Juno News - February 16, 2019


Police are arresting people for ＂transphobic＂ tweets

Topics
misgendering and deadnaming policies
Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Jonathan Van Maron Megan Murphy
Is it time for Justin Trudeau to become his own man？ Justin Trudeau is fighting to impose a TAX on Canadians

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

170.06

Word count

1,379

Sentence count

62

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transgender people have the legal right to be who they are, but it's not enough just to be them. You have to be tolerant enough to allow them access to public washrooms, change rooms, and other facilities based on their lived gender identity. In a pluralistic society like Canada, people with different gender identities, sexual orientations, religious beliefs, or other identifiers should be left alone.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 When it comes to a pluralistic society like Canada, people with different gender identities,
00:00:07.360 sexual orientations, religious beliefs, or other identifiers should basically be left alone.
00:00:13.680 That's the goal, I think, in difference.
00:00:16.120 That yes, everyone has the legal right to be the way they are, just as you have the legal right to be who you are,
00:00:21.160 and I have the legal right to be who I am.
00:00:23.800 But unfortunately for a great many activists, it's not enough.
00:00:28.040 You need forced tolerance.
00:00:30.100 And we're seeing this unfold around the Western world right now on the transgender issue,
00:00:34.980 where anyone who has a different gender identity than their biological sex,
00:00:39.460 or someone who has a different gender identity than we even know are available gender identities,
00:00:44.960 it's not enough just to accept that they have a right to be them.
00:00:48.280 You have to darn well accept it in your personal view of them as well.
00:00:53.740 We see this in the Human Rights Commission in Ontario, which has a washroom and change room facilities policy
00:00:59.660 that everyone has to recognize the right of trans people to access facilities based on their lived gender identity.
00:01:06.320 But another provision that jumps out is that it must be made clear that no one will ever have to accommodate
00:01:13.840 someone else's preferences or negative attitudes.
00:01:17.420 So if you're a biological woman who identifies as a woman, and you're using a washroom, 0.99
00:01:21.840 and a biological man who identifies as a woman walked in,
00:01:25.640 their right trumps your right. 0.82
00:01:27.660 And this is something that in theory we see as being about accommodating a very vulnerable minority,
00:01:33.960 transgender people.
00:01:34.880 But in practice, it's telling people that they've got to shut up if they've got any concerns or discomfort issues.
00:01:41.040 Take this sign that I saw when walking around my old stomping grounds not too long ago,
00:01:45.060 Western University in London, Ontario.
00:01:47.560 This was a sign adorning one of the washroom doors.
00:01:50.100 Western respects everyone's right to choose a washroom appropriate for them.
00:01:55.280 Trust the person using this space belongs here.
00:01:59.120 Now in the fine print of this, it says that this is a byproduct of the President's Standing Committee
00:02:04.600 on Safety of Women on Campus.
00:02:07.300 But again, women's safety, if they feel uncomfortable with someone they see in a bathroom, 1.00
00:02:11.760 has to be secondary to the overarching goal of equity and equality for transgender people.
00:02:17.020 And you take this and compare it with something that someone else shared to me at Humber College,
00:02:22.180 a sign on a bathroom that says,
00:02:23.680 We are respectful.
00:02:24.900 If you're in a public washroom and you think someone's gender does not match the sign on the door,
00:02:29.640 follow these steps.
00:02:30.760 Number one, don't worry about it.
00:02:32.920 They know where they belong.
00:02:34.540 Number two, well, there's no number two.
00:02:36.680 Number one is the only one.
00:02:38.020 If you see someone that you think is giving you cause for suspicion,
00:02:41.540 it's your problem, not theirs.
00:02:43.840 Why this is so dangerous is not because there's an implication that people who are transgendered
00:02:49.820 are more likely to be sexual offenders.
00:02:52.240 That is not anywhere near the point that I'm trying to raise.
00:02:55.840 What the point is, is that if someone is encountering in a washroom an individual who doesn't belong there,
00:03:01.740 who perhaps has less pure motivations for using the washroom than most,
00:03:06.640 you are not allowed to be uncomfortable lest it be seen as violating their rights.
00:03:12.200 And this is so terrifying in the Me Too age,
00:03:15.540 when we're being told as a society to be on guard for areas where women are being threatened
00:03:20.320 or areas where women feel threatened.
00:03:22.860 But then when it comes to the rights of transgender people,
00:03:25.580 the rights of ordinary cisgendered women are apparently irrelevant.
00:03:30.700 Why would someone be concerned about an individual they encounter in a washroom?
00:03:34.440 Well, let's look at this absolutely gut-wrenching case that was reported in The Courier.
00:03:39.000 Mum of supermarket toilet sex assault victims warns freed attacker strikes again.
00:03:45.220 What's not mentioned in the course of this story, but was picked up on by a friend of mine,
00:03:49.740 Jonathan Van Maron over at the Bridgehead,
00:03:51.700 is that this 10-year-old was allegedly assaulted in a washroom by a transgender individual,
00:03:57.640 a biological male who identified as a woman.
00:04:01.120 This little girl, under the rules set out by the Ontario Human Rights Commission,
00:04:04.680 would not be allowed to express discomfort that,
00:04:07.500 hey, there's someone in this washroom that I don't think belongs here,
00:04:10.520 and would be very quickly branded a transphobe.
00:04:13.880 Now, this case comes out of Scotland, part of the United Kingdom,
00:04:16.940 where we've seen a very nasty string of stories in the last few months,
00:04:21.360 in the last couple of years,
00:04:22.800 where allegations of transphobia have been weaponized by the state,
00:04:27.620 by police agencies.
00:04:28.760 Most notably, a story that broke last week,
00:04:31.300 where a 38-year-old woman, a mother,
00:04:33.420 was arrested and detained by police for seven hours
00:04:36.400 for suspicion of harassing a transgender person on Twitter.
00:04:41.420 And part of the way that harassment was defined
00:04:43.660 was by misgendering and what's called deadnaming,
00:04:46.980 which is calling someone by a name that applies to the gender they no longer use.
00:04:51.600 And this individual who made the complaint,
00:04:55.280 a transgender woman, born a male and identifies and lives as a woman,
00:04:59.460 was also the complainant against another case in the UK,
00:05:02.640 where someone else was given a warning by police
00:05:05.960 for the very same thing, for misgendering on Twitter.
00:05:10.660 So Twitter, which has its own standards of practice and its own policies,
00:05:14.460 is now the subject to police intervention,
00:05:17.840 when police believe that you've behaved in a transphobic manner.
00:05:21.900 And you don't even need to do anything yourself.
00:05:24.640 There was a case a little over a month ago
00:05:26.520 where a man was given a lengthy laundry list of complaints by police,
00:05:31.000 not even for anything he said,
00:05:33.380 but for a limerick that was deemed to be anti-trans
00:05:36.600 that this man retweeted that someone else wrote.
00:05:40.220 He asked police point blank,
00:05:41.900 are you going to charge me with anything?
00:05:43.620 They said no, but that they would be recording it as a hate incident,
00:05:47.540 what this man was putting on Twitter,
00:05:49.620 where anyone who doesn't like it has the ability to very easily block him
00:05:54.060 and never see his comments again.
00:05:57.420 Twitter as a private company has a right to set out whatever policies it wants.
00:06:01.260 And despite my frustrations with the platform,
00:06:03.380 I know that I could leave it at any time.
00:06:05.300 It's not itself the force of state.
00:06:07.420 But we do have to look very concerningly at what police are doing
00:06:11.140 with comments and content that is on Twitter
00:06:14.560 in treating it as hate speech when it actually falls or should fall under free speech.
00:06:20.560 Twitter put a policy in effect not long ago
00:06:22.680 acknowledging that it was a violation of its terms of use
00:06:25.300 to misgender or deadname someone.
00:06:28.220 That's fine.
00:06:29.100 When police adopt a similar policy, it's not.
00:06:32.460 Megan Murphy, the Canadian feminist blogger,
00:06:35.700 has decided to file a lawsuit against Twitter for this policy
00:06:38.620 saying that its ban of her was in violation of trade practices.
00:06:42.440 Now, I don't agree with the lawsuit. 0.99
00:06:44.500 I think that Twitter is full of hypocrites 0.73
00:06:46.140 and I think that this rule is one that very much threatens the mentality of free speech. 0.92
00:06:51.220 But I think Twitter has a right to make that determination for itself.
00:06:54.820 What I don't like is that the culture of activists believes
00:06:57.420 that it's not enough to accept the legal equality of people.
00:07:01.340 We need to tolerate and accept on a more intimate and fundamental level
00:07:05.560 in everything to do with the way we interact with each other on Twitter. 0.95
00:07:08.940 Again, you may think that misgendering someone is a jerk thing to do, 0.68
00:07:12.840 which if it's being done deliberately to harass, I'd agree it is. 0.57
00:07:16.600 But something being mean does not mean it should be illegal.
00:07:20.440 More importantly, the policies we're seeing put forward by human rights commissions
00:07:23.920 are very quickly showing that this isn't just about social etiquette.
00:07:27.900 It is about the force of the state.
00:07:30.360 You have to accept it or live with the consequences
00:07:33.200 and they won't be pretty.
00:07:34.880 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.
00:07:36.540 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.