What “equality” doesn’t mean
Liam Johns, the transgender man known for his LGBTQ activism in Charlotte and for sharing his pregnancy journey in a 2019 Charlotte Observer series, died on Sept. 14. He was 35. Johns was undergoing dialysis for kidney failure and was on the national kidney and pancreas transplant list when he passed away, said Chase Hayes, a friend and former partner, in an interview with the Observer.
Maybe the kidney failure was nothing to do with any “trans health care” he had, I don’t know, but it’s difficult not to suspect a connection.
In 2018, Johns gave birth to his first child with his partner at the time, who now goes by Freya. In 2022, he gave birth to their second.
As millions of men do every day.
Johns in 2016 protested against House Bill 2 — North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” — which said people had to use the public bathroom that matched the sex on their birth certificate.
As people had been doing all along, until trans ideology popped up to shout that we have to do it differently now.
“I won’t back down ’til HB2 is gone. I’m 100 percent human and deserve 100 percent equality,” Johns said in a 2016 interview with the Observer. “When our community’s lives are under attack, we stand up and fight back.”
Yes but it’s not about equality. Nobody is saying trans people don’t deserve equality. It’s not “equality” for men to use women’s spaces or for women to use men’s. Notice, for instance, that in both of those scenarios it’s women who are at risk. Men in women’s “public bathrooms” put women at risk, and women in men’s put women at risk. See how that works? And talking about equality is irrelevant.
I guess you could call it a form of equality; women are equally at risk either way!
That aside, there is something truly jarring about reading the words ‘his pregnancy’ and knowing it was not a satire or sci-fi.
Not just jarring, but sinister and ominous. Hidden behind the “style guides” and “journalistic codes of conduct” that set forth the “proper” use of incorrect pronouns is a political decision to hide the truth, to obscure rather than illuminate. To lie. As Ophelia pointed out in connection with the fallout from the Wadwha horror, it’s the media’s job to make things clear. Making it a matter of policy to distort and obfuscate isn’t a good fit for a free press in a free society, as it undermines the integrity of both.
I know that newspapers, magazines, television networks and social media companies are in business, and that they’re “selling” a viewpoint, or allegiance alongside the products they advertise, and that yes, these commitments will influence the stories the run or ignore, and the way that their stories are written or presented. We get a partial picture*, or a slanted, tinted, or coloured picture; sometimes no picture at all. I get it. But there’s something more disturbing than usual about the distortions to this process that have been introduced by the media’s surrender to trans ideology. The blatant denial of reality that’s become reflexive, second nature to so much of what we read and see. The obvious self-censorship, the laboured rewriting to keep the word “woman” out of stories that are about women. These are not slips. They’re not accidents. They are deliberate choices, made to push an agenda at the expense of the supposed mission of the very institutions carrying these decisions out. It also goes against the interests of the public good which they claim to uphold, and for which they are given the freedom to operate in democratic societies. Unfortunately I can’t think of any word better than “Orwellian” for what is happening. Overused? Certainly. Accurate? Chillingly so.
And once again I’m left asking what’s in it for them? What do the media get in return for the self destruction of their own reputation and integrity? How can they possible benefit from such a counterproductive policy? What do they get out of it? What we’re getting out of it is all too clear. We see it reported here every day in Butterflies and Wheels.
*Back in my teens, when I was getting my first taste of the narrow, blinkered view of the world the media serves, I thought that every news cast should have ended with, “And today, around the world, another 40,00 children died of malnutrition or easily preventable diseases.” But then, even that would have become mental wallpaper or background radiation.
And given that so many people in the broader world don’t know the terminology, and think that “transgender man” means “a man that has had a sex-change operation”, they’re going to think: “Wow, sex-change operations are now so good that men can give birth? Amazing!”
‘I’m 100 percent human and deserve 100 percent equality’
To me it sounds like she’s saying ‘I’m not a woman, I’m a human being and deserve to be treated as such.’
If it was ~really~ about equality, the demands would be for accommodations specifically for trans individuals. So some safe gender-neutral bathrooms added to existing ones, trans divisions for athletics events, and so on. After all, it’s fairly obvious that, in our still-far-too-homophobic society, a man in a dress who enters the men’s room IS at risk of assault from other men. So I have little issue with creating accommodations designed to lower that risk. However, I’m not inclined to have one bit of that extra security come at the cost of placing women at risk, instead.