Juno News - July 29, 2023


An honest conversation about transgenderism (feat. Julia Malott)


Episode Stats

Length

42 minutes

Words per Minute

204.31009

Word Count

8,779

Sentence Count

470

Misogynist Sentences

17

Hate Speech Sentences

30


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this True North interview. I'm Ily Canté-Nantel. Today we will be discussing
00:00:06.900 transgenderism, one of the most hot-button political and cultural topics of our time.
00:00:14.880 Transgender activism and policy has been particularly controversial due to the impact
00:00:21.520 that it has had on children, women, and free speech. Today I will be discussing the latter
00:00:28.900 with transgender woman Julia Malat, who has been critical of gender ideology and modern-day
00:00:38.860 trans activism. She has a blog website called Alata Thoughts, where she makes short videos
00:00:46.840 expressing her thoughts on various issues that relate to transgenderism. And today I have the
00:00:55.140 privilege of speaking with her. Before we get started though, please drop a like on this video
00:01:02.100 and consider subscribing to True North if you haven't already. Julia, thank you so much for
00:01:07.060 joining me today. I'm quite excited for this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for
00:01:11.480 inviting me. So how about we get started with you telling us a bit about your journey as a transgender
00:01:18.540 woman? You know, what age did you start experiencing gender dysphoria? And when and why did you decide
00:01:24.840 to transition? And how has that been for you? So I would say in a certain sense, I've always felt
00:01:30.300 this way. And I say that with an asterisk, as I say most things, because when you're a kid, you don't
00:01:36.500 know what you're feeling, right? These are, I often think of some of the conversations I've had with
00:01:41.940 friends who are gay. And it can take a while to, to kind of realize that because you live in a society
00:01:49.780 where the expectation, our norm is to be straight. And so there's kind of that assumption. And sometimes
00:01:55.220 it can take quite a while to realize that there seems to be a conflict or something doesn't seem
00:01:58.700 to be lining up that way. And for me, that was, that was very much how this was. I felt these things
00:02:02.960 very young. I didn't know what they were. I didn't have a word for them and nobody talked about it.
00:02:06.580 I'm a nineties baby. And so when I was in school, this was not a conversation and people,
00:02:11.280 people knew that something was going on. I saw four different counselors before grade six
00:02:14.860 because Jason didn't have any friends. And I was Jason, by the way, and Jason didn't have any
00:02:19.100 friends and Jason didn't have, you know, didn't, didn't connect with, with his classmates and Jason
00:02:24.000 didn't, had severe anxiety and all these things, but nobody was looking at it from an angle of
00:02:30.040 identity. Nobody was looking at an angle from gender dysphoria because that just wasn't that common
00:02:35.280 in, in psychiatrics back in the nineties. For myself, I came to find the word transgender and
00:02:40.740 trans, transsexual when I was 12 years old. And I found that myself online because I got to a point
00:02:45.620 of desperation where I was older than I was starting to kind of understand what I was feeling
00:02:49.860 and realize like, Oh, I really don't like being a boy. I'm really uncomfortable with the thought of
00:02:55.380 developing to be a man. And I've always felt more like what I saw with the girls in my class and
00:03:00.980 women aligned more with how I felt. And so I'm going to the internet because that's all we had back
00:03:05.320 then. Cause this wasn't in schools. This wasn't in the healthcare system. And I'm finding,
00:03:08.980 you know, very low grade blogs. This was not medical stuff, but I find people talking about
00:03:12.600 it and I go, Oh, there's other people who feel the way that I do. And I was always a very big
00:03:17.660 science nerd. So once I did this, I thought, well, I want to find real information because blogs are
00:03:22.140 great, but that's just people speaking about their opinions. So I actually got a, I got a high school
00:03:27.380 biology textbooks and I learned high school biology in grades seven and eight, because in my, you know,
00:03:33.460 very egotistical child mind, I'm like, I want to figure out the answer. Why do I feel this way?
00:03:37.560 What's going on? And I guess I assumed that I would somehow get an answer that no one else had. No one
00:03:41.960 had clearly asked this question. And Jason was going to be the first one. And then I went into the
00:03:46.420 journal articles. So I don't know how much you followed a lot of the stuff around transgender matters,
00:03:50.540 but a lot of the big researchers like Zucker and Bailey and Lawrence, they were people. I was
00:03:57.320 reading their articles that they were coming out as a, as a teenager, but I was at the same time
00:04:01.380 hiding all of this from my family, from my church, and from really all of my circles, because I
00:04:07.300 attached an immense amount of shame to how I was feeling. And so I wasn't confronting it. I certainly
00:04:12.180 wasn't telling anybody at this point, and I wasn't not transitioning. But I was understanding how I
00:04:18.680 felt and processing those feelings in a very unhealthy way. And I guess, how has it been since
00:04:25.440 transitioning? Do you feel like for you, this was the right decision?
00:04:32.820 That's such an, that's such an interesting question. So to continue my story, I am about 14,
00:04:38.900 15 years old, I kind of came to the decision for myself that I certainly wouldn't pursue a transition.
00:04:44.820 I was uncomfortable with the thought of doing that. It was certainly not compatible with my
00:04:48.580 faith, or my family. And it was at that point that I kind of became extremely religious. I dove
00:04:55.000 into my faith much more than I had in the past. I attended an evangelical Christian church,
00:04:59.760 and actually worked in a church then for a number of years following that. And I got a
00:05:06.420 girlfriend in grade 11, and I ended up marrying her. So we got married when we were 22. And she knew
00:05:10.840 about this. We had talked about it when I was 18 years old. But it was one of those things that we
00:05:14.540 kind of talked about. And we just sort of left and ignored and didn't deal with. And our life didn't
00:05:19.580 work. My life specifically didn't work. I wasn't happy. I wasn't thriving. And I was extremely
00:05:27.560 narcissistic. And as I've gone through therapy since, as I kind of look back, I attribute a lot
00:05:32.580 of that to the shame that I was holding on myself. And that's why I have a hard time answering the
00:05:37.960 question you just asked, in terms of, I am much happier, I have a much more workable life now,
00:05:43.420 and I'm thriving. But I have transitioned. And I have worked through the shame that I held around
00:05:49.560 my dysphoria and not sharing it and not talking about it, not dealing with it and being open about
00:05:54.060 it. And I think it would be dishonest of me to act as though I can separate those. And I can know
00:05:59.800 how much of the success and peace of mind I have now comes from the transition, and how much of it
00:06:05.860 comes from dealing with the shame. I'm sure they both contributed. I can't say to what degree.
00:06:12.240 Right. And I guess this is where some, I guess, people are saying that, well,
00:06:15.980 transition alone isn't the answer. There has to be other things as well, right? It's not just a
00:06:21.560 black and white kind of one size fits all kind of super solution, right? So I think your story kind of
00:06:29.140 alludes to that. Then why did you start your blog? I know you have a lot of thoughts.
00:06:35.860 Yeah. And you discuss a lot of these issues from a really nuanced and I think a very common sense.
00:06:40.920 And, you know, you think a critical perspective on both the gender ideology, but also as to some of
00:06:45.340 the other side that is critical of gender ideology, and you really kind of do an analysis, which,
00:06:50.420 you know, I really like. But what made you decide to do this? Because I mean, it is,
00:06:55.500 even as a transgender person, kind of a risk to go and challenge the narrative.
00:07:00.200 Yeah, it is. It is a risk in bad ways and in good ways. In bad ways, it's a risk because there's a
00:07:09.440 very homogenous narrative in the LGBT space and in progressive circles. And I haven't aligned with
00:07:16.600 a lot of the progressive way of thinking ever, really. But it's easy to be given cover. It's
00:07:20.900 easy to stay there and stay quiet. And people will assume that you align with certain beliefs. But
00:07:25.200 speaking out as I've done has certainly created a wedge between those circles and myself, which is
00:07:29.940 a risk. But it's also opened up lots of really interesting and wonderful relationships with
00:07:34.500 people of other, you know, ways of thinking, which I value. Because for me, I don't posit to have the
00:07:40.280 right answer. I think that we need to be able to ask the questions. And that, I guess, is one of the
00:07:44.420 main reasons I started to speak up is I realized we were hitting a point where we're not allowing the
00:07:49.280 questions to be asked at all. I think the first video I did, so I do something called A Lot of
00:07:53.740 Thoughts. I usually do these videos that are about five to six minutes long. Sometimes they're
00:07:57.120 longer, depending on how much I have to say. But I explore topics around all of the stuff around
00:08:02.180 gender identity and gender ideology, you know, schools and free speech and how all of these
00:08:06.140 intersect. And I really got started on that as I was watching our school boards here in Ontario.
00:08:11.780 And the number of people who were bringing concerns to school board meetings, and were simply not
00:08:16.820 allowed to talk, they were being shut down and told that their concern inherently was hateful or
00:08:21.680 transphobic or in some other way a violation of the Ontario human rights. And that concerned me
00:08:29.500 because that can exist, right? Like there is a line that can be crossed where you can become hateful.
00:08:34.300 And I have seen that happen too. But I was seeing more and more incidents where someone just has a
00:08:40.000 concern. They say, I want to talk about washing usage, or I want to talk about these books that I find
00:08:43.880 concerning. And I don't believe that shutting that down is helpful, both because if we want to live in a
00:08:50.840 liberal society, then we have to be able to have these conversations. And the idea of a book might
00:08:54.900 be might be harmful is a great conversation to have. And we can talk about it, and we can decide
00:08:58.900 whether it is, but we don't have to shut it down. And also, because I came to realize that the more
00:09:03.660 militant those sorts of issues are being shut down, the more it comes back to people like me,
00:09:09.100 because people end up blaming someone who's transgender for it. And I'm sitting here thinking,
00:09:13.120 whoa, whoa, whoa, I think these are great conversations. Why? Why are they being shut down? And so those are
00:09:16.920 kind of the two things that came together and gave me the impetus to start speaking as I do.
00:09:22.020 Right. And you mentioned some of the topics that we're going to get into. I mean, I would argue
00:09:26.860 that somebody pushback against transgenderism, kind of transgender activism, rather, comes from
00:09:35.060 the way that it's impacted three main areas, the way it's impacting children, the way it's impacting
00:09:39.520 women in women's spaces, and in speech. And we're going to kind of go into these three things
00:09:45.360 together. We'll start with children. I think it's the most relevant one, and you brought it up with
00:09:49.900 the school boards. A big debate that's happening in both the United States and Canada and other parts
00:09:55.300 of the world is, should children who cannot drive or cannot buy alcohol be able to medically transition
00:10:05.520 or socially transition? So you told me a bit earlier that you, as a teenager, had gender dysphoria,
00:10:14.120 and you felt like something was wrong. So there's definitely a lot of young people that feel
00:10:18.940 this gender dysphoria. What are your thoughts on the idea of transitioning children and teenagers?
00:10:27.760 Yeah, I think the pattern that we're going to see in this interview is I will not give you a
00:10:32.500 straight answer on anything. And I think that's because of the nuance that interlaces all of these
00:10:36.260 topics. So I am not at a place that I'm comfortable being unilaterally opposed to any
00:10:42.960 and every childhood transition. And I think here we should clarify what we mean by childhood
00:10:47.460 transition. Some people mean that socially, i.e. they have a name and a pronoun that they adopted
00:10:52.300 in school, and that's it. Some people mean that hormonally, you know, they're going to go on some
00:10:56.940 kind of a blocker like Lupron, or they're going to be going on to estradiol or testosterone.
00:11:00.740 Or this could mean surgically. This could mean going to those steps of having a mastectomy or
00:11:05.160 having reassignment surgeries with the genitals. And in all of those cases, I'm not comfortable
00:11:12.640 drawing a line and saying never is that ever appropriate. But I'm certainly comfortable saying
00:11:18.120 the process we're following right now is not working. Because we've gone from a place of being
00:11:23.060 very gatekeeping and very rigid on anything to do with transition for kids and adults, which is
00:11:28.120 how it was probably up until the early 2000s. And when we realized that that was perhaps
00:11:34.000 very restrictive and very problematic for people with deep dysphoria, we kind of swung entirely the
00:11:39.020 other way. And now we've hit this place where even our medical system often can't ask the questions
00:11:44.620 that are necessary, even for adults, to really vet and identify, is this the right measures for an
00:11:51.160 individual to take? And that concerns me for adults too, not just children. But with children,
00:11:56.200 there's the added element of their minors, of their brains are still developing. And I know that the
00:12:01.020 system means well in this. They've looked at dysphoric cases like myself. I do believe I was
00:12:05.380 probably a kid who would have benefited with a childhood transition. But I've also known lots of
00:12:10.080 kids who want a childhood transition who, with what I know and with what I've seen with all of the cases
00:12:13.980 that I've worked with, I observe them and think, I'm not so sure that that's the right fix for you
00:12:18.160 at all. You have a lot of other comorbidities that maybe should be tackled first. And so
00:12:21.840 I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution. And that's where we've ended up right
00:12:27.140 now, because we've made it into a human right to say everybody has the right to express gender and
00:12:32.380 identity and expression as they see fit. And that's kind of trapped us into a corner in a
00:12:37.120 certain way to say you can't question, you can't vet out if there's anything else going on under the
00:12:42.840 hood, because that's deemed to be conversion, that's deemed to be non-affirming, when really
00:12:46.360 I would posit that's just asking the questions that should always be asked. And I think that's
00:12:52.060 where I do differ from the predominant LGBT narrative, that I don't think it's better to
00:12:58.560 be trans. I think it is a very, you know, caring thing that we allow people to do who have deep
00:13:05.540 dysphoria like myself, because other mechanisms haven't worked. But if there's a kid and they
00:13:10.140 could transition, or we can give them a fulfilled and prosperous life without transitioning, I believe
00:13:14.740 we should always choose the non-transition path that has less, you know, surgical risk,
00:13:18.700 less hormonal risk, it's cheaper, it's less stigmatizing. I think that this is a path we go
00:13:23.420 down when other options haven't worked. And we've shifted from that attitude to this place of you are
00:13:28.700 the arbiter of your own fate. And if this is what you want, you should pursue it. But this is a one-way
00:13:33.620 path in certain ways. I am post-surgical, so there's lots of things that I'm not getting back if I
00:13:37.680 change my mind. Right, for sure. And we're seeing a lot of older young adults that are
00:13:44.660 now detransitioning and they're saying, well, this was not my problem. But because this ideology of
00:13:49.900 gender reformation, rather than, you know, being like, let's see what is wrong with you. Is it gender
00:13:56.120 dysphoria? It could be something else. And you know, if it is, in the end, gender dysphoria, then let's
00:14:02.100 actually go and help you. We're just kind of trying if a kid is confused. And I do think that's a bit
00:14:11.000 problematic. Kind of on the same topic, you brought up social transitions. And I know you've spoken out
00:14:16.960 against this idea of hiding social transitions from parents when kids are socially transitioning
00:14:23.280 at school. This is a debate that's going on right now in New Brunswick. So could you maybe explain
00:14:29.380 why you don't agree with that? And I will ask you a question, I guess, from their side,
00:14:34.160 is they claim that some homes aren't safe for trans people and hence the kid needs to be protected from
00:14:39.540 their parents. What would your answer be to that claim that's made by trans activists?
00:14:46.320 Yeah, yeah. So this is the topic that I've done a few videos on, just because it's been such a hot
00:14:50.460 button issue in Canada and the States over the last six months. I've also delegated a number of school
00:14:57.200 boards in Ontario on this on this matter as well. And it's there's an interesting undertone in this
00:15:03.840 discussion, because the part that I have a hard time reconciling is that first, we're saying that
00:15:10.800 transition is that identity is key, right? Identity is formative for an individual,
00:15:16.180 we must affirm them or else significant harms can come. And that's the reason why we are suggesting that
00:15:22.540 very, very young children even need to have their identity firmed, whatever that might be,
00:15:27.000 because we don't want to cause harm. But then at the exact same time as this is happening,
00:15:32.100 we're not telling the parents. So the background here is that many school districts, I know in
00:15:36.940 Ontario is every school board except for one, I don't know about all of the other provinces across
00:15:40.220 Ontario, but many school boards will hide a social transition from parents if the kid doesn't
00:15:46.100 want their parents to be told. So a kid can come to the teacher, they can say, you know,
00:15:49.740 I'm Jason, but I now want to be Julia and I want to be called she her. And the school has an explicit
00:15:54.540 policy in place that will enable that transition, the teacher will get in front of the whole class
00:15:59.140 and tell all the classmates that now Jason is Julia, all the other teachers will know so that
00:16:03.020 on the playground, Jason's not being called Julia, the principal knows. And they also know that if the
00:16:07.660 parents call in, and so talking about Jason, well, we don't tell them that Jason goes by Julia here.
00:16:12.820 So it's taken a very active role in enabling this transition. And that's the piece that I have the most
00:16:18.060 discomfort with kind of, as I mentioned earlier, I'm not here to comment on any particular kid and
00:16:23.900 whether a social transition is right or not for them. I have my thoughts and I have my concerns
00:16:27.500 with some of the cases I've seen, but that's not my role. However, I do think that the parents and
00:16:32.600 the medical system must be involved in these decisions. And if the school enables it, and is
00:16:36.780 hiding it from the parents, and that clearly isn't happening. And so that's the piece that I have
00:16:41.160 kind of most vocally spoken out against is the importance of parental rights and parental
00:16:44.940 involvement because of all the comorbidities and other factors that can be at play for that child.
00:16:50.700 Yeah, absolutely. I think that to the idea of deceiving parents, it is wrong. But what if there
00:17:00.700 is a case, for example, where there is a child who says, my parents at home are always railing against
00:17:07.600 transgender people, and they say they would rather, you know, be dead than have a trans kid, for example.
00:17:13.580 And this kid feels gender dysphoric and wants to be affirmed at school, but doesn't feel safe
00:17:18.620 at home. I guess, what would you say would be the solution in a case like that?
00:17:24.280 Yeah, I guess I'd say three things. First thing I would say is I know what it's like
00:17:28.220 to be at school, and to not want your parents to know what's going on. Because I lived in a small
00:17:33.180 town growing up. My dad was an elementary teacher, and my mother was a high school teacher. So I spent my
00:17:38.300 entire time at school with a parent in the building, which meant they didn't find out the stuff that,
00:17:42.220 you know, parents normally found out about the call home stuff, that Jason did something really
00:17:45.980 bad and punched someone, they found out the tiny little details, like Jason didn't do one of the
00:17:49.500 questions on his math homework last night, that would make it to my mom, because she was a math
00:17:52.780 teacher. And so I know what it's like to not want your parents to know things. And I also know what
00:17:57.580 it's like to not want your parents to know that you have feelings surrounding transgender identities,
00:18:02.060 because that was me. And I was devastated and dreaded the thought of my parents knowing, like,
00:18:06.940 this was back in the 90s. But I kept a journal of a lot of my thoughts around this. And I kept
00:18:11.420 it on an encrypted floppy drive that I had hidden in a place in my room, and my parents weren't even
00:18:15.980 technical. But like, I did all these things. So it's just in my head, the absolute worst thing
00:18:19.900 that could happen that would rip my family apart was my parents discovering how I felt about my gender.
00:18:26.620 And I didn't think that they would react well. And when I finally told them at 28, it wasn't good.
00:18:32.620 Yeah, there's a few years of tension in my family. But what service are we doing to any child by
00:18:38.620 hiding this? Because one thing I know from transitioning is that once you start transitioning,
00:18:43.900 you want it more. Once you decide to go by Julia and she, her, and you have a close circle of affirming
00:18:49.980 friends who back you on that and support you in that identity, you resent everyone who calls you Jason
00:18:54.380 even more. And so in that sense, we are going to push them away from their family at home. We're
00:18:59.820 going to pull them closer into their teachers, into the educators and into their classmates at
00:19:04.300 school. And they're still stuck in that house for anywhere from, you know, several to many,
00:19:08.540 many years, depending on their age. And so I don't know where this is supposed to end in that respect.
00:19:13.740 It's one thing, you know, it'd be one thing if they were working with a counselor or a therapist
00:19:18.140 at school, and everyone agrees the parent has to know, and you're not quite ready to tell them yet,
00:19:22.380 okay, so how are we going to get to that point? How are we going to work on this case? That would be one
00:19:25.500 situation. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is just
00:19:29.180 the medical side of it isn't our problem. We'll just do our part by calling you what
00:19:32.300 you want to be called and hope all goes well as things as things form. That comes to my second
00:19:37.500 point, which is, we have and have always had a mechanism for handling abusive situations at home.
00:19:45.260 In the analysis I've done on this, in some of the speeches I've made, there are so many ways that I
00:19:49.660 get notified of my daughter, she's in grade 11, when anything happens, you know, I have to fill out a
00:19:53.580 permission form for her to leave school property. I get called every time she is missing, you know,
00:19:57.420 is missing for a class. And yet, I wouldn't, I wouldn't know about this. What if my daughter's
00:20:02.700 report card comes home and she does really poorly in her classes? Some families are abusive. Some
00:20:07.260 families might, you know, lash out physically or emotionally at their children for that. And that
00:20:11.420 is horrible. But no one has suggested that we stop giving report cards to parents because they
00:20:16.060 might not respond positively. How we've always handled it is if a teacher has a bonafide
00:20:20.380 concern, they have real credible reason to believe that there's something wrong in a household,
00:20:24.300 then they go to Children's Aid Services, because Children's Aid Services has the ability to come in
00:20:29.020 and check out the household, they can have access to the house, they have access to the medical records,
00:20:32.860 they can understand if there's a real concern, or if there's not a real concern. I look at my case
00:20:37.660 and say my parents, I was scared to tell them, but they weren't abusive. If Children's Aid had been
00:20:41.740 involved, they would have very clearly known that there was no credible concern, other than my
00:20:45.980 discomfort and telling my parents. But if a child comes to school and says, I feel that I want to go
00:20:51.020 by she, her and Julia, but I think my parents are going to hit me like that, then Children's Aid is
00:20:55.900 the one who should solve that. Because if you're going to be hit over that, maybe they're being hit
00:20:59.500 over other things too. And this is why we have Children's Aid. And it just blows my mind that this
00:21:04.140 is the one area that we've decided to circumvent that process that by and large works pretty well for
00:21:09.420 identifying abusive households and supporting the households and resolving that.
00:21:12.860 Yeah, for sure. No, I totally would agree with you there that there are mechanisms in place.
00:21:18.540 And what's good with the New Brunswick law, it actually has a few steps in place to how to deal
00:21:24.460 with kids who aren't ready yet, to work with a counselor, to come up with a plan. Oftentimes,
00:21:28.460 kids just need a plan. And I think oftentimes, and this is not every time, but there's oftentimes where
00:21:34.380 kids are more scared of coming out than actually coming out. They realize once they come out,
00:21:39.340 well, I didn't expect the parents to react so positively, right? There's often this fear of
00:21:44.860 announcing big news. Let's move on to the second area of controversy, which is the way that this is
00:21:53.660 impacting women. I mean, you are a transgender woman yourself. So I feel like this is something
00:21:58.940 that you may have a bit of experience on dealing with, or at least online. So there are a lot of
00:22:05.580 feminists are saying, and this is a view that I personally share about the sports is that biological
00:22:12.940 males should not be competing in competitive women's sports. And there's also people who say biological
00:22:19.260 males don't belong in other women's spaces. They'll say like change rooms or dormitories,
00:22:24.940 or even bathrooms, they would argue. Somebody like yourself, who looks and presents like a woman
00:22:30.700 should go and use the man's washroom. What are your thoughts on the idea of female spaces,
00:22:36.780 female sports? Where do we draw the line? You mentioned earlier about nuance. Where's the nuance
00:22:41.580 in this and what's acceptable and what is not according to you? Yeah. Some of these matters,
00:22:49.580 I have stronger opinions on than others. Some sports I have probably the weakest opinions on,
00:22:55.100 typically because I'm not athletic. I like to rock climb. Rock climbing is lovely. Other than that,
00:23:00.540 I have always shied away from sports. I'm not competitive. And so I don't even watch competitive
00:23:05.340 sports. It's a domain that I'm aware of the transgender side of it because of the work I do,
00:23:09.340 but I have very, very little skin in the game on either side in terms of where this lands.
00:23:13.820 But I had a really, really inspired conversation with someone, I don't know, three or four months
00:23:18.700 ago here. And I think we were talking about prisons that time. I forget, we were talking about one of
00:23:24.940 the hot button topics here. And she said to me that, you know, so often we're ignoring that
00:23:33.260 these institutions or these structures already had problems that weren't working. And rather than
00:23:39.900 look at the root problem, now we've become really, really focused on the way that certain transgender
00:23:44.460 matters perpetuate the problem, but we're still ignoring the root problem. And I love that in
00:23:48.460 prisons because the way we do prisons doesn't work. And I think, I think a lot of us know that,
00:23:53.180 you know, why does anybody ever get abused in prison? Why does anybody ever die in prison?
00:23:57.900 Why does anybody ever get raped in prison? Like, I'm not okay with the, you know, a biological
00:24:02.860 male being in a woman's prison and causing abuse or rape, but I'm actually not okay with anybody
00:24:07.100 being in prison and ended up being abused or raped period, you know? And when you look at the stats,
00:24:11.260 I think it's 60% of the abuses and rapes in, in women's prisons are actually coming from the guards.
00:24:17.020 So it's like, why, why is that happening? Like clearly the system doesn't function the way that
00:24:20.940 it needs to function and we should fix that. Like that would be an amazing thing to fix. And do I
00:24:26.460 think that, you know, someone who's biologically male who has been convicted of a sex crime should be
00:24:31.340 in a woman's prison? I don't think that, I think that's a bad idea, but I also think that just fixing that
00:24:37.420 is going to leave so many other vulnerabilities still. So I try to look at these kind of
00:24:40.940 very holistically and say, what, what in the system overall could be better? And on the sports thing,
00:24:46.780 I look at the nuance and say, not all sports are the same thing. You know, some sports,
00:24:51.980 you benefit immensely from being taller, but be more muscular. Other sports like gymnastics, you know,
00:24:57.660 it's, and sometimes it can be the opposite. And so it really depends on what sport are we looking at
00:25:02.140 and what advantages do exist. And so I don't think that a one size fits all necessarily is
00:25:08.700 appropriate. There's also questions of when did someone go on, um, on blockers? When did someone
00:25:13.820 go on hormones? But I also empathize with the arguments that people are giving, you know,
00:25:18.940 it is upsetting when you see somebody who is six foot five or six foot six and has gone through
00:25:23.980 male puberty and has big masculine muscles to be able to blow any biological woman out of the,
00:25:28.220 you know, out of the water, so to say, if it was a swimming competition. And that would bother me
00:25:32.780 too, I think if I was in that. So I don't think that it's something I'm comfortable just kind of
00:25:37.900 going all into nothing on, but how's that for a non-answer? I'm practicing being a politician. Can you
00:25:43.660 tell? Another issue that some feminists will point to is this change in language. And they say that this
00:25:51.020 is erasing women. I mean, we've seen here in Canada, the governments use the term pregnant people
00:25:56.140 rather than pregnant women, uh, birthing persons instead of mothers, we say chest feeding instead
00:26:01.260 of breastfeeding and feminine hygiene has been replaced with menstrual hygiene. And I mean,
00:26:05.500 I've even seen cases of tampons being put in, you know, men's washrooms. Do you, what are your
00:26:11.820 thoughts on this gender neutral language to refer to things that have traditionally, uh, been female
00:26:18.700 only like pregnancy, like menstruation? Do you think it's beneficial to use these, these gender
00:26:23.500 neutral worlds or do you think they're doing more harm than good right now?
00:26:26.860 Yeah. You can probably see that I'm laughing right now. I was just saying this. Um, I don't
00:26:31.180 know how to not laugh at all of that stuff. It's a few months ago, I researched, sorry, what was that?
00:26:36.780 I said, me neither.
00:26:39.340 Yeah. Like a few months ago, a researcher from Australia reached out to me. Her name was Caroline
00:26:43.420 Gribble and she, she did a paper on this and she asked if I would read her paper and provide my
00:26:47.900 thoughts. And it was a, it was a great paper and she discussed basically every word you mentioned
00:26:51.980 there along with many others. Um, and I think there's more than one debate going on with language.
00:26:59.180 We could do many hour long discussions about, about language, but a lot of the ones that you
00:27:04.460 zeroed in on there and what you just described are the ones that originate from queer theory.
00:27:09.020 And that's the piece that I am not in alignment with. So the queer theory attitude, the postmodern
00:27:15.100 deconstructivism that comes in from that. And I won't get into the theory too much, but
00:27:18.060 that's where we get the idea of deconstructing sex and gender of ripping them apart and saying
00:27:23.020 sex is biology and gender is this conceptualization that can be whatever we want it to be. Right?
00:27:28.620 So you might say there's, there's men and women as genders, but I can say that there's three or
00:27:32.780 five per a million and that's, that's fine. And we can all have our own gender. And that's what
00:27:37.500 leads to a lot of the language changes. I think that's very silly, um, myself because I'm gender
00:27:43.340 dysphoric because I'm biologically male. You know, I was born with a penis and with everything that
00:27:48.460 boys have. And I had extreme emotional discomfort with that. And in a sense, I had a disability,
00:27:55.020 right? Because I wasn't able to thrive for emotional reasons because of that. And so I have
00:28:00.620 made physical changes hormonally and surgically in order to try to cope with that in order to align as
00:28:05.740 closely as I can with the biological sex that I am not. So in other words, I deeply affirm the idea of
00:28:11.900 there being these, this dichotomy of, you know, male and femaleness, and I'm trying to be as close
00:28:16.540 to female as I can knowing that I will never actually be female. So for me, all of the language
00:28:22.060 changes seem very, very silly. You know, women menstruate. That's, that's what, that's what
00:28:25.980 women do. Do I menstruate? I do not menstruate, but that's okay. We don't have to change the language
00:28:30.460 around it because that's, you know, that's what they do. And the same goes the other way, you know,
00:28:34.780 women, you know, breastfeed. Well, the fact that someone has decided to be on testosterone doesn't
00:28:39.500 mean that they don't still have mammary glands and have the ability to breastfeed. I don't know
00:28:43.420 why we have to change the language around it though. I don't think that helps anybody. I think
00:28:46.780 it, it gets confusing and complicated and upsets people when they feel their, their gender, their
00:28:51.740 sex being ripped apart and kind of be told that they're separate in ways that doesn't resonate
00:28:56.460 with them. Right. And I would agree with you there. I think that that's very well said. And you did touch
00:29:01.100 on queer theory. And I think this leads actually pretty well into my next question. Queer theory and gender
00:29:07.020 ideology have really been behind the whole pronouns thing, this notion that people have different
00:29:13.020 pronouns that are maybe not he, him, or she, her. You made a video and a series of videos where you
00:29:19.340 talked about the issues with fixating on pronouns and you said it's bad for transgender people. So
00:29:24.380 can you maybe explain your thoughts on that and why you don't think we should be compelling people to
00:29:30.060 use pronouns as is being done right now? Yeah, absolutely. So early on in my transition journey,
00:29:36.220 I think I mentioned, I started around 28 and like most people, you know, I started very privately.
00:29:41.740 I was, I, some of my close friends knew and I was still Jason at work and I was still Jason out in
00:29:47.340 public. And then I was being called Julia and she, her in this little circle. And like I already
00:29:51.740 referenced when talking about kids, that felt really good. I liked it. I'm like, oh, I feel so warm and
00:29:55.740 fuzzy with these people. Oh, I don't like what I'm getting everywhere else. But then as I went in and
00:30:01.500 started to expand my transition socially, I, I, I'd run into people who maybe wanted to affirm
00:30:07.100 me. They wanted to call me what I wanted to be called, but then they would, you know,
00:30:11.260 mess up, so to say, or they'd say he, him, because, you know, I'm five for 10 or my voice is fairly low,
00:30:16.300 or they knew me as Jason for 28 years, all these reasons that that came out. And these are not people
00:30:20.300 who are trying in any way to get to me. These are people who like me and affirm for me, but we mess up.
00:30:26.140 It's hard, right? I get it. It's hard. And that really upset me. Like when that would happen,
00:30:32.220 it wasn't just, I didn't like it. It was, it might throw me into a cycle for a few days where I'd be,
00:30:36.060 you know, emotionally thrown off and I wouldn't want to, you know, go and see that person anymore,
00:30:40.860 chat with that person because I was uncomfortable with them. And I had an amazing life coach at this
00:30:46.220 point in time. And as I really kind of wrestled with him and said, what was going on? I came to
00:30:50.460 realize that that was because I was denying reality. I wanted to be female. And at this
00:30:56.060 point, I was imagining that I was, I had created this facade. I am female, just like all the other
00:31:01.420 women. And, you know, if you don't call me that, when you call me, he am, it reminded me that you
00:31:06.300 saw something different. You might like me, you might like me and want to hang out with me and
00:31:09.260 be totally fine with my transition, but, but something registered different for you. And you
00:31:13.180 saw that. And just knowing that you saw that was what would tear me apart. And when I realized that,
00:31:18.940 I realized how easy it was to just construct this differently for myself and say, I am biologically male.
00:31:26.300 And people are going to see that. And that doesn't mean that they dislike me. That just means that
00:31:30.380 they see that. And thus, I don't need to be bothered by that. And so that was kind of the
00:31:34.620 first transition that I made for myself was to understand that I didn't have, it wasn't helpful
00:31:40.860 to me to not to kind of, you know, separate myself from reality, because it creates ways when I can get
00:31:46.780 hurt by other people and their language. Then, as I started to read a lot more authors in this space and
00:31:51.260 get involved in the work I'm doing now, I was also concerned about the whole idea of
00:31:55.580 compelled speech and the risks that come along with that. You know, for myself,
00:31:59.340 I unapologetically will use the pronouns that people want me to use for them because
00:32:03.660 I understand how that can feel good. I understand how that can be helpful. And mostly,
00:32:07.660 I want to respect people. You know, I don't know what your legal name is. I haven't seen your ID.
00:32:11.740 And I don't need to. I know what you want me to call you. And so I'm going to call you that.
00:32:15.500 And for me, pronouns kind of align in the same way. But that doesn't mean I'm comfortable
00:32:20.540 mandating it for somebody else. You know, it's not illegal to be a jerk. It's just maybe not going
00:32:25.820 to make you a lot of friends. And so if somebody insists that they want to call me he, him,
00:32:29.900 they know I don't really want that. Okay, well, whatever, right? Like, I'd rather have a
00:32:33.260 conversation with them than get really upset over someone who's intentionally trying to do something
00:32:37.180 that they suspect I won't like. And of course, what I found is that taking that position means
00:32:42.300 I basically never get he, him. Because people, for the most part, aren't jerks, right? You know,
00:32:46.620 even people in this gender critical space, they're concerned about being compelled. And when I come
00:32:50.300 along and say, look, what you feel and what you want matters too. Let's just do what you're
00:32:55.100 comfortable with. Almost always, people call me she, her, because they don't feel like they're
00:32:59.180 denying reality. It's just, just being decent to someone and calling them what they want to be
00:33:03.660 called. Another part of the criticism from the transgender activism is this idea that they,
00:33:09.580 they censor people by shutting down their views and, you know, they'll show up in protest. And
00:33:14.140 there's other protest movements that take part in these tactics. BLM has,
00:33:19.340 some indigenous rights protests have, some socialist protests have. But I don't think there's a group
00:33:25.020 that does it as viciously and as strongly as the queer and trans activists when it comes to, you
00:33:30.060 know, trying to cancel people. I mean, the way they treated JK Rowling, the way they treated Helen Joyce,
00:33:35.900 for example. Why do you think there's so, a lot of these people are seem to be so angry,
00:33:41.340 so upset, and feel such a need to shut down anyone that's critical of them? Because to me,
00:33:46.940 that sounds almost like there's a psychological aspect to this.
00:33:49.420 I agree and I disagree with you there. I agree with everything you described in terms of the
00:33:58.060 behavior that you see with shutting things down from many trans rights activists. There's another
00:34:04.940 group, though, who I've seen be just as vitriolic in terms of how they handle their activism as well,
00:34:11.020 and that's the radical feminists. And I want to be clear here that I'm not using radical feminism
00:34:16.620 and gender critical as analogous terms. You know, gender critical has, in some circles, come to be,
00:34:22.380 you know, a politically correct way to refer to someone who might have been called a TERF previously,
00:34:27.020 or a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. But it's also used more broadly as anybody who's critical of,
00:34:32.300 you know, the ideological approach to gender that's being taken under queer theory. And that's
00:34:37.180 the one I'm using here. So we have this realm of gender critical people who have concerns. I think
00:34:41.180 you'd probably consider yourself gender critical. I'd consider myself gender critical.
00:34:44.460 And then we have the radical feminists who align very much with, you know, the radical
00:34:49.420 feminist ideologies that originated in the seventies. And for lack of a better term, it is a
00:34:56.060 woke ideology. It's a woke ideology the same way that trans, you know, queer theory is a woke ideology
00:35:01.340 the same way that anti-racism is a woke ideology. They're all radiating from the same place of critical
00:35:06.140 social justice. And it creates that really strong activist shutting down drive that you see. And so
00:35:14.380 I do see that with the trans activists and I receive it because I'm on the enemy side to them
00:35:18.620 because, you know, I don't align with their narrative. So I received that from them, but I
00:35:22.140 received the exact same thing from the radical feminists as well in the exact same way. And I've
00:35:26.060 noticed those two particular parties, it's an intensity I don't get from say a classical conservative
00:35:31.580 who might have conservative values, but they don't have the vitriol. They might not agree with me,
00:35:37.980 but it's not so vile the same way. And, and I think that's why you see such tension between
00:35:43.900 trans rights activism and radical feminists, because they're both using the same ideology.
00:35:47.180 And this is possibly the first circumstance under critical social justice where we've seen
00:35:52.380 two woke ideologies pitted against each other. Often it's something like that, as you mentioned,
00:35:56.220 it's, you know, anti-racism and queer theory, which you can be both, right? You can be an anti-racist
00:36:01.900 and a queer theory advocate, or you may not, but they're not diametrically opposed, but radical
00:36:05.900 feminism and trans rights activism have found themselves in diametrically opposed positions.
00:36:09.900 Their enemy is each other. And it's, it's very scary. It's very scary. So I'm sitting here in the
00:36:14.140 middle and hoping they mostly shoot over me and occasionally I get some crossfire.
00:36:17.580 Right. And there's something that, that is important to notice some of the vitriol. And
00:36:23.260 I look at, at some of the comments you've gotten from people that are more gender critical, or I
00:36:27.900 look at some of the abuse that Caitlyn Jenner has gotten from the right, even though she
00:36:32.060 has taken such brave stances on let's say women's sports and whatnot, or even Blair White is one of my
00:36:37.820 favorite transgender commentator. I've seen a lot of people recently refer to her as he and saying that
00:36:43.980 he's just a mentally ill dude. And they're saying that we should always misgender transgender people.
00:36:49.180 We should ban transgenderism and eradicate it from, uh, society as Michael Knowles said at CPAC,
00:36:56.620 and that they're just delusional people that, you know, are unfit for higher office, as they said
00:37:01.420 with Caitlyn Jenner, when she ran for, for, for governor, uh, in a fight to let's say safeguard gender
00:37:08.060 transition for kids or protect women's spaces or to protect free speech. What do you think that
00:37:13.660 type of rhetoric has on a movement that wants the, these basic principles done?
00:37:19.180 Yeah, I think the effect is deleterious. And that is the other reason why I'm here doing what I'm
00:37:24.780 doing, because I mentioned earlier how I would watch in our school board meetings, how many
00:37:31.340 concerned parents are being shut down simply for raising a concern, because the narrative has to
00:37:35.500 become call anybody hateful and transphobic simply for having a concern. And my perspective is there is
00:37:42.300 hate out there and there is a concern. And instead we are targeting all these people who don't have hate
00:37:48.060 and who are just asking questions. And I want to be in that space in the gender critical realm
00:37:52.460 to draw a very clear wedge and say, look, there's all of these people who have valid concerns and
00:37:56.460 valid questions about sports, washrooms, prisons, children, transition, all these things that we can
00:38:01.100 and should discuss. And there's all these people over here who actually are hateful, who actually have
00:38:06.140 fascist figures, you know, who really we should be concerned about. And they're different, they're
00:38:11.500 different groups, but they blend together so easily, right? Before someone like me is in a space,
00:38:15.660 oh, you have a concern about washrooms, you have a concern about washrooms, great, we're friends, and
00:38:18.940 you don't always necessarily realize someone else's motivation. And as I've found, when I come into a
00:38:23.580 space, a private group or a conference, it's just a friendship circle, it tends to make it pretty clear
00:38:28.300 all of a sudden, because some people are like, Julia is amazing. Julia says what we're saying. Julia helps
00:38:31.980 let's move these things forward. And other people say, absolutely not. Julia is, you know,
00:38:36.460 the embodiment of everything we hate. And it makes it clear whether you hate and have contempt and
00:38:40.380 disdain for transgender people, or whether you have concerns about issues. And so for me,
00:38:45.260 we need to separate those two, those two kind of sects of people. And that's one of my objectives.
00:38:51.500 Right, for sure. I would agree there. So we're obviously not done having these discussions,
00:39:00.300 these debates. I mean, I think that transgender debate in Canada has really
00:39:04.620 been around since Justin Trudeau has been elected. You know, there was Bill C-16 with
00:39:09.100 Jordan Peterson, there was the sex ed debate in Ontario. Now we're seeing the debates around sports,
00:39:15.500 around prisons, around children. And I think it's only going to keep going from here. Where do you
00:39:22.860 think this narrative, these dialogues are going to go? And is it where you think you want it to go? Or do
00:39:27.660 you think we're, we're, we're due for more, I guess, polarization and more extreme kind of agenda
00:39:34.700 demands and whatnot? I'm certainly not smart enough to be able to comment on where I think this goes.
00:39:42.300 I don't like the way it is going. I'll say that much. I don't like the division. I think that that's,
00:39:47.180 the polarization is very scary. And that's why my mission is to bridge to the gap is to say,
00:39:51.980 we need to be able to talk. We need to be able to connect. I, I travel mostly in gender critical
00:39:56.780 circles now. And every day I'm meeting people who have never known a transgender person. They
00:40:01.580 know of transgender people. They know of those angry people that they've seen in, you know,
00:40:05.020 viral posts where they're called perverts and all these things, but they don't know someone.
00:40:08.380 And they certainly have not encountered someone they can like. And that has been my goal. It has to
00:40:12.460 be in those gender critical circles and those conservative circles and be a transgender person whom they
00:40:17.020 can like as a person. That doesn't mean they have to agree with me. And I'm not looking for anyone to agree
00:40:21.100 with me. You know, I, I avoid debates like the plague. I'm not looking to go into a debate and
00:40:25.900 argue with someone over whether something is right or not. I'm looking to humanize transgender people
00:40:30.140 to, to prevent that extremism from forming and to say, look, there are people who are gender dysphoric.
00:40:35.260 There are people who are caught in the crossfire here. You can totally be against policies and
00:40:39.500 ideologies. Like I'll help you in some cases where we're aligned, but let's not make it about the
00:40:44.380 people and let's not get to a point where, where people on either side are being hurt. And I'm in,
00:40:48.460 I'm in, I'm in Waterloo region here. And, you know, a few weeks ago we had, we had exactly that happen.
00:40:52.060 And that's scary. That's scary stuff because I don't ever want to see policy disagreements
00:40:57.820 moving to a point where people are actually being, you know, encountering violence.
00:41:01.420 No, for sure. That's a good point. I do think we have to, on all sides, really tone the temperature
00:41:09.260 down and stop these accusations that concerned parents are genocidal transphobe, and that all
00:41:17.420 transgender people are groomers, for example. I really don't think that sort of, sort of dialogue.
00:41:23.100 So I can understand, and I can understand the frustration people have. Absolutely. A lot of
00:41:29.100 what's going on is very frustrating, but I think as human beings, we need to acknowledge that we're
00:41:35.740 often emotional and try to kind of take a breath and find what are we, what's common sense? What,
00:41:43.500 what are we going to fight? And remember what we're fighting against. And I think for a lot of
00:41:48.300 people, they're not actually fighting against transgender people. They're fighting against
00:41:51.740 gender ideology and that being imposed on their children, on their sports, on their charter rights,
00:41:58.540 such as free speech. They're not actually against transgender people. And I think sometimes people
00:42:03.100 need to, you know, take a breather and remind themselves of that. Well, Julia, thank you so
00:42:09.100 much for joining me. I think this was a really good conversation and productive conversation. I certainly
00:42:15.820 learned a lot, and I wish you the best of luck. Please continue to speak out. I think it's good for
00:42:22.620 Ontario and Canada to have voices like you that are critical of narratives and think for yourself
00:42:30.140 with, with nuance. So thanks again for coming on today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
00:42:35.340 I hope that you enjoyed this discussion. I sure did. Please consider supporting True North by
00:42:42.620 visiting donate.tnc.news. For True North, I'm Ilikantinantel. Thank you for watching.