My speech at Reality Based Women Unite 2025

The second annual caWsbar event in honour of International Women's Day

On stage with Heather Mason (centre) and Kara Dansky (right)

This International Women’s Day, on March 8, caWsbar held our second annual Reality Based Women Unite event. We met in Calgary (last year it was held in Toronto), and look forward to meeting in another city in 2026.

Speakers included Maureen Sullivan, Drea Humphrey, Ghislane Gendron, Heather Mason, and Kara Dansky.

The day after our event, Heather Mason led a large—and well-received—protest in downtown Calgary to raise awareness about the dangerous males being housed inside women’s prisons in Canada. It was even mentioned by Fox News.

This is a copy of my speech:

Today I want to speak to you about defeating gender ideology in Canada after our next federal election. What a tumultuous road this country has been on just waiting for an election that feels like it might never come—and it’s still not clear exactly when it will. I’ve been calling this period in Canada “political purgatory.” It certainly feels as though we are trapped in some in-between country. Not the Canada we knew, and not the Canada we want.

I’m pleased with rumblings that Mark Carney may call an early election, should he win leadership of his party.

Carney’s honeymoon with the media and public is over and it also looks as though whatever bump he provided to the Liberal party is not significant enough to take away the Pierre Poilievre Conservative majority government that we can all feel coming.

Putting aside the reservations that some of us may have about the right side of the political spectrum, I do think it’s widely accepted among gender critical or sex realist persons that our Conservative party is no longer sympathetic to “wokeness” which, of course, includes gender ideology.

As such, they are the best party to represent us in this fight. We are going to, in 2025, end up with a government that recognizes females as a distinct sex class from males. (It’s thrilling just to say that out loud.)

Whether we will see the types of sweeping promises to women and girls that we saw President Trump make with his executive orders on biological sex and women’s sports remains to be seen. Regardless, there will finally be members of parliament, and a prime minister, who recognize reality, are not afraid of reality, and can do something about it.

But—not without our ongoing work and dedication, which takes me back to the purpose of my talk. That is to start a dialogue about the work that we have left to do.

Gender ideology, we know, is a house of cards. And in some places, it’s falling. In Canada, it rather feels as though someone built our gender ideology house of cards using crazy glue. (Crazy glue of course being the only type of glue that could hold such a whacky and flimsy house together.)

But anyways, we are going to have to dismantle this thing through our own efforts. We can’t simply rely upon Poilievre or his MPs to do this, without our prodding, our helping, and our insisting. And we will.

We also must recognize that our work on shifting our culture, and opening the eyes of our fellow Canadians, is not over. And is crucial.

So let’s get into that.

I have been reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which he wrote in 1859, and I must share a passage with you today. For those unfamiliar, On Liberty is a both defence of freedom and an examination of tyranny.

Mill wrote:

“Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society itself is the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.”

When I read this passage, I cannot stop thinking about gender ideology.

Mill spoke on the tyranny of a prevailing orthodoxy. An orthodoxy based on what he called “wrong mandates” or mandates that should not be imposed at all. That’s gender ideology. Mill said that the enforcement of a wrong mandate creates a unique type of oppression.

A deep oppression, that afflicts victims to their core. In their everyday lives. That is contrasted to the oppression inflicted upon citizens via a political tyranny. And we need to, he said, figure out the guardrails or appropriate limits to how a prevailing orthodoxy—but an appropriate one, not one based on a “wrong mandate”—might infringe upon our liberties.

That is the same concept of figuring out the guardrails of a political system, where you need to have defined individual rights and constitutional checks.

In Canada, gender ideologues are currently inflicting both tyrannies on all of us. The social tyranny. And the political tyranny. Both need to be dismantled.

What does the social tyranny look like? It’s this: it’s the people who disowned us, their friends, for refusing to say that trans women are women. They’ve inflicted social penalties where they don’t have the power to inflict political ones. It is their shunning, their excommunication and their gossip. These are painful and punishing things to have happen to a social creature, as we all are. The impact is often profound, as I am sure many of us in this room can attest to.

The social tyranny is also every act of fealty performed in service of gender ideology despite one’s internal discomfort. From adding pronouns to your work email signature when you know that it is a silly thing to do, and it irks you, irritatingly. It is also the pit of fear that women and girls shove into the depths of their being when they feel their natural and biological reaction to a male—to an unknown threat—within the spaces where they want to be and deserve to be safe and away from males.

It is the voice inside their minds that says “I’m afraid” or “I’m uncomfortable”—or even, hell, “That’s a linebacker in stilettos and a dollar store wig”—but which the mind supresses and forcibly, under the social tyranny, ignores.

And then there is the political tyranny. Our government undermined and eviscerated women’s sex-based rights by legislating gender ideology into our human rights act and criminal code. We know this. We know that Bill C-16, and the addition of “gender identity” to our laws was not an act of liberty.

It was not an act to provide any necessary or absent freedoms within our society, certainly not for women. It was an act that legislated tyranny against our sex class.

Our governments and institutions, since 2017, have been infiltrated and taken over by many who either gleefully or thoughtlessly impose gender ideology’s social tyranny. And within our institutions, they exercise, with politics, the very same coercive and evil mandates.

Many of these people will remain in positions of power even after a federal election.

We can look to the United States to see what sort of struggles are ahead of us. This week, Democrats in the US senate managed to thwart and block passage of the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.” The Act, of course, would have made sports sex segregated, as they should be.

Women, like Kara Dansky, have been doing ongoing work to meet with political opponents, to meet with Democrats, and explain the issue. Because within this political and social tyranny of gender ideology that we all live under, some people still simply do not understand what is going on. They do not fully understand the opposition to this issue, or they haven’t examined their complicity in upholding gender ideology.

They are not enforcers, so to speak, so much as people who are executing the mandates of a social tyranny because it has so infiltrated their minds. And they still might be convinced otherwise, if shown the illogic and the cruelty of the positions they’ve assumed. If encouraged to listen to the voice inside their minds that knows that all of gender ideology is a lie.

And if they are shown that the immense pressure that they are under to conform to gender orthodoxy is, in 2025, a pressure exerted by a smaller and smaller minority of hateful zealots.

And that the pain one expects to feel if and when they refuse to continue to execute the mandates of this social tyranny—from within their positions of political power—is not pain, but instead, a path to freedom. And to self-respect.

We, all of us, can lead the way by showing and convincing such persons how we personally have been targeted by but ultimately foiled gender ideology’s social tyranny and—while it hasn’t always been easy—we have a clear conscience for having done so. We need to get through to people like this.

Cowardice is ultimately more painful than living in reality.

I know that many of us are already tackling this difficult work in their own communities. What I want to impress upon everyone is that we have no time to let off the gas, even if or when we get a new government.

Our fight is far from over. And in some respects, it is about to get more difficult. But—that’s only because we are on the precipice of victory.

In psychology, the principle of “extinction burst” refers to an intensification of an unwanted behaviour when that behaviour stops being reinforced. An extinction burst looks like a tantrum, or a fit, performed when one is not getting what they are accustomed to receiving. We must expect a great extinction burst from Canada’s gender tyrants once the country has elected a government that no longer caters to their falsehoods.

And we must remember that these tyrants, or their uncritical minions, are widespread within our government and institutions.

Our senate—where Justin Trudeau just appointed five new senators, days before he is out as Prime Minister, and 10 total in this year alone—and our judiciary. Our Supreme Court has a majority of judges—six out of nine—appointed by Justin Trudeau.

We can pray for, but should not expect, their impartiality.

Our healthcare regulators are similarly stacked institutions. The BC College of Nurses—need I say more? Well, their CEO and registrar was just appointed as BC’s deputy minister of health, by our NDP government. No doubt this was an intentional move to place a reality-denying gender cultist into a higher position of power, at a time when the BC NDP must answer to an opposition party that doesn’t entertain their nonsense ideology.

We can look at all of this and feel dismayed. But I suggest feeling hopeful and motivated instead.

Last year, when we met on International Women’s Day in Toronto, I wouldn’t have believed it possible for Canadians to repeal Bill C-16. I do think it’s possible, now. We have made enormous gains over the past year. We have mainstreamed opposition to gender ideology—in Canada.

No one can point to us and say that we are lone bigots, strangely obsessed with others’ genitals. No. That ship has sailed. The public largely knows that this is not some niche issue we are here speaking about today.

Gender tyrants do not deserve to hold the power they do. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty reminds us of the seriousness of the behaviour of these people.

Some people believe that we should just ignore gender ideology until it goes away, not understanding that gender ideology won’t suffocate under the weight of its own bullshit. Because it’s more than a nonsense ideology—it is a vehicle for the social and political tyranny that plagues mass societies across space and time.

This is a noble fight. It’s a fight for women, for children, and for liberty. We, all of us, are a force against a brutal form of social and political tyranny.

Keep up the fight, because we are so close to winning.

Happy International Women’s Day!