We didn’t peak hard enough: Four years have passed since Canada’s infamous #WaxMyBalls Human Rights Tribunal circus

I can’t pinpoint what it is about Canada that makes us so resistant to Peak Trans.

Four years ago this past week, a Vancouver woman with the Twitter handle @goinglikeelsie showed up at the BC Human Rights Tribunal (HRT) building in downtown Vancouver, morning after morning, with a notebook and a pen. She didn’t know it at the time, but she was about to shine an international spotlight on Canada’s now-infamous #WaxMyBalls hearings.

No one from our national broadcaster, the CBC, could be arsed to walk a block to report on the tribunal cases that saw multiple female estheticians on trial for refusing to handle/wax male genitalia in their own homes, sometimes in the presence of their young children. The state was about to weigh in on whether or not women should be forced to touch male genitals against their will, and Canada’s mainstream media didn’t think that this constituted news. (Our country’s brightest investigative journalists were likely roaming our safe streets on the lookout for a rampant crime wave of misgender-ings and white supremacy-ings to sob about.) After the hearings concluded, the CBC wrote a disinterested piece positioning the vexatious male litigant as an unfortunate candidate for a worthy cause.

Anyways, I don’t want to belabour the #WaxMyBalls cases or even name the male grifter at the centre of it all. Ultimately, the man who identifies himself as a woman lost the cases and (presumably) his ball sack skin remains hairy to this day. Lawyers from the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms flew to BC to successfully (thank god) defend the women unwittingly sucked into this horrific gender self-ID maelstrom. The public gallery grew all week as @goinglikeelsie’s Tweets, shared each evening from her painstakingly-scribbled notes, went viral on Twitter.

Actual journalists even showed up as the case dragged on. (Not from the CBC; no actual journalists can be found in their employ.) The public gallery filled with citizens wanting to make a show of support for the female defendants; so many, in fact, that a number of hopeful observers were turned away. I too showed up, with my then four-month-old son strapped to my chest in a baby carrier. It really felt like something important was about to happen in Canada.

The entire world noticed. Ricky Gervais Tweeted about it. The story caught international media attention. A Canadian “transwoman” was suing estheticians for refusing to wax his balls. It was like the stereotype of the “polite” Canadian culminating in the ultimate absurdity: The Canadian state was going to intervene and tell women to just be nice and literally tear a strip off the poor, oppressed woman’s testicles. The lawyer chairing the cases on behalf of the HRT, Devyn Cousineau, wrote that it was “critical gender affirming care” for males who identify as females to access Brazilian waxes designed for vulvas, but on their testicles instead. The Canadians who had been crying foul about gender self-ID for years rejoiced, ironically, because surely there could be nowhere but up from here. The whole world was watching our embarrassing gender circus and it seemed to be an obvious prognostication that Peak Trans was coming to Canada. Sadly, it was not.

There have been promising developments on the road to a National Peak Trans in the ensuing four years: from the formation of the non-partisan organization Canadian Women’s Sex Based Rights (caWsbar) to moderately improved mainstream media coverage, to a parent-led uprising against the forced gender identity indoctrination of our children in public schools.

More of us know about the gender madness. And more of us are bored to death of having “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives—the corporate term for what is essentially a hard-left state religion of gender and race politics—rammed down our throats 24/7. I’m regularly accosted by people headily describing some novel (to them) genderwang that they’ve encountered and, while old hat to me, I mustn’t show my tedium in front of those who are peaking in real time.

For some reason, #WaxMyBalls didn’t peak our country. And though the hairy-ball-sack-of-a-human-with-a-hairy-ball-sack lost, there was technically no legal precedent set to prevent another male who identifies as a female to launch identical HRT cases in the future. Our infamous grifter lost on the basis of a clear racial animus towards the women he targeted for services. Should a non-racist man want to force women to wax his testicles against their will, there’s nothing stopping him from suing more female victims.

Essentially, #WaxMyBalls dropped from our national consciousness as fast as it trended. Nothing really changed, legally or culturally.

Since the hearings, Canada has continued to legislate gender madness into law. It is now illegal—with threat of imprisonment—for health care providers to question the stated gender of any patient, even a toddler. The state and many of our citizens continue to mob and persecute the few who loudly oppose gender identity ideology. That includes me, with my nursing license on the line as I face what feels like an endless disciplinary process for my “off duty conduct,” and Jordan Peterson, who is also battling his professional college after he was sanctioned for opposing the Canadian state’s DEI orthodoxy. And while other countries ban the medical transition of youth, Canada is pretending that there isn’t widespread professional disagreement on gender medicine—not to mention a dearth of evidence to support it, and growing evidence to suggest we should end it. We hand out Lupron (the same drug used to chemically castrate sex offenders) to children like it is Halloween candy. We allow male sex offenders into our female prisons and rape shelters. We allow males to dominate and then steal awards from our best female athletes. We will look back on this period of madness with deep shame.  

I can’t pinpoint what it is about Canada that makes us so resistant to Peak Trans. I have zero doubt that many of us will continue to shout from our rooftops until DEI is exposed as the divisive and delusion tripe that it is; but I worry that our efforts will be in vain, and that Canada will just meekly follow suit after every other western country has long abandoned this mad ideology. It’s a crushing thought—that our efforts won’t make a difference.

As for @goinglikeelsie, she is still shouting, too. On the #WaxMyBalls hearings, she told me this week that the Hairy One “had the perfect grift. If he had been able to show even a modicum of restraint and waited until he’d had his ‘gender affirming’ surgery, we may have seen women ordered to wax what remained of his male genitals. And someday, [we] still might…”

Let’s hope not, Canada.

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I’d like to dedicate this piece to the memory of Richard Bilkszto, who tragically died by suicide this month. Richard shared a lawyer with me (Lisa Bildy), and he also stood up to a woke mob in his professional life. Richard was a brave and principled man in a country where there are too few men like him. May he always be remembered for those fine qualities.