SWS conference: my talk on cancel culture

Cancel culture hides and obscures the truth. It erodes civil discourse. It silences dissent.

Two weekends ago, I trekked to Seattle, Washington for the Sovereign Women Speak (SWS) annual conference. I was invited to speak on cancel culture. The SWS women had a lovely venue and intimate setting for five days of events, including a prison protest.

Things were quiet with the exception of an unknown person (or persons) pulling the hotel and conference centre fire alarm, causing an evacuation of all the hotel’s guests. As we exited the building, we were greeted by a hand-painted “TRANSPHOBES GTFO” banner. (And maybe anarchy or Antifa symbols?) The fire department promptly arrived and gave the all-clear for everyone to go back inside. A butch woman who worked at the hotel helped one of the SWS attendees remove the banner, while she mumbled about what kind of idiots would do something like that.

This is the talk I gave:

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I am so honoured to be here tonight and I thank you all for having me. My name is Amy Hamm, and I’d like to talk to you about Cancel Culture.

I’ll start with an overview of how I was subject to Cancel Culture—and still am, really; I’m in the midst of a three-year plus cancellation—and then I am going to get into some more general thoughts I have about the phenomenon.

Nearly three years ago, I was involved in erecting a Posie-Parker-inspired I-<3-JK-Rowling billboard in Vancouver, Canada. Prior to this, I had been writing and talking about gender identity ideology and feminism for a few years. I had been organizing events in my city that were subject to cancellation attempts and always had large protests with trans-identified males, and some females, threatening violence.

Perhaps many of you have seen the viral photos of two masked women (this was pre-COVID) in Vancouver holding a handmade cardboard guillotine with the word “TERF” scrawled on top. This was at an event I organized with another woman.

To see activists promoting the idea that women should have their heads chopped off for knowing that men cannot change sex is atrocious but not entirely unsurprising coming from fellow Vancouverites.

At another event I had organized, a braying mob chanted at me and my then six-week-old-son, “SAVE THE BABY FROM THE TERF.” At least a few members of this mob were former friends of mine, none of whom had the decency to apologize for what they had participated in. I’m sure they still proudly call themselves feminists, though.

We are, in Vancouver, probably the epicentre of trans activism in Canada. Toronto and Vancouver might be tied, but Vancouver has quite a few charmers—including the BC Human Rights Tribunal staff that took on Canada’s infamous testicle waxing hearings. If there’s any city where you should worry about a woke mob coming to cancel you, Vancouver is that city. And that’s precisely what happened to me.

Even though I had been speaking up for years, it wasn’t until the billboard drew media attention that two members of the public, one of whom remains anonymous to me to this day, decided that I, a nurse, should not be able to have my day job because I am a quote-unquote TERF, and a “danger” to trans people.

These two lovely strangers wrote letters to both my employer and to the BC College of Nurses. The College, which gives me my nursing license and therefore my job, decided to investigate me.

It would take me hours to summarize what has happened in the legal battle to keep my job since then; as it currently stands, I’ll be back for 10 more days of disciplinary hearings this fall, for a total of 21 days. Longer than, I’m told, many murder trials.

But to summarize my case, I think the most important details are these:

First, I refused to settle, which would have entailed a temporary suspension, re-education, and my admitting to the false accusation that I am transphobic; second, I am only able to continue fighting because Canada’s Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is funding my legal bills; and third, the gender-identity house of cards is falling, and I know that women are going to win, but Canada represents the bottom row of cards. We are at the bottom watching it topple on all of us. We are taking far too long to come to our senses. And we need all of the help that  we can get.

I recently tweeted that ignoring woke things, ignoring gender ideology, is a luxury women and children cannot afford. We know the consequences of this ideology and we are seeing them play out in our rape shelters, our prisons, and our sports. We are no longer at the point where we are warning others. Men have already invaded our spaces. Children, mostly gay children, often autistic young girls, are already being mutilated and sterilized.

We are now telling people exactly what is happening right in front of their eyes. And some people still don’t believe us. It sounds too outlandish, and how could it be real if so few people are talking about it? Are we lying or exaggerating? Surely there is not a murdering pedophile housed inside a Canadian women’s prison with a mother-baby program. The women saying that this is true must be full of it, or insane. Right? Sadly, no.

This is the power of cancel culture. Cancel culture hides and obscures the truth. It erodes civil discourse. It silences dissent. It isolates and alienates its targets, and it makes everyone around you wonder if they’re in a silent minority, or a silent majority.

We become paranoid of one another. When a cancellation is successful, it emboldens the mob and begets further cancellations. The reason it works so well is because people are afraid of social exclusion. We are afraid, with good reason, to be exiled from our own communities. That is a very painful and sometimes deadly thing to have happen to us. Cancel culture weaponizes this fear, and makes women like me, like all of us, afraid of telling the truth.

In journalism, we talk about a chilling effect or libel chill. And it means that journalists, who are tasked with speaking the truth, on behalf of and for the betterment of their society, are too afraid to do their jobs properly under threat of unfair punishment. It means journalists can no longer tell the truth without fear of repercussion. It’s usually because of bad legislation or powerful players with the money to sue their enemies in bad faith. The most powerful are then able to silence whomever they please. Sound familiar? A democracy is in deep trouble without a free press.

I feel the same way about a society where women are afraid to speak about what is happening to them. And where women are afraid to pronounce basic truths that are obvious to everyone around them.

For women, the threat of cancel culture has made too many of us afraid to tell the truth—that men are not women—because of the repercussions. But the thing is—we are already suffering. Rather than suffering the repercussions of speaking out, we are suffering the repercussions of turning our backs on the truth for too long.

As a class, we have already lost so much. And now we are fighting for the same rights we had a decade ago, when we could instead be focused on women’s liberation in the places where women never even got as far as we did. This is all a tragic waste of time.

I wish we were here talking about what we are doing for the women of Iran. Instead, here we are, talking about how to deal with the male sexual fetishists and big pharmaceutical companies who have toppled women’s rights to sex-segregated spaces in the west.

Women need to be able to speak the truth, just as journalists do. To protect ourselves, our children, and our sisters. We need to be able to name and call out the dangers we face as a distinct class of people. It’s reasonable to be afraid of exile from our communities, but don’t forget that everyone here in this room is a community. And this is enough, right here. We are a community that lives in reality and wants to protect vulnerable people.

We should be more afraid of the repercussions of ignoring the truth than we should be of living in exile from any community that is willing to live by lies. Men can never be women. We deserve our own spaces, for both our dignity and our safety.

I’m not asking everyone to go out and get cancelled. I am asking you to keep having conversations, and to keep reminding other women about why we matter as a sex class. A lot of women and girls no longer know this, and they’re fighting against themselves, as part of some bastardized and penis-centric movement that they describe as feminism.

It’s difficult to understand. But we do know that history shows us why we must remain vigilant after securing any right—whether to free speech or women’s spaces; we earned our rights and we need to protect them, always. We can lose them so fast. If you understand this, please keep explaining it to those who do not.

And also: Please do not let cancel culture scare you, or the example of what happened to me deter you. Because here I am, in this room, telling more people the same things they tried to stop me from saying in the first place.

Just keep speaking. We will win this together. Fuck cancel culture. And thank you all for being a part of the best community I have ever joined.

Amy

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Thanks for reading!

What’s next for me? I’ll be writing about one of my favourite things—insane online communities. Have you heard of the “Are We Dating the Same Guy” and “Are We Dating the Same Girl” Facebook groups? Well, stay tuned. These groups are a boiling point in the (as I see it) increasingly nasty cultural dialogue between males and females.