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steven lightfoot's avatar

Excellent, you are doing important work. Your coherent professionalism is exactly what Canada needs to push back against the sophistry of the ideologues. Keep it up. I too use my real name, we must not be afraid to voice our serious and good faith concerns, and simply ignore any immature attacks directed toward us.

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Lee Lakeman's avatar

Uplifting confidence. A great piece

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Leslie MacMillan's avatar

Edit: This is Leslie. Substack gets our e-mail addresses mixed up.

Very good. I particularly like the distinction between negative and positive rights, the latter being exhortations for the state to spend ever more money and constrict other people's liberty to ever greater extent in the name of "progressive" social justice policy.

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Ollie Parks's avatar

What has happened to activism that so many of today's activists prove to be a scourge on the very society they claim to be trying to improve? Whether the cause is homelessness, addiction, criminal justice, autism or gender identity ideology, activists such as Florence Ashley are making headlines with their extreme policy positions that harm the constituencies they claim to represent as well as society in general. Instead of being shown the door, this generation of activists are being empowered by public and private institutions that implement their pernicious ideas and impose them on the rest of us.

Can it be that we are being too polite in our opposition to radical activists? Trans activists unleash the flying monkeys the moment a captured enterprise steps out of line and they have yet to pay price for doing so.

In a better world, this piece and others of the same stripe and caliber would appear in every in every source that aided in disseminating and normalizing the specious and shoddy scholarship of Mr. Florence Ashley and his ilk. Radical activists would discover that they no longer had the spotlight to themselves; their critics were legion and they were being exposed as the frauds they'd always been.

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lee_santos's avatar

Thank you for this incisive and exceptional rebuttal—sanity will win out if you (and we) continue to make these calm clear evidence-based arguments.

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Sam's avatar

This ties in with this recent Canadian critique of how public social institutions are handling the attempt to form a consensus on these issues : https://open.substack.com/pub/hxlibraries/p/sogior-multiculturalism?r=1nw26k&utm_medium=ios

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Stephen Howard's avatar

Well reasoned and structured thinking, thank you. As these truths are increasingly reaching the light of day, figures like Ashley need to be vigorously and publicly marginalised - ooops, there is that word !! I think the reclaiming of language is at the very heart of deprogramming children and young people (plus the feckless adults orbiting them) from inhabiting a space where they are currently & actively encouraged to expect that their every thought and feeling be validated, and acted upon - dictated by virtue of their (naturally) attenuated view and comprehension of things. Having said that, I support the expansion of psychotherapeutic practices for all, and particularly the generations coming through who are being pulverised by the technology and an unmitigated access to pernicious stimulation and information(s).

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Rona Dinur's avatar

Excellent summary of this madness.

The brazen overconfidence with which scholar-activists promote strong and highly consequential claims about delicate medical/psychological matters on which they have *no expertise whatsover* is truely something to behold.

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Catherine's avatar

Brilliant analysis. If only those considering such surgeries/hormones would read it.

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