CBC:
When CBC decided not to air the documentary Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?, multiple commentators saw it as an affront to empiricism and free debate. Transgender Kids is a BBC documentary that challenges the “gender affirmative” approach to supporting children with gender dysphoria — that is, children whose gender identity does not align with that assigned at birth.
Critics of CBC’s decision saw the network as yielding to trans activists, who they saw as rejecting science and acting as an unreasonable mob.
I, however, rejoiced at this decision. Empirical evidence is important. It’s often an essential tool when advocating urgent change. But showing this documentary would not have contributed to healthy public debate based on the available scientific evidence.
I in this context is…
This creature. Got it. I’ve covered pieces by this monstrosity before, but I never really dived deep into the id of this creature. I assumed pictures would do the trick all by themselves.
Welcome to the website of Florence Ashley, metaphorically a biorg witch with flowers in their hair! Florence Ashley is a transfeminine jurist, bioethicist, public speaker, and activist who uses they/them pronouns.
Unfortunately for Florence, he is as much of a “biorg witch,” as he is a woman. Possibly less so since such thing does not exist. And I don’t mean that in the sense that witches aren’t real, although there is that. I mean “biorg,” isn’t a thing. This is the sort of very sane person that we’re dealing with.
Their public writing has been featured in The Globe and Mail, CBC Opinion, Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, Huffington Post, The Conversation, IRPP Policy Option, NOW Magazine, The Advocate, INTO More, Gazette des femmes, Le Devoir, La Presse, Le Journal de Montréal, and Journal Métro.
Yes indeed they appear to have plenty of mainstream disinformation outlets falling all over themselves to put their rantings out there into the ether. It’s weird, because nobody actually likes these people, and yet these “biorg witches,” keep getting shoved down our throats.
On this website, you’ll find a short biography, a repository of published academic papers, links to media publications and interviews, and Florence’s curriculum vitae.
If you want to get in touch with Florence, you can reach them on Facebook, Twitter, or at f.ashley at mail.utoronto.ca.
Well anyway, enough of that. Let’s get back to the CBC piece.
In defence of airing Transgender Kids, people have argued that we should present the facts and let people make up their own minds. While I generally agree, important presuppositions are required.
Firstly, the facts must be presented in a fair manner and be presented in their totality. Cherry-picking facts — which this documentary does, as I will describe in detail below — does not make for healthy public debate. Secondly, viewers must generally be rational decision-makers who are capable of critically assessing the ideas being presented. Neither presupposition is accurate in this context.
Don’t you see you stupid bigotphobes? You’re just not rational enough to have the truth presented to your bigoted minds. Truth like that Camryn here is a blue jay.
Or that this she-man is a dragon.
Maybe if you were more rational we could show you objectively true things, but sadly that is not the case.
What’s more, if you asked people around you whether trans people are normal, I suspect that most would answer “no.” Being trans is seen by many to be a suboptimal outcome that should be avoided except in the clearest of cases. In a recent CROP survey prepared for the anti-bullying organization Fondation Jasmin Roy, only 39 per cent of people expressed being very close to believing that gender identity can differ from gender assigned at birth. Everyone else believed to some extent that gender is biologically determined.
Given that transitude — the fact of being trans — is understood to be abnormal and undesirable by large swaths of the general population, we cannot expect viewers of the documentary to be unbiased in their assessment of the evidence presented. It is well known that people tend to favour information that confirms pre-existing beliefs. Even if data is presented in an unbiased way, viewers introduce their own bias by overvaluing data that confirms their pre-existing beliefs about gender being based in birth assignment.
This part is why I had to write this piece. The tranny here just flat out admits that the vast majority of the public don’t believe in their fairytale magic neo-penis conversions. As shown earlier, there are people who believe that they are secretly blue jays or dragons. There are men who secretly believe that they are women. But they aren’t women, and they aren’t dragons either. And don’t let the gaslighting by all those propaganda outlets listed above make you think that you’re alone in having this opinion, because you’re not.
In this light, the decision by CBC not to air the documentary should not be seen as an affront to science and public debate. On the contrary: it demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the interactions between empiricism and free debate.
Let’s not forget that the stakes are high, considering the vulnerable state of trans people in our society. People are already hesitant to affirm their children’s gender identities. Showing the documentary would have been negligent and inimical to healthy public debate.
CBC refused to show this documentary because it makes it harder for these groomers to indoctrinate vulnerable children. And, BTW, it’s not the “trans community,” that’s vulnerable, it’s the children they’re trying to abuse. Every story I’ve ever encountered is about kids who are doing poorly in life, often from broken homes, who get preyed upon by these groomers. It’s never children who are doing really well at everything and are loved by everybody. But the groomer squeals in pain as it lashes at you.
