2016/09/27: Part 1: Fear and the Law

So, I've been informed about a couple of things this week that have really been bothering me, and I thought that I wasn't sure what to do about it. I've been communicating with some of my friends and colleagues about it, but that wasn't enough. So, I thought I'd try to write my thoughts down and then talk about them a little bit and see where I got with that.

I've entitled this talk "Professor Against Political Correctness," and the reason for that is because it's blunt and to the point. I'm very concerned about what's happening in the universities. It's not so bad in Canada—I've been fortunate, very fortunate at the University of Toronto—but there are continually things happening, including in the administration here and in the broader political world, that make me very nervous. I like to attribute that to the fact that I know something about the way that totalitarian and authoritarian political states develop, and I can't help but think that I'm seeing a fair bit of that right now.

I guess I also wanted to do this because there's a misapprehension that everyone in academia is politically correct, and that is true very frequently among social scientists, about 20 percent of whom identify themselves as Marxists, which, in my estimation, by the way, is no better than identifying as Nazis, given the murderous nature of Marxist doctrine and the fact that we know how it's turned out when implemented in multiple countries. Now, I'm not politically correct, and I want to talk to you today about why all this worries me.

So, I got wind of two events this week. One actually dates from last May. There is legislation passed or the first reading of legislation in the federal House set in Canada about a bill called C-16, which was an attempt to alter the Canadian Bill of Human Rights. It's tangled up with another organization that operates at a provincial level in Canada, in Ontario—which is the province I reside in—called the Ontario Human Rights Commission. As far as I can tell, what happens at the Ontario Human Rights Commission is rapidly turned into policy in multiple provinces across Canada, and perhaps increasingly at the federal level. There's a Liberal government in power; that's the name of the political party in Ontario, and now there's a Liberal government federally. There is obviously a fair bit of cross-influence for better or for worse.

Also this week, I got wind of a University of Toronto human resources initiative that also upset me, I guess we could say quite profoundly. So, I thought I'd talk about all of those and try to see if I can make some sense out of them. So, I'm making this video because I don't really know what else to do. I've talked to some colleagues, and I've talked to some colleagues as I or some people inside the university and outside the university that I know, and they're upset and worried about this but unclear about what to do, and all of this scares me, I guess.

And here's why: the changes to the law scare me because they put into the legal substructure of the culture certain assumptions about basic human nature that not only do I believe to be untrue, I think they're also dangerous and ideologically motivated. I also don't think that the reason for the legal changes is the stated reason. The laws scare me; the doctrines behind the laws scare me. And, you know, when there's a law, there's a body of thought that's associated with it and a body of interpretations that are associated with it that flesh out the law because the law is a pretty bare thing.

I've read—I wouldn't say extensively, because extensively is a lot—but I've read enough about the doctrines behind the laws so that that also makes me very nervous. Increasingly, I see that these more radical ideas, the ideas that we're going to discuss, are bought in; people buy in at the administrative level in large organizations—corporate, governmental—it doesn't matter. As long as the organization is large, there's increasing administrative buy-in, and a lot of this seems to me to be driven by human resources departments, which I think are generally the most pathological elements of large organizations.

I say that because I've actually had fairly extensive experience dealing with human resources departments. I think HR training is very politically correct, like many disciplines— we'll talk about that later. The people behind the doctrines also scare me. I think that generally they’re a very bad combination of resentful and uninformed, and that's good enough; resentful and uninformed; that's good enough. I also think that their aims are destructive rather than constructive. They claim constructive aims, of course, everyone claims constructive aims, but the actions that I see undertaken seem to be driven by resentment and primarily by resentment.

And so I doubt the validity of the claims. The claims are always for equality and diversity and that kind of thing, and those words are very easy to say but a lot harder to put into practice. So, I'm scared by the people behind the doctrines. I'm scared by the response of my colleagues at the university. A number of them are unnerved by the continual move towards political correctness.

I'm going to tell you a couple of responses that I've got recently from people that I think are quite brave, by the way, but worried about making a statement, putting their careers on the line, worried about being tortured to death by people online, worried about administrative over-response or even administrative response.

Well, here's why: the things that I'm seeing at work will have to be discussed in a phone conversation. This is a professor, an American professor. I asked how this person was feeling about the position that they held at the university. The person said, "The thing that I'm seeing at work will have to be discussed in a phone conversation. It's hard for me personally to explain it in email. I'm not certain this is the career path I'm interested in anymore. I actually find myself censoring things that I'd normally say to students, and I'm not sure how to stop that self-censorship. The censorship leads to me not truly educating them in a manner that will let me feel like I've done my job well. It's not as much from the administration yet as it is from the students."

See, I don't see that so much at the University of Toronto. The students here are so terrified of the job market and generally speaking so diligent and conscientious that they are not particularly sidetracked by political correctness. But that's obviously not my colleague's experience in the US. This is in California. Another colleague, this is more local, said something I thought was very intelligent: "I think that's why this sort of thing is so difficult to stand up to. The personal consequences of objecting are huge." This person is referring to the possibility of adverse job effects, I guess effects on unemployment.

You think tenure would protect people against that, and I suppose it probably does, but that doesn't mean that people are necessarily willing to put it to the test. They're worried about being pilloried online by social justice warriors and so on, and having their reputation savaged and demolished. So, you know, that’s a reasonable fear, especially given the next part, which is the effect of my objection on society will be minuscule.

So, there's this combination—that's the idea, anyways—the personal consequences of objecting are potentially huge in that the social effects are minuscule. There'll be no positive effect, and so the thinking goes, why put yourself and potentially your family and your financial stability at risk by speaking out when the consequences will be minimal?

And, you know, I've talked to other people outside of academia—academia writers, for example—who've had friends who've made a comment online, you know, which they thought was rather innocuous, that's quoted over and over again and sometimes in major newspapers as, you know, emblematic of their particular stance, and that shows them in a very harsh light.

So, anyways, this particular colleague concluded by saying, "We should have acted 10 years ago." Well, you know, I feel for both of these colleagues. I think they're both excellent educators, by the way, and they're also, I would say, classically liberal people. You know, they're not— you wouldn't call them conservatives; you certainly wouldn't call them right-wingers. They’re people whose concerns aren't driven by their political ideologies, it's as simple as that. Their concerns are driven by their continual observations— increasingly continual observations—that things are not going in the proper direction in universities and that it's becoming increasingly difficult for professors and, and students for that matter, at least of a particular kind of political orientation, to even have the opportunity to say what they think.

So, okay, so that scares me. It scares me when I see decent people—and I think people who are more courageous than average—frightened into submission and considering altering their career paths because they don't feel that they can say what they think anymore, and they're afraid of the direction that the universities are going. So, yeah, that's scary.

So then, I'm a clinical psychologist. This is starting to affect my clients. I've had three clients in the last two years who have been driven near the point of insanity by politically correct occurrences at work. One of them was a bank employee. What finally did her in fundamentally was she sent me a very long email chain referring to a series of discussions that happened in this bank internally about whether or not the word "flipchart," you know, referring to those large pads of paper that you put up on a stand that you can flip forward and draw on—kind of an archaic technology now—whether or not the word "flipchart" was pejorative and racist.

The reason for that was that apparently the word "flip" can be used pejoratively to refer to Filipinos, which is something I didn't even know. And I suppose a Filipino could conceivably take offense to having a pad of paper named flipchart, although it's hard to imagine the circumstances under which that might arise, or at least once it was hard to imagine.

Anyways, she gave me access to a string of email conversations about that particular topic, and the bank did eventually agree to stop using the term "flipchart." I don't know what they replaced it with, but, you know, she was a very sensible person—an immigrant, by the way—who couldn't reconcile her requirement, you know, her moral requirement to work hard and be productive and be sensible and be conscientious with the fact that people were being called on to alter their behavior in ways that were absolutely nonsensical.

She was from an Eastern European country, and of course for her, this was reminiscent of the tactics of the worst of the ideologues in the 1970s and '80s and before that, so it was very, very hard on her. She was very, very stressed by the situation at work.

And then I had another client who worked in an HR department in a major educational institute, and he was always being called on to manifest his support for various feminist initiatives at the educational institute. He wasn't really all that comfortable presenting himself as a pro-feminist because he actually wasn't one.

You can argue one way or another about the propriety of that, and that's really not my point. My point is is that he believed, and I think with cause, that his job would have been in jeopardy if he would have let his objections to the demands of the political environment within the workplace be made known. And I would say he's a little bit more—he was a little bit more to the right than most of the people that I've talked with, but not to any great degree, although like many people, I think he's being driven in that direction by the continual radical moves to the left that seemed to be part and parcel of every organization in maybe modern Western society.

Now, then the other client that I had, who was very much troubled by this, was a social worker who was, I think, she was an immigrant as well—quite conservative, from a conservative culture—and was very much—had very much difficulty with the demands, for example, that she allow non-surgically altered transsexual men free access to the women's shelters.

The women's shelters, for example, here are some of the people in them—obviously say, or Muslim women who come from very conservative cultures who really can't even function in a situation where, you know, a male, biological male has been given access to what in principle is supposed to be a woman's shelter. And that was one of many things that bothered her, but we don't need to get into that. The point is that I've had people who've been driven to seek psychological counseling because of the effect of politically correct oppression on them in the workplace.

And so that's worrisome. So that's a whole bunch of things that make me nervous. And then my own response scares me. I find this stuff maddening; I can't really believe the amount of foolishness that has accumulated around these rather contentious Marxist, semi-Marxist political issues, which I don't— I have no respect for. As I said already, I think that Marxism and neo-Marxism is no better than fascism and neo-fascism.

I think the historical evidence for that is absolutely clear. I can't understand why we think it's acceptable for academics and their followers to call themselves Marxist or neo-Marxist, but we would not for a second countenance the same thing from the fascists or the neo-fascists.

Anyways, the upside of it is that I'm nervous about doing this lecture, and I've also become nervous about some of the things that I'm teaching, which I think—and I'm going to discuss this a little bit further or look further on in this discussion—I think that some of the things that I say in my lectures now might be illegal. I think they might even be sufficient for me to be brought before the Ontario Human Rights Commission under their amended hate speech laws, and that scares me as well.

And it scares me that I think that, because it sounds paranoid, but most of the time in the past when I've been concerned that something is going to happen at an administrative or bureaucratic level at the university, it’s frequently the case that when I'm worried about something happening, that it does actually happen. And that it's not so much worry as an ability to see high probability outcomes down into the future.

So— and, you know, even if the things that I'm saying haven’t been made illegal, or, you know, heaven forbid, transformed into suddenly into hate speech, I am nervous that they might be, and even that's making it more difficult for me to teach, because in order for me to teach, I have to say what I think is true, and I can't do that if I'm afraid.

If I have to be afraid of the consequences, I'll stop talking. You know, even, oh, if you can say one thing or the other, and there's a lot of pressure not to say the first thing, and you could just as easily say the second thing, it's just as easy to say the second thing. Why not just not bother with it?

You know, well, the reason I can't do that is because if I have something to say and I don't say it, then it drives me crazy, and so that's not something I'm willing to go down that path. I've already decided that I'm going to try to tell people what I think and to tell them what I think to be the truth, even though it's the truth that I think that—I’m not saying that what I think is true; I mean who knows what's true? That's why we have freedom of speech, right? To sort out what's true.

So, but I can tell you that it's true that I'm scared about this, and I think that's appalling. I really think that's appalling. All right, so this is Bill C-16, and somebody sent this to me this week pointing out what was happening with regards to this fundamental Canadian human rights legislation.

I'm going to do a bad job of this because it takes more time than I have to do this properly, so all I can do is tell you my initial thoughts and try to justify them as best I can. It would take months to do this lecture properly, and I haven't got months to do it properly, so I'm going to have to do it badly.

So here we go. So Bill C-16 is an act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code. So these are major—this is a major amendment because the Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code are major pieces of legislation. They affect everyone, and the consequences for contravening them are severe—as severe as severe consequences can be, short of illness and death. So, they're non-trivial pieces of legislation.

Now if you guys aren't in Canada, you might wonder why you should care about this. But what's happening in Canada is happening throughout the West, so I'm going to concentrate on the local occurrences, but you can be sure they're emblematic of similar things happening in your jurisdictions. So, because this is certainly not only a Canadian problem, and in fact I would say to some fairly large degree Canada has been reasonably free of this, especially at the university level, and it's almost as if we're importing it unnecessarily.

But, okay, this enactment amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination. Now this amendment has only gone through first reading. This was back in May, but similar legislation has already been passed in a number of provinces—those are the smaller, like states; they're the smaller subdivisions of the Canadian political system.

So this hasn't been made into law federally, but it's likely going to, and it already has at the provincial level, as I said. So, this enactment also amends the Criminal Code to extend the protection against hate propaganda set out in that act to any section of the public that is distinguished by gender identity or expression, and to clearly set out that evidence that an offense was motivated by bias, prejudice, or hate based on gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance that a court must take into consideration when it imposes a sentence.

Okay, so that's basically a hate crime modification. So if you commit a crime, well that's one thing. But if you commit a crime and it's motivated by bias, prejudice, or hate based on age, sex, race, ethnic identity, and other things—including now gender identity or expression—then that makes the crime worse. It falls into the category of hate crime, and so that's what this modification is intended to produce or to bring about.

So, any crime that is associated with bias, prejudice, or hate based on gender identity or expression is now an aggravating circumstance. Okay, so it's a hate crime. Now, I have some real problems with hate speech legislation, and the reason I have problems with it is that it's not obvious when speech is motivated by hate. Angry speech can feel like it's motivated by hate, but angry speech is the only kind of speech, in some sense, that is indicative of real disagreement.

I mean I'm not saying that all disagreement should be angry; I'm just saying that if there is real disagreement, then anger is often the evidence for the existence of real disagreement. And if there's real disagreement, angry people have to talk it out, because if they don't, then a bunch of terrible things happen. First of all, you start losing track of who the angry people are; second, they don't get to say what's on their mind and even listen to themselves; they don’t get to have other people tell them that they're wrong; they don’t get to modify their viewpoints because talking is thinking.

You know, and if you start people from talking, then you stop them from thinking, and that's a really bad thing. And then if you interpret hate speech too broadly, then you drive the so-called haters underground, and then you don't know what they're up to. And when people go underground, that isn't good; that's really not good. You get the rise of all sorts of underground political movements when people aren't able to express what they think, even though it's unpleasant.

So, if you want to know where the haters are, then you have to let them talk. You know, we even tell two-year-olds who are angry; we say, "Well use your words," and the reason we tell two-year-olds that is because the alternative to using your words is using your fists. And so if we don't let angry people talk, then the only—they only have two alternatives—well apart from changing their mind, and they're not going to change their mind just if you just shut someone up; that doesn't change their mind because partly the way you change your mind is by talking and thinking and communicating with other people, and if you shut that avenue off for people, then they can't change their minds.

Well then, they either pull it in and get resentful, you know, that's one option; they don't take any action, or they get aggressive and violent, or they start agitating for violence.

And so, you know, I can't help but think that, well there's a famous psychoanalytic dictum: if you don't understand the motivation for something, look at the outcome and infer the motivation. Well, if the outcome of shutting people up is that they get violent, then it's hard for me to suppress the suspicion that it was the incitement of violence that was at least part of the initial motivation for producing the restriction.

Now, I think there's a lot more to it than that, you know, I think a lot of it is a lot of this desire for people not to ever say anything upsetting is actually a consequence of trait agreeableness, which is a big five psychological trait, and really agreeable people are egalitarian by nature, but they also don't like conflict. And what that means is they don't like short-term conflict, you know, they don't like anybody to be upset.

And the problem is sometimes you have to be upset in the present to solve problems in the medium and the long term. You know, you can't stop people from talking about upsetting things because, as I said, that’s just the same as stopping them from thinking, and if they can't think really complicated things through, well then they don't solve problems, and then the problems manifest themselves in the real world. It's no joke.

So there's a recent case of Lionel Shriver, who's a—well, I won't talk about her. You can look her up. I'll try to stick to the point here. So, this is also part of Bill C-16; this is modification of section two of the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Purpose: the purpose of this act is to extend the laws in Canada to give effect within the purview of matters coming within the legislative authority of Parliament—that’s Canada's highest governing body—the principle that all individuals should have an opportunity equal with other individuals to make for themselves the lives that they are able and wish to have and to have their needs accommodated consistent with their duties and obligations as members of society without being hindered in or prevented from doing so by discriminatory practices based on race, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, and now, hypothetically, gender identity or expression, marital status, family status, disability, or conviction for an offense for which a pardon has been granted or in respect of which a record suspension has been ordered.

Okay, so, well what's problematic about this? Well, I've outlined some of it in yellow. I don't really like the idea of "wish to have the lives that they're able and wish to have," and then to have their needs accommodated. Well, it's messy; it's messy terminology; it's not easy to delineate needs. There's an infinite number of them. It's very, very difficult to determine whose needs should take priority. In fact, that's why we have a free-market society; we have a free-market society so that people's needs can be voted on in some sense by the purchasing power of free individuals, so that nobody, no central committee, no governing body has to decide whose needs should be accommodated.

It's an infinitely complex problem, and it can't be solved by fiat; it's not possible. And this was attempted in places like the Soviet Union, where need decisions were constantly made by centralized committees, and the consequence was absolutely catastrophic. Not only was it economically suicidal, it was also murderous.

So, the whole idea of having needs accommodated is a very, very slippery idea, and it sounds good, but it's very, very dangerous. It's dangerous because the question, 'Who decides whose needs are paramount?' is the crucial question, and how that is answered is the crucial issue, and that can go seriously wrong.

And then, well, the inclusion of gender identity or expression—well, we'll discuss that momentarily. And there's also modification of section 3: for all purposes of this act, the prohibited grounds of discrimination are race, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, and then again newly gender identity or expression, marital status, family status.

So, this is the Criminal Code modification, modification of subsection 318(4), where they define an identifiable group, and this is for the purpose of determining who fundamentally is uttering hate speech or discriminatory speech, and this includes all the candidates we already described: color, race, religion, national, ethnic origin, etc., and includes gender identity or expression.

And so, well, we will continue to talk about that. And then there's modifications of subparagraph 718(2)(a) again with regards to hate crime: evidence that the offense was motivated by bias, prejudice, or hate based on race, national, ethnic origin, language, color, religion, etc., including gender identity, expression, or any other simpler similar factor the offense was motivated by.

Okay, so this sort of legislation has already come into play in provinces in Canada: Alberta, British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Ontario. I'm going to concentrate on Ontario because I think a lot of this is emanating from a small coterie of people behind the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which is a particularly pathological organization, in my estimation, and perhaps the biggest enemy of freedom currently extant in Canada, and I don't say that lightly.

So the reason I think the Ontario Human Rights Commission is an emblematic institution in this regard is partly because I think that the social justice warrior type activists are over-represented in the current provincial government—federally the current liberal provincial government—and I can't help but shake this. I can't help but manifest the suspicion that that’s partly because our current premier is a lesbian in her sexual preference.

That in itself doesn't bother me one way or another; I don't think it's relevant to the political discussion, except insofar as the LGBTQ community has become extraordinarily good at organizing themselves and has a fairly pronounced and very, very sophisticated radical fringe. And I can't help but see the hand of that in what I'm going to read to you, and you can make up your own mind and see if you think the same thing.

So, the wording on the Ontario Human Rights Commission with regards to legislation like Bill C-16 is the same; it's identical to that on the Canadian Department. I've given you the links here, and so that's another indication to me that there's tremendous crosstalk between these institutions—one at the provincial level, that's the Ontario one, and one at the federal level because the wording is identical.

So that's the argument for overlap. And the other thing too, with regards to the LGBTQ angle on this, is that the wording is identical in many regards to that that's commonly used by LGBTQ activists, and so that's why I'm putting the different organizations together.

And as I said before, I'm not saying this is right; it's what I've been able to sort out; it's what I've been able to puzzle out, and I'm putting it forward as an element of discussion.

Okay, so here are some of the definitions that they use, and these are now explicit categories and implicit presumptions of our most fundamental legal structures. So now these have become something—these definitions have become something more than fact; they've become facts that you question at your legal peril.

So here's the first one: gender identity. This is directly from the Ontario Human Rights Commission website. Gender identity is each person's internal and individual experience of gender. It is their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.

Now, I'd also like to point out that that's relatively—this is a petty thing to say, I suppose—but one of the things that struck me about the Ontario Human Rights Commission website is that it's fairly poor, very poorly written, and this particular sentence is very poorly written. Policy that's on its way to be transformed into legislation should not be poorly written because it means it's being poorly thought through and poorly specified, and it means that the people who are doing it aren't being careful, and that makes me nervous.

And so then there's things in here that I don't believe to be true. Gender identity is each person's sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum. I don't know what "neither" means because I don't know what the options are if you're not a man or a woman. It’s not obvious to me how you can be both because those are by definition binary categories.

There's an idea that there's a gender spectrum, but I don't think that that's a valid idea. I don't think there's any evidence for it. Biological sexuality is ancient; it's hundreds of millions of years old, and it's binary because there's two forms of biological sex.

Now, of course, this is predicated on the idea that your gender is somehow independent from your biological sex, but that's a proposition, not a fact. And even if it's true, even if it in some manner was determined to be true, it is certainly not determined to be true to that degree now, and certainly not to the degree that it should be instantiated in law. At most, it's an opinion, and I think it's a politically motivated, an ill-informed opinion.

And now it's got the force of law. And then there's another modification, which is gender expression, which is something different than gender identity. So I guess there's biological sex and then on top of that, there's gender identity, which is separate. They're not even correlated; they don't bear one or any relationship to one another. I guess one is choice or it isn’t exactly clear.

I mean, here's one of the things I find very confusing: it seems to me that the leftist activists have made the claim that with regards to transsexual individuals, for example, that you can be a man in a woman's body and that that's a biological reality, or that you can be a woman in a man's body and that's a biological reality.

So as long as your gender identity is opposite to that of your biological cardinal biological sexual attributes, then that's biologically determined. But if your gender identity is in sync with your biological attributes, then that's a free-floating cultural construct—unless I've got my logic wrong somehow.

And I cannot see how both of those things can possibly be true, but I don't think coherence is one of the hallmarks of radical politically correct thinking, and you can tell that because politically correct people, like the people who have produced this legislation and these policies, are capable of saying things like "it is their sense," meaning each person's, by the way. It is their sense of being maybe—maybe an individual can decide to be a plurality as well—and that's why "they" is being used as the pronoun in this particular sentence, although I think the real reason is that the person who wrote this can't write.

"It is their sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum." From my perspective, that sentence is entirely nonsensical, and now it's law.

And then, okay, so we've got biological sex, we've got gender identity, and then on top of that we've got gender expression, which I guess is how you express your gender identity, which is separate from your biological sexual orientation; it's the way people publicly present their gender. It is the presentation of gender through such aspects as dress, hair, makeup, body language, and voice.

Okay, well those are canonical categories now, and it isn't clear to me, because of the legislation, it's possible—I believe it's possible—that my commentary on these definitions is now illegal and that it's also now potentially classifiable as hate speech. And I would say if that's the case, then like, well, it's the sort of thing I'm going to question, and if someone should be put in jail for questioning that, then I guess I should be put in jail because I'm going to continue to question it.

I think it's nonsensical; I think the formulation is absurd; I think it has no scientific standing; I think it's ideologically motivated; I think it's divisive; I think it's dangerous; it causes chaos; it confuses people; there's no upside to it, and for every one person that this potential transformation of legislation is going to free from oppression, it's going to deftly confuse a hundred more.

And I say that as a clinician with some experience in this matter. More definitions: the code does not define the grounds of gender identity, gender expression, or sex. Instead, the understanding of these and other related terms and the implications for the code—that’s the Ontario Human Rights Code and Ontario Human Rights Commission policies—is evolving from tribunal and court decisions, social science research, as well as self-identity in common everyday use.

More definitions: sex is the anatomical classification of people as male, female, or intersex, usually assigned at birth. I should also point out that the class of intersex is so rare to be virtually non-existent, and it isn't reasonable to make standard policy on the basis of extreme exceptions, and the reason for that is that there are myriads, millions of extreme exceptions, and it's not possible to constitute a collective society on the basis of legislation that's designed for exceptions; it can't be done by definition. The law is fundamentally there to produce a collective agreement.

Okay, back to definitions: once again, gender identity is each person's internal and individual experience of gender—we've already said that. A person's gender identity may be the same as or different from their birth-assigned sex—well, that's the theory. Gender expression is how a person publicly expresses or presents their gender—well, we've covered that.

There's another addition here: a person's chosen name and pronoun are also common ways of expressing gender; others perceive a person's gender through those attributes. Well, this is also Ontario Human Rights Commission policy.

Okay, so this is the scenario I've been running through my head. I can envision a student or a colleague insisting that I call them using gender-neutral pronouns "ji," "zhe," or "zhe" for you Americans, "G" or "sharor," I think it is. I'm not doing that; I'm not doing that.

I think it's manipulative, and I don't recognize another person's right to determine what pronouns I use to address them. I won't do it. Now again, I think that because of these new laws, that my decision might be illegal and maybe it’s even a decision of hate, but I'm not doing it. I think that those gender-neutral pronouns are politically motivated.

I think they're connected to an entire underground apparatus of political motivations, radical left political motivations, and I think uttering those words makes me a tool of those motivations. And I'm going to try to be a tool of my own motivations as clearly as I can articulate them and not the mouthpiece of some murderous ideology.

A person's gender identity definitions continued: a person's gender identity is fundamentally different from and not related to their sexual orientation. Well, that's rubbish fundamentally, because if you ran a correlation analysis between gender identity and sexual orientation, the correlation is going to be something like 0.95, which indicates an almost perfect correlation for the vast majority of people. Gender identity and sexual orientation are the same thing, and so it is not fundamentally different from and not related to their sexual orientation.

That's just a misstatement of fact; perhaps for a minority of people, sometimes they're dissocial, but that doesn't mean that a gender identity is fundamentally different from and not related to sexual orientation. It's a complete misstatement of fact; if there's a correlation of, if there's a correlation of any magnitude between two things, then one is related to another, and when the correlation is just about perfect, well then they are fundamentally related.

So, that's another policy that's based actually on a lie, a misstatement, an untruth. All right, so "trans" or "transgender" is an umbrella term referring to people with diverse gender identities and expressions that differ from stereotypical gender norms. It includes, but is not limited to, people who identify as transgender, trans woman, trans man, transsexual, cross-dressers, or gender non-conforming, gender variant, or genderqueer.

Now, here's what I think about these terms. You see, the people who use these terms want everyone to believe that they're for all the good things that they say they're for, but I don't believe any of that. I don't think that they're for good things at all; I think that they use the pretense that they're for good things— you know, that they stand for good things—to continue their nefarious activity.

One of the most nefarious elements of their activity is the use of these ideological clubs, you know, when the club basically is—here's the club, right? I mean, the kind of club that you hit people with: if there's a difference in outcome, then it's a consequence of racism and bias, and then if I point out the difference, then I'm a good person.

So my little routine for wandering through the world, making sure that I'm a good person—unlike those other people who aren't good people—that need to be punished and perhaps jailed— I look for inequalities, and wherever I find them, I attribute them to racism. And so that means I can spend my whole life doing nothing but being on the side of good, ferreting out all the evil that resides in other people and not in me.

I don't trust people like that. I think that the continual generation of these terms is a consequence of the desire to make that game continue for as long as possible, regardless of the consequences, so that the people who hold those opinions can always be morally correct and have a whole set of enemies to go after. And that's why the terms keep multiplying.

Because every time society moves to become more tolerant, more liberal, well then that interferes with the game because the game is, well, we have to find racist and horrible people. And so, the solution to that is, well, let's just continue to generate categories—more and more categories—to demonstrate how unequal people are. Well, because the categories are infinitely divisible.

And we'll get to that later; it's a game that never runs out. And if you're a professional, if you're someone whose profession is to be politically correct or to be a social justice warrior, and that might be an academic—especially a Marxist one—and in all sorts of sub-disciplines—we'll also get to that later, like sociology and social work, and many of the social sciences apart from those two—and educational psychology, that's another major offender—and social psychology, another major offender— then you're publicly subsidized for your damn viewpoints.

And if you can continue to make the case that the world is full of racists and people possessed by ethnic hatred, you know, persecuting the poor minorities, then your shtick lasts forever, and you can fully justify your subsidized position as well as being on the side of right and morality and making the world a better place.

What a good deal for everyone who is politically correct. Definition of discrimination and harassment—now these are truly terrifying. Discrimination happens when a person experiences negative treatment or impact, intentional or not, because of their gender identity or gender expression.

Okay, and that could be age, sex, race, etc. Okay, think about that sentence. Discrimination happens when a person experiences negative treatment or impact. Okay, so let's say negative impact—well, so what? That means that if I say something that makes you feel negative emotion or maybe even interferes with your happiness—because those are actually separate things—then you've experienced negative impact.

Okay, now that’s bad enough because it means that you get to decide when what I've said is not appropriate. But the worst part of it—and that's not so good because you could misunderstand me, or maybe what I'm saying is right, and you just don't like it, or you know, there's a whole variety of reasons you might get upset about what I say—so the fact that you get upset about something, that's negative impact, but that doesn't necessarily mean that something's bad.

I might even mean that something's good; good has happened. I don't think I've ever learned anything in my entire life that wasn't preceded by some kind of negative impact. We always learn things the hard way.

But the worst part of it is the next phrase: discrimination happens when a person experiences negative treatment or impact, intentional or not. Okay, so here, think about this. When you have little children, and maybe one runs into the other and knocks your child out, you set your child up, and the first thing you say is, "Well, Bobby didn't mean it."

And the reason you say that is because we've learned—and this is painful. This is a painful thing that human beings have learned; it’s at the base of our modern legal systems that intent matters. It isn't consequences that you judge; it's intent. If I accidentally run into you, that's way different than if I run into you on purpose.

If I kill you accidentally, that's manslaughter at its worst; if I kill you with intent, that's the worst form of homicide. We judge people on intent, not on consequences. And so this policy is designed to reverse that.

It's now possible that you didn’t discriminate against someone and violate the law and I think maybe even be persecuted for hate crimes because this is written in such a messy manner—by doing something accidental, intentional, or not. Well, who's going to judge that? Well, you can imagine who's going to judge that—the kind of people who would dare to judge that.

The kind of people who would be the enforcers of social justice—the kind of people who genuinely believe that their intent is pure, well, what if their judgment's not?

Harassment is a form of discrimination. It can include sexually explicit or other inappropriate comments—not defined—questions, jokes, name-calling, images, email, and social media. It doesn't say what email and social media content; just email and social media, which is another indication of the appalling level of literacy behind these statements.

Transphobic, homophobic, or other bullying, sexual advances, touching another—unwelcome and ongoing behavior that insults, demeans, harms, or threatens a person in some way. All right, so the first thing you might note is that this has been written to cover the broadest possible range of possibilities. That's the exact opposite of what good legislation does.

So if you combine these discrimination and harassment laws, basically the policies allow for people to—like if I unintentionally negatively impact you with a joke, then I'm harassing you. And that's well on its way to being, well, it's a violation of the Ontario Human Rights Code. It's an offense according to the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and it's on the way to being a hate crime as far as I can tell with the modifications of federal legislation.

So—and then to cap it all off, they throw this in at the end of the sentence: "other unwelcome and ongoing behavior that insults, demeans, harms, or threatens a person in some way."

Okay, so that's all pretty scary, but then there's more, of course. And so this is the Ontario Human Rights Commission developing policies on organizational liability. So listen to this: organizations are liable for any discrimination and harassment that happens. They are also liable for not accommodating tran's persons’ needs unless it would cause undue hardship.

The whole issue of undue hardship is a tricky one because I'm not exactly sure who adjudicates that. We'll get to that later. They must deal with complaints, take steps to prevent problems, and provide a safe welcoming environment for trans people.

Okay, and, you know, old people and ethnically diverse people and, you know, differently gendered people, and all of that. So fine, organizations are liable for any discrimination and harassment that happens.

Okay, well that puts a hell of an onus on the organization because it isn't exactly clear to me how organizations are going to monitor all of their people all of the time in the organizations. What if they're using social media outside the organization? So organizations are now liable for all of this.

So how are you going to police all that? Okay, next, more on liability from the Ontario Human Rights Code: under Section 46.3 of the code a corporation, trade union, or occupational association, unincorporated association, or employer's organization—now listen to this—will be held responsible for discrimination including acts or omissions committed by employees or agents in the course of their employment.

This is known as vicarious liability. Okay, responsible parties violate the code now this is where it gets this is where it gets horrible, I think: where they directly or indirectly intentionally or unintentionally infringe the code or whether they otherwise authorize, condone, or allow behavior that is contrary to the code.

It is unacceptable to choose to remain unaware, ignore, or fail to address potential or actual human rights violations whether or not a complaint is made. God, you couldn't possibly design a broader definition of liability. Potential or actual human rights violations—whether or not a complaint is made.

Okay, so does that mean that you have vicarious liability if you fail to address a potential human rights violation—whether or not a complaint is made? The only thing I can say about legislation that's written in this manner is that it seems to me to be consciously designed to get as many people in trouble as possible.

That's it; it's designed to get as many people as possible in trouble at the same time. So that brings us to the end of part one of this talk on political correctness. In it, I described the increasing fear that's spread by politically correct activism throughout large organizations, including academic institutions like the University of Toronto.

I also discussed the increasing all-pervasiveness of this viewpoint because it's not something that's localized anymore to academic institutions. It's spread beyond them and is characteristic of the preoccupations of a certain kind of administrator at a very large multitude of large organizations.

Then I described in detail the Canadian Bill C-16, which is an attempt to modify the Canadian Human Rights Code and the Criminal Code to make a whole variety of speech acts and the holding of certain opinions, or the articulating of them, criminal, and maybe even criminal under the provisions of the hate crime legislation.

In part two, I'm going to give you a more detailed analysis of the University of Toronto's attempts to transform its HR department into a politically correct organization. I'm using the goals of the University of Toronto as a cautionary tale about how such political maneuvers operate at a local level, again on the principle that a good story about something local is a good story about something of general significance.

In part three, I'm going to talk about what individuals can do about these sorts of things—what you as a citizen, how you as a citizen might arm yourself intellectually so that you can articulate a stance against this kind of movement if you feel that that's in your best interests.

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