Urging Restraint for the Transgender Community

“It is not overwhelmingly different than when I, as a gay man, criticize the gay community for taking things too far by, for instance, bringing both borderline and actual nudity to public Pride Parades, especially in places where children are often present.”

Every community, especially those based around identity, finds itself having to deal with its radical or fringe elements at some point. How these communities respond to outlier individuals within their movement can make or break their efforts. In the case of the feminist movement, that fringe element was exemplified by those who infamously succeeded in getting #KillAllMen to trend on Twitter in 2013. The failure of feminism to address its more fringe elements continues to turn off possible members, even those who share the movement’s goal of gender equality.

But now, a different community is having similar challenges. Over the past few months, the transgender community—and some of its members who are particularly active on Twitter—are now being defined by near-constant controversy. In many cases, this is a case of the community going “too far.” It is not overwhelmingly different than when I, as a gay man, criticize the gay community for taking things too far, for instance, by bringing both borderline and actual nudity to public Pride Parades, especially in places where children are often present. (Some defenders of this have actually gone on to explain that exposing children to such displays is a good thing.) Other examples in the gay community include pushing child drag queens as an acceptable phenomenon, and excommunicating members of its own community for wrongthink. In this brief piece, I intend to point out a few areas where the transgender community has been pushing its boundaries and entering territory that is not only excessive but also potentially self-defeating to their own movement.

In the transgender community, the self-described “global internet personality” and “social justice warrior” Jessica Yanev is certainly an oddity. Very few trans people can claim to have abused the spirit of Canadian human rights laws by filing approximately a dozen human rights complaints against beauty salons that preferred not to perform waxes on her (she still has male genitalia). She’s also described South Asians as “turban f——”, doxxed a YouTuber, and sent nude photographs of herself to an underage girl. But the trans community remains strangely silent about her. Other than Morgane Oger, who wrote an op-ed in The Globe and Mail denouncing Yaniv’s legal charade regarding the waxing, very few trans activists have been quick to criticize Yaniv.