In 1929, the Persons Case was concluded in London. After fighting in the Supreme Court of Canada, which did not recognize women as persons (1928), women finally obtained this status and thus the right to be appointed to the Senate.
In 2023 in Quebec, they must fight not to be erased by the word “person”, and the Minister of Justice, Simon Jolin-Barrette, had to present a motion to the National Assembly so that the word “woman” not be struck from the laws and replaced by the word “person”, on the pretext that it would be more inclusive.
However, being a woman corresponds to the category of sex, which is enshrined in the Charters of Rights and Freedoms, a category that generates a certain number of rights for women. Removing the word “woman” from the laws is therefore neither trivial nor inclusive.
This attempt to erase women, during the discussions on Bill 12 on surrogacy, is the fruit of an ideology which is penetrating the minds of the population, the media, school curricula, and even in the National Assembly, namely the ideology of gender identity.
This ideology replaces the word “sex” with the word “gender”. However, “sex” has a biological basis for the reproduction of all species of mammals, including humans, while the word “gender” refers to a differentiated social construct, which varies according to cultures and times.
The distinction between feminine and masculine is variable and includes a certain number of stereotypes that feminism has deconstructed and which are coming back in force with gender ideology, contrary to what the latter claims.
An ideology that enters schools and girls who flee femininity
From kindergarten to secondary school, biology is more and more evacuated from the sexuality education course. In addition to the fact that adolescents will not have the tools to understand how their bodies work, sexuality is taught as a quest for identity rather than a series of romantic experiences.
From an early age, young people acquire a whole lexicon of gender identities (sex assigned at birth, gender fluid, transgender, etc.) and they are suggested to question their identity that they would not have had. otherwise.
In addition to school, in social networks, young people learn that they can be born in the wrong body. Statistics Canada data shows a recent social trend that not only leads more young people towards a non-binary or transgender identity, but that it is mainly girls and women under the age of 35 who declare themselves as such.
Throughout the West, there has been a meteoric rise in the number of minors with gender dysphoria.
For example, between 2016 and 2017 in the United States, the number of transgender surgeries increased fourfold. In 2018, Britain noted an increase in cases of young people requesting a gender reassignment of over 4400% in the last 15 years.
Whereas before it was mostly men who transitioned, today more than 70% of cases are teenage girls.1
Reduced to stereotypes
When biology is removed, women find themselves reduced to a set of stereotypes. Thus, pushed into their questioning of what gender they are, girls who don’t like to wear dresses, have never been attracted to dolls, prefer to play sports and like mechanics come to believe that they are, in reality, boys enclosed in a female body.
This feeling is even stronger if, in addition, they discover that they are sexually attracted to girls. Added to this is the omnipresence of pornography and the hypersexualization of women, which increases the difficulty for girls to calmly face the transformations that accompany puberty.
The extraordinary rise in cases of girls wanting to change sex is symptomatic of problems that go beyond the individual. It is deplorable that we have come to offer medical solutions to social problems. It is that, all the indicators say it, it is even easier to be a man in our society than a woman.
Running away from femininity becomes an interesting option that is presented to young girls from an early age. Is it really any wonder, then, that an increasing number of young girls who do not fit stereotypes are self-identifying as trans rather than asserting themselves as girls who meet the challenges of moving beyond socially determined for women?
1 Shrier, A. (2020). Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.