Giving up on justice, but continuing to shine a light

Thoughts on being cancelled, four years later

By now I’m certain you’ve all heard the news out of Texas: two whistleblowers from Texas Children’s Hospital – where children were undergoing secret medical transitions – now have federal agents breathing down their necks. Dr. Eithan Haim, 33, is facing imprisonment for exposing the hospital’s lies. Nurse Vanessa Sivadge had the FBI knock on her door after she revealed the hospital’s physicians were illegally using Medicaid benefits to offer sex-change procedures to minors.

Haim, in particular, has paid a heavy personal cost; in addition to facing years in prison, his family paid a heavy financial price. He spent everything he had on legal bills. There is no end in sight to his legal troubles. Hard-left activists have targeted his employment and defamed him (as they do, the twits that they are).

Haim is raising money for the ongoing legal battle. On his fundraising page, something he wrote struck my heart like a thunderbolt:

“I do not bring this up to cast myself as the victim or grift for sympathy - because at the end of the day self-pity does nothing for you. We see this as the exact opposite - a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stand up for what is right and against those who abuse their authority to silence those who speak the truth. In this way the costs are miniscule. Whatever we have paid - whether financial, emotional, or career-wise - has been well worth it.”

Haim’s framing of his battle as an opportunity reinvigorated me, four years into my own battle.

I have a confession: I have given up on justice in my personal fight against cancellation. There is no verdict, yet, from my case with the BC College of Nurses and Midwives. I do hope that the panel (the “jury”) rules fairly—if only so that the nursing profession’s reputation in BC isn’t totally ruined. (We need nurses, and we need people to want to become nurses.) But overall? I have given up. It used to be about both “the cause” and my personal vindication. I obsessed over not losing: my case, my job, my profession, my reputation, my safety—anything at all. I wouldn’t hand a single thing over. I refused to consider making a single concession. I refused to envision anything except complete victory.

But there’s a problem: It's enormously mentally taxing to feel that way. It is an incredible burden to take every jab, and every bad day, and every minor setback as an unacceptable outcome that is within your power to either prevent, stop, or make right. The list of grievances piles up. The list of people you need to prove wrong piles up. The list of future defamation suits grows. The words you can say that might finally change the minds of the fiendish bigots who seek to destroy you flitter through your mind at all hours, day in and day out. It’s tempting to feel this way—obsessed with winning—because it allows you to pretend that you retain some aspect of control over the mechanisms behind your own cancellation. But you don’t. You don’t have any control over being cancelled. To think you do is to stand below an approaching avalanche and fantasize that your willpower can keep it from enveloping you. It won’t. I have no control.

Without saying too much—I can’t, for legal reasons—know this: Every time you see a public fight, there is so much more happening in private. There are more legal maneuvers, more players, more cases, more abuses. There is so much more.

The failures and losses that terrified me do not terrify me any longer. I’ve given up on justice for myself. I’ve imagined the worst-case scenario, had nightmares about it, planned on how to avoid it at all costs—and then realized that it was happening anyways. And I’m still breathing.

Like Haim, I also believe that it’s an honour and an opportunity to fight this fight and to shout the truth right into the ugly maw of every authoritarian fanatic who thinks that women have penises or that children sometimes need to be sterilized and mutilated for their own good. It’s a miracle that these cultists don’t suffocate under piles of their own bullshit.

I haven’t felt this strong before. I don’t need vindication, in this lifetime or 100 years after I am gone. That’s irrelevant.

It is at this point—the point where you feel there’s nothing left to lose but you’re still standing and you’re still angry, and still fighting—where the mob needs to start fearing you. When you attempt to take everything away from someone, don’t forget that you’re also taking away their fear.

The plan: to fight like hell, all the way down, and shine a light on all of it.  

xo

Amy