Joking aside, because it’s April 2, we are having a Twitter space Sunday night to discuss Canada, the very state of it.
Matt Osborne, editor of The Distance, will be chatting with Eva Kurilova, one of our fabulous contributing writers. Leave a comment and we will give it priority in our Q&A queue.
As seen last week in Nashville, both Matt and Eva are committing acts of journalism in an unpolice state ruled by a totalizing ideology of gender identitarian jibber jabber. Chris Elston, aka Billboard Chris, was once again seriously assaulted in Canada this week by police who watched and then mocked him. Post-Nashville, post-Posie in Australia, people are getting scared. We will talk about all of it.
If you have never read Eva’s work, well then what is wrong with you? Explain yourself to her in the space tonight, maybe.
We’ll try to have the first hour be organized and then take questions for an hour after. Really, that’s all the time Eva has available with such a busy schedule of brilliance.
Matt will be hosting. He wants us to make sure everyone with questions, comments, or concerns knows they should request the microphone when the Q&A begins and use the Twitter spaces menu to raise a hand and wait for recognition before unmuting. Otherwise things get all Zucotti Park and we’re done with it.
We refer policy questions to the rules of the forum.
We are also using the Substack threads feature for this post to give subscriber questions priority and help us keep the first half of the space on a useful track.
Thanks to everyone who supports this project. You are responsible for making our heads get big and fill up with big ideas and big plans, so we will talk about them a little bit. Exciting!
"gender identitarian jibber jabber"
Can certainly sympathize with that -- great deal of what comes under their heading of "gender" is incoherent twaddle and quite unscientific claptrap. A great deal of which we have feminism to thank for, Judith Butler and her ilk in particular. Y'all may wish to consider that as a topic for later discussion.
However, I don't think most people in this neck of the woods are much willing to consider that the concept is not entirely useless, and that a too facile or ideologically driven rejection of more rationale definitions of the term -- most often by so-called gender-critical feminists -- is part and parcel of the problem.
One might reasonably argue that "gender ideology" has had such a pervasively corrupting influence largely because there is some merit in the concept, most broadly as rough synonyms for personalities and personality types differentiated by sex -- feminine and masculine personality traits in particular. A perspective which some "sects" of feminism have, quite credibly, championed and promoted.
However, more broadly, it seems that far too many in this particular neck of the woods, including Eva, are further contributing to the problem by a rather desperate, and quite unscientific, insistence that "sex is immutable 🙄" -- it most certainly isn't, at least by standard biological definitions.
And the issue really IS a matter of definitions -- for the sexes in general, and for "woman" in particular. See my earlier comments in Eva's post for details:
https://www.thedistancemag.com/p/woman-undefined-the-counterfeit-mysticism/comment/13555990