Trudeau's government is setting the stage to criminalize gender identity dissidents in Canada

CSIS claims those challenging gender identity ideology are "violent extremists," but where is their concern for those engaging in overt violence and threats against women's rights activists?

A target in a darts game played at CATA’s “Transmas” party in 2019

This week, the Canada’s state funded media reported that CSIS, Canada's intelligence agency had assessed that the “anti-gender movement,” determining it could "inspire and encourage serious violence against the 2SLGBTQI+ community.” Referring to those pushing back against misogynist, violent and predatory trans activism as “extremists,” CSIS appears to be responding to a growing pushback against gender identity ideology in Canada, including politicians like Danielle Smith and Pierre Poilievre who support policy limiting the transitioning of minors.

CSIS spokesperson Eric Balsam told CBC News that while violent rhetoric does not always lead to violence, "the ecosystem of violent rhetoric within the anti-gender movement, compounded with other extreme worldviews, can lead to serious violence."

These statements are shocking beyond belief, as someone who has been fighting gender identity ideology in an effort to protect women’s rights, children, free speech, and reality more broadly, for many years now. I and women all around the world have faced extreme threats of violence for at least a decade, in our attempts to gather, organize, write and speak about our concerns, and the impact of transgenderism on women and girls in particular.

I have required private bodyguards and a police presence at almost every event I have spoken at in Canada and the US. An event organized by WoLF in Seattle in 2020 was subject to a bomb threat. When the panelists and I left the building, activists hurled themselves at us as we tried to get in our security team’s vehicles, to escape. An event planned at Simon Fraser University in 2019 was shut down just days before when the University’s security told us the threat of violence was too great, and that they wouldn’t be able to guarantee the safety of students, staff, and attendees. We held the event at the Pan Pacific instead, where activists parked themselves outsideholding a makeshift guillotine reading “TERFs and SWERFs step right up.”

In response to my talk in Toronto in 2019, 700 protesters showed up outside the public library, including Antifa, a violent terrorist group, to hurl vitriol and threats at attendees. Thousands had attempted to force the Toronto Public Library (TPL) to cancel the event, but city librarian Vickery Bowles refused, citing the library’s mandate to support free expression. The police had to cordon off the entire block surrounding the TPL in order for me to enter and leave the building safely. It had been planned that I would do media interviews after the event, but things had gotten so out of hand outside, and trans activists had also barricaded themselves inside the library, that the police told me I had to leave immediately, offering me a jacket to cover my head (I refused it). The police were visibly scared.

In 2019, a group calling themselves Coalition Against Trans Antagonism (CATA), run by a large man named Tami Cameron (aka Tami Starlight), responsible for graffiting Vancouver Rape Relief’s store front with messages such as “Fuck TERFs” and shoving a disembowled animal through their mail slot, plastered posters of my face, with the words, “Meghan Murphy Transphobe” and “Shut Her Down,” all over Vancouver to ensure I could not feel safe anywhere in my home town.

A Vancouver politician named Morgane Oger (né Ronan) has been working for many years to define speech in defense of women’s rights as illegal hate speech and to criminalize not only me, but the venues that host my events. Ironically, he has openly encouraged others to perpetrate violence against me (the definition of hate speech, in other words). In 2019 he wrote, on his own website:

Meghan Murphy is encouraging others to break the law. She is not breaking the law because the provincial discrimination law only applies to physical publications and the federal law is only the criminal code making it an infraction to incite hatred likely to cause a disturbance.

Effectively, transgender people need somebody to react to Meghan Murphy in an act of violence or aggression in a provable way and then she may meet the very high bar for an offense under s.319 of the criminal code.

Nonetheless, she is inciting an illegal act and is liable for the consequences that she caused when “an injury” as defined in tort law occurs.

Until then, Transgender women who she targets with her advocacy have to wait while she incites hatred against us on false premises.

In 2019, at a talk entitled “Is a populist anti-transgender campaign being waged from Canada,” the then-BC NDP Vice President reiterated this, suggesting to his audience that the only way to “stop Meghan Murphy” was through extreme threats of violence, leading to the security costs required to host me to be unaffordable. This was the very tactic used by the Vancouver Public Library in 2018 in an attempt to cancel our room booking for an event called, “Gender Identity Ideology and Women’s Rights.”

That same year, Oger successfully advocated the City of Vancouver to defund Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter, Canada’s longest standing women’s transition house, supporting women escaping domestic violence.

I filed a police report against Oger in 2020, after he stalked me around my neighbourhood, as I was running errands. A few months later, I was contacted by the Vancouver Police ahead of another event we had scheduled to take place at Robson Square Library Conference Centre called, “Women’s Places and Spaces: Sports, Prisons, and Shelters,” due to a death threat against me they had been alerted to. CATA had petitioned the VPL to cancel that booking and was granted time at a VPL board meeting that same year to speak about their petition and argue that hosting our event “contradicts the City of Vancouver’s 2SLGBTQ+ Advisory Committee guidelines as it jeopardizes the safety of these groups, and therefore their access to VPL’s facilities.”

Following this (and numerous meetings where both CATA and Oger held the floor) , the VPL updated their room booking policy to introduce a “Rental Pre-Screening and Risk Assessment procedure to identify whether events are likely to, or will, violate the Criminal Code or the BC Human Rights Code, or present a significant security risk to the Library.” The updated policy explicitly states that “hate speech, as defined by law, is not permitted, andthat VPL will not accept event bookings that are intended to promote or incite hate as defined by Canadian law.”

Further to this change, in direct response to that first event in January 2019, the VPL began creating a “Trans, Gender Diverse and Two-Spirit Inclusion Action Plan” and further revised their room booking policy, so that members of the public were no longer permitted to book rooms for public events at all. In response to a room booking request this year for a panel event featuring myself and several other speakers, aimed at discussing the state of free speech in Canada, the VPL said:

At this time we are only taking rentals for Monday-Friday private events for up to 100 people. Private events are organized for invited guests only, and no one from the public may attend or purchase a ticket to attend.

What this means is that in response to groups and individuals who have engaged in overt violent threats against female activists advocating on behalf of women’s rights in Canada, the Vancouver Public Library changed their policy explicitly to prevent us from hosting events and talks. Instead of standing strong against male threats of violence and in support of free expression, they catered to fascists, sending the message that these kinds of threats work and are supported by government funded, public institutions, paid for by our tax dollars. (The VPL’s annual budget is $55.2 million, with more than 90% funded by the City of Vancouver, and funding from the Province of British Columbia covering most of the remaining 10%.)

Canada is not alone, albeit the country seems most inclined to support terroristic trans activism. These threats are consistent across the Western world. Women like Kellie-Jay Keen and Julie Bindel have faced such violence and threats for years, every time they speak in defense of women’s rights in the UK. An event organized by the USA branch of Women’s Declaration International in San Francisco, was protested by trans activists who scaled the wall to a private bridge accessing our conference room in the Hilton San Francisco Financial District to chase down myself and K Yang, another woman speaking at the event. Had we not been yelled at to run by a man with us, who had to physically fight them off, we would have been attacked and possibly worse. One of the protesters was arrested on two counts of felony vandalism and resisting arrest, which resulted in non-life threatening injuries to two officers. Later it was discovered that the man, Casey Goonan, a 33-year-old Oakland resident, may be on a government watch list on account of being involved in an extremist group or terrorist activity.

Things have not calmed down in Canada. In September, as I was addressing a crowd gathered at Parliament in Victoria, BC for the One Million March for Children, activists pushed past the barrier protecting the speaker stage, hurling themselves at myself and the other speakers in attempt to attack us. After one of them punched a police officer attempting to maintain the barrier, the event was shut down. The VicPD told us the situation had become too dangerous and that they could not protect us from the growing mob, and rushed me away to a car.

Shortly thereafter, an event booking made at the Cowichan Community Centre on Vancouver Island for my scheduled talk, “Inclusivity, Gender Identity, and Women’s Rights” was cancelled, citing the BC Human Rights Code. A letter from the Administrative and Facility Booking Coordinator explained:

Given the likelihood that the purpose of this event is to promote, or would have the effect of promoting discrimination, contempt or hatred for any group or person on the basis of sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, or any other similar factor, it is determined this rental must be cancelled.

We have continued to fight this decision on the basis that my speech is not never has been “hate speech,” and that predicting hate speech is foundationless, more broadly. That “One less TERF,” a statement made in response to the death of celebrated women’s rights activist Magdalen Berns by CATA, or “More Dead TERFs,” as read a sign held by a man outside the Hilton in San Francisco in September, or any of the other threats of violence offered by trans activists to female dissidents, isn’t being considered seriously by organizations like CSIS, while they attempt to turn us into criminals demonstrates a reversal of epic proportions, and a massive failure on the part of our governments.

Commenting on a document drafted by the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC) and obtained by CBC News through an access to information request, Balsam told the CBC that "CSIS assesses that exposure to groups and individuals espousing anti-gender extremist rhetoric could inspire and encourage serious violence against the 2SLGBTQI+ community, or against those who are viewed as supporters of pro-gender ideology policies and events.”

When will ITAC and CSIS begin paying attention to groups like CATA and other trans activist groups and individuals, who have openly used violence and violent threats to shut down the peaceful speech of individuals like myself, who express fair and rational concerns about the impact of gender identity policy and legislation on women and minors? Once it’s too late? Perhaps never?

In a public address at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg last year, CSIS Director David Vigneault raised his concerns about violence directed at the 2SLGBTQI+ community, saying:

We're concerned about the sharp uptick in hate crimes across Canada, and the marked increase in terrorist and violent extremist threats and rhetoric from extremist actors, many of whom are consuming toxic media online, becoming radicalized, and may mobilize quickly to violence."

If this is true, I eagerly await the report on extremist trans activism in Canada, and the ever-growing threat of violence against women like myself, and those who dare say that men are not women ever, that there is no such thing as a “trans kid,” and that women and girls deserve protection from male predators.

In the meantime, I will consider these organizations and our government more broadly as nothing more than ideological arms of a terrorist group.