Ignorance is hardly bliss

As timing goes, a press release issued by a group calling itself the Institute for Canadian Values could not have been worse – nor could it have possibly been better.
On Thursday at 2:19 p.m., the man claiming to be the group’s president, Dr. Charles McVety, issued a press release decrying a federal bill that aims to include transgendered individuals as people protected from discrimination.
What was interesting, however, was McVety’s use of the term “pervert,” to describe transgender individuals.
The irony, of course, is that McVety’s release came almost at the same time local media outlets learned that a transgendered individual, Michelle Rayner, had allegedly been assaulted in a bathroom on the St. Thomas University campus in Fredericton, apparently on the basis of her perceived sex (male).
Now, we fully acknowledge that not everyone is comfortable with transgendered individuals. And frankly, that’s OK. We live in a free society, and should be able to hold individual views that range from one extreme to the other on transgender issues, and to reasonable in-betweens – such as holding the view that governments should not fund gender-change procedures.
The latter is somewhat my personal view, by the way. I have no hatred or animousity towards transgendered people, and once knew a fascinating young lad named Melvin who became a lass named Melody.
Yet at the same time, it is difficult for me to see governments subsidizing $50,000-plus elective sex-change surgery when Grampa is on a 15-month waiting list for a hip transplant, and Samantha needs to have a biopsy done to see if she’s got a cancerous tumour in her breast.
But there is a considerable difference between holding a personal view, even an extreme view, and having an uniformed or inflammatory view, as McVety and the alleged assailant in the St. Thomas University bathroom did.
We teach our two-year-olds to “use your words.” The woman in the bathroom who allegedly assaulted Rayner could have done exactly that.
“Excuse me, but this is the woman’s bathroom,” would have been far preferable to a punch in the face.
McVety’s term “pervert” (the precise quote reads: “... our children will be exposed to perverts entering girls’ bathrooms, change rooms and even showers claiming transgender discrimination.”) is fear-laden and needlessly inflammatory. It also shows an interesting bias, in that McVety (president of the Canadian Christian College), didn’t use the term “boys’ bathrooms” even though there are transgendered individuals who are biologically female but either choose to express, or feel moved to express, as a male.
Although much-debated, some scientists have well-founded data linking genetic traits to transgendered individuals: some people, it seems, are hard-wired to be something other than a black-and-white, girl-or-boy outcome. If so, we note that genetics can’t be altered.
But ignorance can.
Many transgendered individuals experience some degree of psychological trauma, and more than a few suffer from mental illness attributed to challenges with gender identity: trauma directly linked to societal anger and misunderstanding, like assuming transgendered individuals are “perverts.”
Adding to that trauma isn’t going to help.
Understanding, however, will.
A line from an old Rush song, “Witch Hunt” seems appropriate, here:
“Quick to anger, quick to judge, slow to understand
Ignorance and prejudice and fear go hand in hand.”
As an aside, evidence as to how attitudes in this country must change lies in location of the Canada.com story on Rayner’s claims.
It was filed under “entertainment.”