Solidarity with our Sisters in Quebec – A Speech from Ghislaine Gendron at caWsbar’s Reality-Based Women Unite 2025
- Gender Dissent
- Mar 29
- 15 min read
Gender Dissent
A super-successful second event!
For the second time, at an International Women’s Day conference on March 8, women gathered in person and online to discuss perspectives, experiences and actions underway regarding the reclamation of our Charter rights and freedoms.
The Reality-Based Women Unite 2025 event, hosted by Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights (caWsbar) and held in Calgary, featured a speaker panel on Saturday and a Keep Prisons Single Sex protest on Sunday. Both activities were, again, wonderfully invigorating, “affirming,” and uninterrupted by trans-activist violence, thanks to careful, strategic planning by the organizers.
The panelists this year included caWsbar founders Heather Mason and Amy Hamm and board member, Maureen Sullivan, B.C. Bureau Chief for Rebel News, Drea Humphrey, American lawyer, writer and feminist leader Kara Dansky, and national co-coordinator for Women’s Declaration International (WDI) Canada, responsible for Québec and the Francophonie, Ghislaine Gendron.
Gender Dissent was there too, charging up on the positive vibes generated among the sisterhood who made it to Stampede City – the exact location of the conference revealed to ticket holders only the day before. Many of the women excitedly and emotionally met each other in person for the first time, after months, and in many cases, years of collaborating and supporting one another on social media.
It is hard to imagine a more energizing place to be than among a large group of ladies who have developed meaningful long-distance relationships with a shared purpose of existential importance: to insist that our government reinstate the hard-won sex-based rights of women it so deftly eradicated with its woefully ill-conceived 2017 amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act.
The government has never acknowledged the obvious and dangerous conflict of rights it created when it made gender identity and gender expression protected characteristics under the law. In fact, the government has denounced, demoralized, and threatened to criminalize women brave enough to publicly oppose the unfair and de-humanizing impacts of the legislation wrought upon us by Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.
"Today in Calgary, a rally took place to protect women's spaces. The community responded with overwhelming support, demonstrated through enthusiastic honking, waving, and thumbs up. Calgary sent a clear message: it's time to reclaim women's spaces & challenge harmful ideologies." —Heather Mason, March 10, 2025
The view from Quebec
Several attendees at the conference shared with Gender Dissent their enthusiasm and appreciation of having sisters from Quebec join us at the event.
With her speech, Ghislaine Gendron shared her personal journey into feminism and the women’s sex-based rights movement, her critique of gender-inclusive discourse, and highlighted her concerns over the erosion of women's rights by ideological and technological forces. She contrasted women’s historical struggles against religious oppression with contemporary challenges posed by gender identity politics, the normalization of prostitution and biomedical interventions in gestation and birth.
Some conference attendees were surprised to learn from Ghislaine about the Catholic church’s and government’s historic directives for women designed to grow the population in la Belle Province – during the period known as La Revanche des berceaux (the revenge of the cradles).
Image created by AI
“Priests would meet women individually and remind them their duty to the Church and to their husband by having as many babies as possible. This era was called "the revenge of the cradles." The women of that time were bound by religious injunctions to have more children, regardless of whether they had the financial means to do so or even a motivation. It was not rare to have more than 12 children at the dinner table at that time.” —Ghislaine Gendron, Reality-Based Women Unite, Calgary, March 8, 2025
Even more attendees were flabbergasted to learn that one of Quebec’s current leading advocacy organizations for women, la Fédération des femmes du Québec (FFQ), is, astoundingly, led by a trans-identified man.
All attendees were positively affected by Ghislaine’s superbe speech, so convincingly and endearingly delivered, en anglais, in spite of her own expressed concerns about her accent.
With her permission, we are pleased to publish Ghislaine’s speech below, as she originally wrote in English. The French-translated version may be accessed here.
Hi Sisters,
I am so happy to be here, in Alberta, province of Premier Danielle Smith. Alberta, the first province in Canada that protected women’s sport with its Fairness and Safety in Sport Act, and protected children with its Health Statutes Amendment Act 2024. Thanks to these acts, Danielle Smith is helping to protect young girls against themselves by banning mastectomy surgeries, something that would have been applauded by everyone, including Liberals and progressives, just 10 or 15 years ago. Thanks to these Acts, fairness and safety in sport will be restored in Alberta.
Alberta is also the province of the astonishing Linda Blade, who helped this to happen in her province. Thanks to you, Linda in India. We need more Linda Blades and Danielle Smiths in Canada. Alberta is also the province of Kathleen Lowry, Raine McLeod, Eva Kurilova, Jenny Morris from WDI Alberta and other Terfs who I am looking forward to meeting and seeing this week end.
I would like to thank caWsbar for inviting me to this reality-based event. Thank you caWsbar, you are doing a great work!
So now, I think it’s time to introduce myself. As you can hear, I am from Quebec, born in Montreal. My name is Ghislaine Gendron. I am retired from a career in the maritime field, a non-traditional job for women at that time. Therefore, I spent most of my career amongst men and I felt comfortable with this.
When I was younger, I didn’t specially feel an inclination to spend time with children, I didn’t like cooking, I wasn’t interested in fine clothes or makeup. I even felt a little bit as an imposter at women’s gatherings, sometimes. I felt I had to "play a character" that wasn’t really me. A character of “womanhood,” I thought.
Then I read The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir in my early twenties. I also read Germaine Greer and other feminists of the second wave. These women put my feelings into words and I will always be grateful to them. Thanks to these women, I understood what gender was all about.
In 2014 I volunteered to join the board of directors of the feminist association Pour les droits des femmes du Québec and remained there until 2020. Then I became Quebec’s coordinator for the WDI (Women’s Declaration International) until today. I now realize that I’ve been engaged in feminism for over 11 years, and I can’t say how honoured I feel to participate in this March 8th celebration with you today.
I think it’s worth taking a brief look back at these last 11 years.
At the beginning of my personal commitment, we were a small group of women alerted by the resurgence of religious fundamentalism.
A few words about religion here. Quebec had a “past” with the Catholic Church. The Church had strongly interfered in state affairs before the 1960s in our French and Catholic province. It presented itself as the guardian of Quebecers’ values, while keeping women outside the clerical hierarchy and decision-making roles. Priests would meet women individually and remind them their duty to the Church and to their husband by having as many babies as possible. This era was called "the revenge of the cradles." The women of that time were bound by religious injunctions to have more children, regardless of whether they had the financial means to do so or even a motivation. It was not rare to have more than 12 children at the dinner table at that time.
Gradually, Quebecers freed themselves from the Church. Catholic churches emptied out in the following decades. Schools and hospitals were secularized, and the French model of secularism influenced our collective choices. The principles are as follows: the state does not favour religion or non-belief. The state protects freedom of conscience, which includes religion, agnosticism, and atheism, without favouring any. In Canada and United States, French and English people carry a different past with in their relation to religions. In the period of colonization, many English people came to America to escape from religious persecution. They wanted to protect religion from the State interference. In an opposite way, French people wanted to protect the State from religious interference. They both wanted a separation of State and religions, but they don’t didn’t protect the same thing.
In the 70s and 80s these religious injunctions towards women did not work anymore for the vast majority of the population. We thought we had liberated ourselves and this would never come back. But it came back from a place we did not expect. It came back through the door of inclusion and the lens of intersectional analysis.
The Fédération des femmes du Québec (FFQ), which means "Quebec Women’s Federation," was a jewel of Quebec feminism, created in the 70s. But in the first decade of the 2000s, the FFQ started to “normalize” the veiling of women in schools and daycare centers. At the same time, the same federation was denouncing Christian religious injunctions, such as the fact that women are excluded in the clerical hierarchy, that the Pope forbids contraception and abortion, that Catholicism venerates virginity, and many other sexist practices.
It was in 2012 that a bunch of women began to be aware of the entry of patriarchal demands into this feminist association in Quebec. It started with the promotion of religious fundamentalism presented as a women’s empowerment. The veil, a symbol of oppression and apartheid based on sex in Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, was presented as an act of freedom and women’s empowerment. My choice, my right. It is true that feminism is the right to make choices, but it is false to pretend that all choices are empowering.
A few years later, the FFQ began to nourish an ambiguous discourse about prostitution. It started with the acceptance of a group called Stella into the Federation, which presented itself as a group concerned with the health of women involved in prostitution. Then, gradually, a new language took hold. They no longer spoke of the sexual exploitation of women, but about choices, and sex work. The FFQ had adopted this language. As if economic precarity is not a constraint. As if many of these women are not under the control of pimps and organized crime. As if these women don’t need to use street drugs just to survive the daily sexual violence they are are exposed to. But I never saw any of the women who defended the empowerment of prostitution give up their own job to make a career in prostitution.
In my view, this was the turning point where language became corrupted. And when a language is corrupted, thoughts are affected by lies, without any consciousness of it. And it slowly finds its path to social disruption. It is rarely good news for women and children.
Feminism for men
Pour les droits des femmes du Quebec (PDF) was founded in 2013, in reaction to the FFQ's stance about prostitution and its radical shift in sexist religious demands towards women.
Four years later, a trans-identified man became the "president" of the FFQ.
Under his presidency, the FFQ definitively positioned itself in favor of recognizing prostitution as a choice—a woman’s means of empowerment and a work. And of course, as an inclusion tools for so-called transwomen. A few organizations walked out in protest and some joined PDF Quebec.
Patriarchy had taken possession of the women’s movement and substituted men’s desires for women’s demands. The tools were the same as usual in a relationship based on power: intimidation, shame, deprivation of money, threats. But with the discourse on gender identity, they added new tools: victimization and perversion of language. It was mainly through these means that they succeeded in getting young feminists to adhere to their discourse. Women are socialized to be kind, and sadly, often place men’s needs above theirs. Activists knew this and they were going to use it.
This is how we started to see young women advocating for men’s so-called “rights” to get access to their locker rooms, their bathrooms, their sports categories and even their prisons with the Elizabeth Fry Society’s new policies. In a "MeToo" era, it’s what psychologist Leon Festinger called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance, as you may know, is a term that describes the state of tension and confusion felt when a person is confronted with contradictory information or belief. To reduce this uncomfortable emotion, some choose to modify their beliefs, or their logic thinking. For instance, if a man wears a skirt and pretends to be a woman, the state of dissonance makes some women exclude the possibility of him being a rapist.
We are living in a dangerous time for our hard-won women’s rights. These rights are very recent in human history and exist only in a few countries around the globe. Today, these rights are threatened with the complicity or willful blindness of counter-powers: media, opposition parties, some feminist groups, some LGB groups, institutions, NGOs, to name just a few.
Annie Sugier is a French feminist. She founded La ligue du droit international des femmes in 1981 with Simone de Beauvoir. I had the honor of interviewing her during our monthly French-language webinars of the Women’s Declaration International.
Annie told us in the interview in what circumstances she and de Beauvoir founded their organization. And her testimony is very interesting. In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini was taking power and was the leading head of the Iranian Republic. Soon after that, a sex-based apartheid system was established in Iran with the consequences you know. Simone and Annie, of course, were surrounded by left-wing intellectual friends and shared their views. During the interview, Annie told me that when they compared the racial apartheid in South Africa to the apartheid based on sex in Iran, the left-wing men around them were offended by this comparison. They told them: “You do not pretend to compare the situation of women with that of the blacks in South Africa, do you?!”
A quick reminder here. In South Africa’s apartheid, black people suffered from segregation for decades. They were not allowed to mix with white people in sports stadiums or places of worship and they lived under institutionalized segregation. Fortunately for them, they had the right to sing, to dance, and they had the right to show their hair. Iranian and Afghan women don’t. They [black South Africans] weren’t required to cover themselves from head to toe and show not an inch of flesh. Iranian and Afghan women do.
Because of this terrible apartheid, South Africa was banned from participating in the Olympics for 30 years. This was not the case for Iran and Saudi Arabia.
At the Barcelona Games in 1992, while a whole stadium applauded Nelson Mandela as South Africa returned to the games, Iran’s delegation had a man, instead of a woman, leading athletes and carrying the country’s flag. Men don’t walk behind a woman.
Why didn’t the international community and the IOC do anything for our Iranian and Afghan sisters? The UN Apartheid Convention considers that a state’s crime of apartheid can occur only on the basis of race. It seems that nobody at that time considered or thought of the possibility that half of a population can be segregated in an apartheid system on the basis of their sex. [Paragraph edited from original for clarity.]
Annie had this thought in the interview: "I ended up thinking that universal rights are aimed for men."
This is also where my own thoughts on this patriarchal counter-revolution have led me.
Queer and gender identity discourses do not fool us. I don’t use the word “theory” while talking about queer or gender identity because those are not theories. A theory is a well-founded explanation of some aspect of the world, based on a body of evidence and observations. It is developed through scientific methods, including experimentation and reasoning. Theories are not mere guesses or hypotheses; they are grounded in substantial evidence and have been tested and refined over time.
On the opposite, queer and gender identity discourse asserts concepts without evidence, without methods, and are supported by contradictory and circular reasoning. The only word I’ve found that can accurately translate this movement is "discourse."
So, the discourse on gender identity and queer discourse have mobilized huge amounts of money. This discourse has succeeded in influencing researchers, medical associations, political parties, medias, some feminist groups, some lesbian and gay rights groups. Disguised under civil rights clothes, it claims privileges. The privilege to choose to go in a male or a female prison (possibly based on their sexual orientation). The privilege to choose their sport category—male or female. The privilege to get government-subsidized cosmetic surgeries. The privilege to have access to women’s intimate spaces. And so on.
This discourse is promoted by transhumanism advocates and biotechnologies that seek to enhance human being’s capacities but that only succeed in dehumanizing them and creating inequities.
Biotechnology is hurting women and children but not only in the gender-affirmation industry. It is doing harm to women and children also in reproductive technologies. They experiment with the same drugs on young egg donors. Lupron takes control of their reproductive hormonal system. These drugs shut down their hypophysis (pituitary gland) and induce artificial menopause in young women. These drugs are given to egg donors and surrogates without knowing their long-term effects. Egg donors are submitted to the process of ovarian stimulation that forces the simultaneous maturation of dozens of oocytes (eggs), which is an unprecedented performance by women's bodies in human history. These drugs are administered to them to mislead their body. We don’t know what are the long-term effects. All we have are surveys that suggest a rate of breast cancer 22 times higher than the normal female population under the age 40.
But industry shows little interest in investigating. Wonder why?
Today is March 8th. It is International Women's Rights Day. It is not a day about trans issues, it is a day about women. The aim of the day is to highlight the struggle for sex equality and raise awareness of women's rights issues around the world. It is about defending women's rights, denouncing discrimination, sex violence and persistent inequalities between men and women.
Linda Blade and other Albertan women succeeded in Alberta. In the United States they have now an executive order that protects sex-based rights, thanks to the great advocacy work of our southern-border Sisters. I am so sorry Kara [Dansky], that the Democrats missed completely that boat. We are all aware of the efforts that you’ve put into this. Maybe you are facing a greater amount of political party financing than was expected. I understand that this could be a mitigated win. Maybe, as we do, you love the executive order but not so much the signature? Anyway, congratulations, Kara.
In Canada we will soon be in elections. Let’s be inspired by Terf Island and let’s get our message to politicians that they won’t have our X if they don’t respect our sex.
You have gathered here, we have found each other in Canada, United States, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy. We have found sisters in Iran, Afghanistan, and others in Africa and South America. You are courageous women. You are the proud heirs of the suffragettes.
You are March 8th glorious amazons.
Love you.
Afterword
An interesting point for follow-up from Ghislaine’s speech
WhiIe in English-speaking Canada, women observe International Women’s Day, women in Quebec and in France observe Journée internationale des droits des femmes (International Women's Rights Day).
French-speaking societies, especially in Quebec and France, view March 8 as a political day of activism with a focus on concerns like wage inequality, gender-based violence, women's access to leadership roles and reproductive rights.
Whereas English-speaking societies tend to observe International Women’s Day with less emphasis on activism and more on highlighting women’s achievements.
Perhaps, until we no longer need to be agitating for the return of our sex-based rights in Canada, we should adopt our Quebec Sisters’ expression, International Women's Rights Day, for our one day of the year?
And an important update
On March 17, 2025, Amy Hamm, registered nurse and co-founder of caWsbar, filed a human rights complaint against the BC College of Nurses and Midwives (BCCNM) for discrimination of on the basis of political belief. This follows BCCNM’s lengthy investigation finding her guilty of unprofessional conduct for publicly sharing her views on sex and gender ideology.
On March 27, Amy was fired with no severance after 13 years of service with an exemplary record.
"Canadian registered nurse Amy Hamm @preta_6 was fired from @VCHhealthcare in Vancouver, BC for her outspoken views critical of trans ideology. In Canada, wokeness is state ideology and rejection of its religious claims is punished in both private and public. —Andy Ngo, March 27, 2025
The so-far four-and-a half-year ordeal has raised the ire and the support of some of world’s most influential people, including J.K. Rowling and Jordan B. Peterson. It’s certain Amy’s ongoing fight will continue to be monitored and reported on the international level, and that Canada’s reputation will continue to tank in accordance with its mistreatment of women who dare defend themselves, their children, and biological reality.
"Another defeat for Canadians who, in general, refuse to notice where their country is headed @preta_6" —Dr Jordan B Peterson, March 14, 2025
"Don't let them gaslight you into thinking you're the mad one. The New Endarkenment will not win if there are still people brave enough to stand up for objective, scientific truth and the rights of women and children. This quasi-religious bullshit is just that: bullshit." —J.K. Rowling, March 14, 2025
You can support Amy’s ongoing fight for freedom of speech and freedom of political belief through a donation here, or to caWsbar, and by subscribing to Amy’s Substack.
And oh, yeah, don’t forget to give ‘em “The Hamm” the next time you are forced to “respond to dangerous idiots who are out to destroy you for telling the truth.”
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