of those people are transgender, genderqueer or non-binary. There are some societies that have third gender categories. Source: Wikipedia

Transgender people have a gender identity or gender expression that differs from their assigned sex.[1][2][3] Transgender people are sometimes called transsexual if they desire medical assistance to transition from one sex to another. Transgender is also an umbrella term: in addition to including people whose gender identity is the opposite of their assigned sex (trans men and trans women), it may include people who are not exclusively masculine or feminine (people who are genderqueer or non-binary, including bigender, pangender, genderfluid, or agender).[2][4][5] Other definitions of transgender also include people who belong to a third gender, or else conceptualize transgender people as a third gender.[6][7] Infrequently, the term transgender is defined very broadly to include cross-dressers,[8] regardless of their gender identity. Source: Wikipedia

Cisgender (often abbreviated to simply cis) is a term for people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. Cisgender may also be defined as those who have "a gender identity or perform a gender role society considers appropriate for one's sex".[1] It is the opposite of the term transgender.[2][3] Source: Wikipedia