by felicia rembrandt
Charlotte Dalwood is an Alberta man, a law student, who decided two years ago to adopt a synthetic female sex identity, and was promptly rewarded with an internship at the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. After posting an anti-women article on CBC Opinion, he now has a regular column at eminent “progressive” media outlet, rabble.ca.
Dalwood made his introductory splash with the CBC article published in October, 2021, in which he argued that Canada’s Supreme Court needs to be involved to prevent women from fighting for sex-based rights. He attacked the group, Canadian Women’s Sex-Based Rights (caWsbar) for “falsely” claiming that:
the charter's equality provision covers cisgender but not transgender women because it lists "sex" and not "gender" as a protected ground. They then argue, on this basis, that the inclusion of "gender" in human rights legislation is unlawful; indeed that governments have a duty, instead, to preserve and promote sex segregation.
This, of course, is not a false claim, as sex and gender identity (the term he should have used, as “gender identity” – but not “gender” -- is what was imposed on Canadians by Bill C-16) are not the same thing. Sex is material reality, while gender identity is usually described as an internal feeling by those who ascribe to it. Gender, on the other hand, was a term used by second wave feminists to distinguish the sex roles and expectations placed on people from their biological sex.
The article attracted 525 comments, with critical comments almost immediately “deactivated” (disappeared). This prompted one tweeter, Inge Wood, to start a twitter thread of her own deactivated comments and to invite others to contribute theirs.
Esme Vee wrote a letter on behalf of caWsbar to CBC ombudsman Jack Nagler requesting a “Right of Reply”. In her letter Vee stated:
Dalwood falsely labels caWsbar as an “anti-transgender rights group” and misrepresents the spirit and purpose of these [prison] demonstrations. Standing up for women’s rights is not “anti-trans,” and Dalwood produces no evidence to prove otherwise – unsurprisingly, because this evidence does not exist.
Vee’s letter continued:
Dalwood assigns a nefarious motive to caWsbar when suggesting we “deliberately misread” the Canadian Charter. Dalwood may hold the opinion that we have misread the Charter (we strenuously disagree), but provides no evidence to assert that our interpretation is a misreading. The sentence is also vaguely written and borders on defamation, as there is no explanation provided for the alleged “legally baseless assault on human rights legislation.” As we have asserted, caWsbar stands up for women’s sex-based rights, which are legal and enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Women’s sex-based protections are both Charter rights and human rights. The onus is on others to provide a rationale as to why they believe the preceding statement to be untrue.
Vee concluded by stating:
Dalwood’s arguments represent an outrageous attack on the right of Canadian women to speak about our issues and concerns. That these baseless arguments were given a platform by our national broadcaster only serves to potentially silence women further.
The ombudsman forwarded Vee’s letter to Andree Lau, Managing Director of CBC Digital News, who also serves as a judge for the Digital Publishing Awards, the SABEW Best in Business Awards and E&P (Editor and Publisher) Awards, and who’s linked in profile includes the pronouns “she/her.”
Her lengthy defense of Dalwood’s article began with the statement, “your view and your organization’s view of the piece is not one I share.” She said that the CBC’s journalistic standards require they tell readers, among other things, “any affiliation or association the contributor has, so that the public is clear where the contributor is coming from.” She claims the criteria were met, despite the fact that the CBC did not identify Dalwood as “transgender”, surely relevant to his arguments and something the public should have been told.
She concludes her reply by stating:
Please understand, I am not in any way choosing sides here. I am simply saying that Ms. Dalwood’s reading of your organization’s stated aims cannot reasonably be characterized as unfounded or baseless. It is her [sic] opinion that these aims threaten trans rights. Hers is a legitimate perspective . . . the respectful expression of which meets our journalistic guidelines.
After the publication of this article, Dalwood was welcomed to Rabble, where he is a monthly columnist and is honoured in that publication’s “best of 2022” for opining that disability rights are 2slgbtq+ rights and Canada’s guardianship laws are preventing “transgender children” on the autism spectrum from accessing gender drugs and surgeries. Such laws need to be retired, he says. His most recent column, appearing under the “feminism” heading, argues that free legal advice should be provided to victims of sexual assault. The word “woman” does not appear. Nor does the word “man.”
It's hard to understand how a battle between “perpetrators” and “survivors” (Dalwood does not acknowledge victims who don’t survive) is a feminist cause.
In its website, Rabble claims that it views events with “a progressive lens that centres issues of social movements, of labour, and of grassroots activism.” It elaborates on that by saying it “embraces a pro-human rights, pro-feminist, anti-racist, queer-positive, anti-imperialist and pro-labour stance, and as such encourages discussions which develop and expand progressive thought.” Its “about” page proclaims that it is “led by a lineage of women visionaries.”
Rabble proudly declares itself a federally incorporated non-profit organization, and offers its readers, both individual and organizational, multiple ways to support it.
The federal government’s Heritage Department, Canadian Periodical Fund Program, also gives funding to the publication. It has received more than $300,000, most of it dating from late 2019 onward. On some of its grants it is listed as a for-profit organization.
Rabble was previously a home for Meghan Murphy, founder of Feminist Current. She was an unpaid blogger who occasionally contributed paid pieces and briefly worked as an editor. She cross-posted most of the articles she wrote for Feminist Current to Rabble, but quit in 2016 after a post she wrote objecting to Planned Parenthood’s use of the term “menstruator” (to refer to women) was taken down mere hours after it was posted.
According to Canadaland, which covered the story, Rabble’s blogs and opinions editor, Michael Steward said the article was removed “because it contained transphobic language and violated our journalistic policy.” Rabble publisher Kim Elliot wrote Murphy soon after, explaining:
It is unfortunate that you do not see the problems around the erasure of trans male identity in the piece. In our analysis, the piece denies the gendered identity of trans men who menstruate by implying that if a person has ovaries and a uterus, they are by virtue of those biological markers, a woman.…The blog pits women’s rights against trans rights and trans identity is dehumanized, dismissed and erased in the process. This is tantamount to the expression of transphobic ideas, which violates our journalistic policy. This is why the piece was unpublished.
Murphy responded in a Rabble post, saying “I am not wasting a second more of my energy producing content for and working with people who so brazenly seek to marginalize women's voices and destroy and silence feminist analysis and the fight against patriarchal oppression.”
Rabble was founded 21 years ago by one of Canada’s preeminent feminists, Judy Rebick. She worked alongside Dr. Henry Morgentaler to change Canada’s abortion laws in the early 1980’s and when a man attacked him with garden sheers, she physically blocked the attack. In addition to fighting for women’s rights to abortion, Rebick became president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women in the 1990’s.
She has also been a lifelong leftist activist, once running as an NDP candidate and attempting to refocus the party in a more activist direction. She joined the Occupy Wall Street camps in 2011, and published a book, Occupy This, in 2012. Still actively engaged in feminist action, she was one of 151 feminists who signed “Feminist Resistance Against War: A Manifesto”, which was initiated by Russian feminists after Russia invaded Ukraine.
In the early 1990’s her memories of childhood sexual abuse by her father began to surface. She eventually realized that she had a condition known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), a form of personality splitting that helps severely abused children survive. There is still controversy over this diagnosis, which used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), but rather than keep her condition private, Rebick wrote about her eleven “alters” (alternate personalities) in her 2018 memoir, Heroes in my Head.
The book was made into a documentary, and in a CBC radio interview, she spoke about her years of therapy, which eventually enabled her to integrate the alters into her consciousness. She credits the condition with giving her “a fearlessness that helped her activism as an adult.” In another interview with Now Toronto, she also spoke about DID as a mental health “injury” rather than a mental health illness. She reiterated that it was a gift as well as trauma, giving her both fearlessness and “super empathy”.
So it is hard to read a woman of such stature conclude a recent Rabble post on the firing of CTV anchor, Lisa LaFlamme, with the words, “Ending violence against women and trans people is the mountain left to climb for feminists.”
Should we be thankful she didn’t write “Ending violence against women, both cis and trans …?”
It is tragic that Rebick, who has fought so hard for women and spoken out for those harmed by the violence of childhood abuse, has fallen in with the gender ideology cult -- a global corporate-driven child abuse movement seducing children with the rhetoric “your body, your choice.”
Where is your empathy, Judy? If it is with your new columnist, a man appropriating both womanhood and feminism, a man who believes children need castrating and sterilization to be their “authentic selves,” then it is truly misplaced.
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