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Opinion

Ordinary working Canadians are not buying into transgender identity politics

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7 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

A couple of weeks ago, I made the mistake of turning on the news on my car radio. It was the CBC, and a panel was discussing Canada’s housing crisis. According to the experts brought on by the CBC, this crisis was accompanied by a shortage in tradesmen, and this shortage was in part due to the fact that construction sites were hostile environments for women and “non-binary people.” This, the panel opined, was a huge problem that needed to be fixed. It reminded me that the salaries of Canadian tradesmen are garnished to pay for this garbage. 

Listening to the panel, it struck me how out of touch progressive activists are with the reality of what they would call the “lived experience” of most normal people working normal, blue-collar jobs. Anyone who has worked on a construction site knows that enforcing political correctness – especially the swiftly moving Overton Window of acceptable speech these days – is a fool’s errand. Attempting to police the way men talk to one another on a job site is a great way to ensure hostility from said men, who incidentally have jobs to do. 

But progressives don’t seem to understand that most people simply trying to make a living aren’t interested in being hectored about their insufficiently up-to-date views on however many genders the Canadian establishment currently believes in. Case in point is a recent column in the Globe and Mail sounding the alarm about a new Canadian travesty: “Non-binary job applicants are less likely to receive interest from employers if they disclose gender-neutral pronouns on their resume, according to a recent working paper.” 

According to University of Toronto economics Ph.D. candidate Taryn Eames in a paper titled “TARYN VERSUS TARYN (SHE/HER) VERSUS TARYN (THEY/THEM): A Field Experiment on Pronoun Disclosure and Hiring Discrimination,” employers appear to be discriminating against “non-binary” Canadians. As Eames says in her abstract: 

Thousands of randomly generated, fictitious resumes were submitted to job postings in pairs where the treatment resume contained pronouns listed below the name and the control resume did not. Two treatments were considered: nonbinary ‘they/them’ and binary ‘he/him’ or ‘she/her’ pronouns congruent with implied sex. As such, I estimate discrimination against nonbinary and presumed cisgender applicants who disclose pronouns. Results show that nonbinary applicants face discrimination: disclosing ‘they/them’ pronouns reduces positive employer response by 5.4 percentage points. There is also evidence that discrimination is larger (approximately double) in Republican than Democratic geographies, potentially reflecting attitudinal differences. By comparison, results are inconclusive as to whether presumed cisgender applicants who disclose pronouns are discriminated against.

In her paper, Eames states that there is “strong evidence of discrimination against applicants who disclose nonbinary ‘they/them’ pronouns,” and, like the CBC panel, announces that this is a problem that needs to be solved. “Non-binary gender identities are becoming more and more common, especially among younger generations,” she said. “These people are going to be aging into the labour force, and this is going to become a bigger and bigger topic over time.”  

The Globe and Mail attempts, sloppily, to tie this study to parental rights policies in New Brunswick and elsewhere, as well as implying that Alberta’s proposal to ban sex change surgeries for minors are also part of an anti-trans trend that is “trickling down” into the workplace. “Even in situations where a hiring manager is open to hiring a non-binary employee, there may be perceived obstacles,” the Globe and Mail stated. “Customer-service positions, for instance, an employer might have concerns about how they will manage situations that can arise from employing a non-binary person.” 

The reporters assume, of course, that “non-binary” – that is, claiming to be neither male nor female – is a real identity that should be accepted by every employer and all of society at large. The assumption is that there is no debate over this recently invented identity category whatsoever, and that the task at hand is to find ways of forcing employers to proactively affirm the assertions of LGBT activists. They apparently do not stop to consider the fact that many employers simply want to do business and not be forced into cooperating with an ideology that they are ambivalent about. 

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He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016

Daily Caller

Joe Rogan Tells Elon Musk He ‘Changed’ History By Buying Twitter, Calls Out Previous Government Interference

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation 

 

By Hailey Gomez

The popular podcast host thanked Musk for deciding to buy the company, noting how social media companies had coordinated with the government to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, impacting the 2020 election.

Podcast host Joe Rogan told billionaire Elon Musk on Monday that he “changed the course of history” by buying Twitter in 2022, recounting how the government had become intertwined with social media platforms.

In October 2022, Musk won a legal battle to become the sole owner of Twitter, now known as X, and promptly fired several top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust and safety. On “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the popular podcast host thanked Musk for deciding to buy the company, noting how social media companies had coordinated with the government to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, impacting the 2020 election.

“First of all, thank you. Thank you so much for buying Twitter. Thank you so much. I’m not exaggerating when I think you changed the course of history. I really do. I really think you made a fork in the road. We were headed down a path of censorship and of control of narratives that is unprecedented,” Rogan said.

“Forget about what they were able to do back when they had newspapers and the media under control. What they were doing with social media by suppressing information and when you had a combined government effort — like with what they were doing with the laptop story,” Rogan added. “We have 51 former intelligence agents saying that this is Russian disinformation, take it off offline, and Twitter complied. If you didn’t buy that we wouldn’t have known that. We had no idea.”

Musk explained how he became aware that the system on Twitter was changing, pointing out how former President Donald Trump was permanently banned from the platform after Jan. 6, despite calling on his supporters not to riot.

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“The reason I bought [Twitter] was because I’m pretty attuned, since I was the most interacted with users on Twitter before the acquisition,” Musk said. “So before the acquisition I had more interactions then — like there’s some accounts like [former President Barack] Obama and whatever had a higher follower count — but I had the most number of interactions of any account in the system. So I was very attuned to like if they change the system, I can tell immediately. And I’m like, something weird is going on here, you know?”

“I just got increasingly uneasy and obviously when they de-platformed a sitting president, you know, de-platformed Trump — that was just insane. The things he was posting … he was posting good things. He was saying, ‘Hey, we do not riot, but don’t do any destruction of property, please stay calm.’ That’s the kind of stuff he was posting, and you’re like, ‘Uh, what’s wrong with that?’ Then some people said, ‘Oh, that’s like some sort of dog whistle, he means the opposite.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, so we’ll give you Trump’s account. Now you post what you think he should post because you can post nothing, he can ask people to calm down, like what? It was insane, it didn’t make any sense,” Musk said.

Following Musk’s acquisition of the company, the billionaire collaborated with independent journalists and authors like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger to release the “Twitter Files,” which revealed that the company’s former executives justified banning Trump by citing the “context surrounding” the former president and his supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”

After the interview with Musk was released Monday evening, Rogan announced on X that he endorsed Trump in his bid for the White House.

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Fraser Institute

U.S. election should focus or what works and what doesn’t work

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From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew D. Mitchell

As Republicans and Democrats make their final pitch to voters, they’ve converged on some common themes. Kamala Harris wants to regulate the price of food. Donald Trump wants to regulate the price of credit. Harris wants the tax code to favour the 2.5 per cent of workers who earn tips. So does Trump. Harris wants the government to steer more labour and capital into manufacturing. And so does Trump.

With each of these proposals, the candidates think the United States would be better off if the government made more economic decisions and—by implication—if individual citizens made fewer economic decisions. Both should pay closer attention to Zimbabwe. Yes, Zimbabwe.

Why does a country with abundant natural resources, rich culture and unparalleled beauty have one-sixth the average income of neighbouring Botswana? While we’re at it, why do twice as many children die in infancy in Azerbaijan as across the border in Georgia? Why do Hungarians work 20 per cent longer than their Austrian neighbours but earn 45 per cent less? Why is extreme poverty 200 times more common in Laos than across the Mekong River in Thailand?

Or how about this one: Why were more than one-quarter of Estonians formerly exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution when the country was socialist while today nearly every Estonian breathes clean air in what is ranked the cleanest country in the world.

These are anecdotes. However, the plural of anecdote is data, and through careful and systematic study of the data, we can learn what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, the populist economic policies in vogue among Democrats and Republicans do not work.

What does work is economic freedom.

Economic freedoms are a subset of human freedoms. When people have more economic freedom, they are allowed to make more of their own economic choices—choices about work, about buying and selling goods and services, about acquiring and using property, and about forming contracts with others.

For nearly 30 years, the Fraser Institute has been measuring economic freedom across countries. On one hand, governments can stop people from making their own economic choices through taxes, regulations, barriers to trade and manipulation of the value of money (see the proposals of Harris and Trump above). On the other hand, governments can enable individual economic choice by protecting people and their property.

The index published in Fraser’s annual Economic Freedom of the World report incorporates 45 indicators to measure how governments either prevent or enable individual economic choice. The result reveals the degree of economic freedom in 165 countries and territories worldwide, with data going back to 1970.

According to the latest report, comparatively wealthy Botswanans rank 84 places ahead of Zimbabweans in terms of the economic freedom their government permits them. Georgians rank 107 places ahead of Azerbaijanis, Thais rank 60 places ahead of Laotians, and Austrians are 32 places ahead of Hungarians.

The benefits of economic freedom go far beyond anecdotes and rankings. As Estonia—once one of the least economically free places in the world and now among the freest—dramatically shows, freer countries tend not only to be more prosperous but greener and healthier.

In fact, economists and other social scientists have conducted nearly 1,000 studies using the index to assess the effect of economic freedom on different aspects of human wellbeing. Their statistical comparisons include hundreds and sometimes thousands of data points and carefully control for other factors like geography, natural resources and disease environment.

Their results overwhelmingly support the idea that when people are permitted more economic freedom, they prosper. Those who live in freer places enjoy higher and faster-growing incomes, better health, longer life, cleaner environments, more tolerance, less violence, lower infant mortality and less poverty.

Economic freedom isn’t the only thing that matters for prosperity. Research suggests that culture and geography matter as well. While policymakers can’t always change people’s attitudes or move mountains, they can permit their citizens more economic freedom. If more did so, more people would enjoy the living standards of Botswana or Estonia and fewer people would be stuck in poverty.

As for the U.S., it remains relatively free and prosperous. Whatever its problems, decades of research cast doubt on the notion that America would be better off with policies that chip away at the ability of Americans to make their own economic choices.

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