In Canada, it is now a crime to use the wrong gender pronouns when speaking to someone that "self-identifies" as the gender opposite to their biological sex. Yes, you read that correctly. No need to go back and double check. Canada has made it a crime to call a boy "a boy" and a girl "a girl" if its not the gender that they feel they are on the inside.
Has the world gone insane? It sure looks that way.
Last Thursday, Canada's Senate passed Bill C-16, which adds "gender identity" and "gender expression" to the country's Human Rights Code and essentially makes that act of "misgendering" a hate crime. The bill, which passed by a vote of 67-11, received praise from Justin Trudeau, Canada's prime minister. "Great news," he wrote on Twitter. "Bill C-16 has passed the Senate -- making it illegal to discriminate based on gender identity or expression. #LoveisLove."
The bill was also praised by Jody Wilson-Raybould, Canada's attorney general and minister of justice. "All Canadians should feel #FreeToBeMe," she wrote on Twitter. But while many leftists and progressives in Canada had nothing but good things to say about the Senate's passage of C-16, not everyone is so pleased.
Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, has been one of the most outspoken critics of the bill, arguing that it violates the free speech rights of the Canadian people. "Compelled speech has come to Canada," Peterson said in a statement. "We will seriously regret this."
Back in May, Professor Peterson expressed his disapproval of Bill C-16 before the Senate. "Ideologues are using unsuspecting and sometimes complicit members of the so-called transgender community to push their ideological vanguard forward," he said. "The very idea that calling someone a term that they didn't choose causes them irreparable harm that legal remedies should be sought it an indication of just how deeply the culture of victimization has sunk into our society."
Professor Peterson is right. Whether they are aware of it or not, what the Canadian government is essentially doing is compelling their people to comply with their left wing politically correct agenda. If they refuse, then they will be charged with a hate crime, forced to pay hefty fines, and even potentially thrown in jail. Needless to say, this is a slippery slope. What starts as the suppression of speech relating to gender may very well escalate to the suppression of other forms of speech. It is, to put it bluntly, a step in the direction of tyranny.
Furthermore, there is something incredibly hypocritical about the left's insistence that gender is based on how one feels on the inside rather than the genitalia they were born with. While your typical liberal will site science and "factual evidence" to argue that mankind is playing a significant role in the warming of planet earth, science is all but ignored when it comes to the left's views on gender. Biologically speaking, gender is based on chromosomes. If the sperm carries an X chromosome, then a female will be born, and if the sperm carries a Y chromosome, a male will be born. This is science, and yet the progressives reject it.
Sources include: