Today's tonic: "My question for Doug Ford: When it comes to gender who is indoctrinating whom?"

Today's tonic: "My question for Doug Ford: When it comes to gender who is indoctrinating whom?" by Toronto Star writer Emma Teitel.

"This entire gender identity freakout rests on the wildly idealistic belief that “woke-ism” has eviscerated age old gender norms. In truth, it’s hardly dented them. In order to genuinely believe gender norms are eroding one must live his entire life at the centre of a pride parade. Because to walk around mainstream society — and to raise a child in mainstream society — is to be hit over the head at every turn with the reminder that girls are girls and boys are boys, and don’t you forget it.

"After all, it isn’t baby boomers throwing gender reveal parties; the explosion of that trend occurred in recent years thanks to my generation, “woke” millennials who are supposed to have forgotten the meaning of tradition.

"However, it turns out we love tradition, especially if it involves cutting into a cake to reveal a baby pink interior (it’s a girl!), or in more devoted cases (as happened in Arizona in 2017 and California in 2020) detonating a pyrotechnic device that releases a plume of colourful gender-indicating smoke into the air, resulting in a wildfire that burns thousands of acres of land and in the latter case, kills a firefighter.

"Queer people are not erasing the gender binary. Straight, cisgender people are literally setting the world on fire to preserve it.

"...Ford has good reason to weigh in on trans kids: they’re a convenient scapegoat and distraction from the Greenbelt scandal. The federal Conservatives, on the other hand, have a far better chance at maintaining their lead among younger voters if they never talk about trans people again.

"But it seems Conservatives at all levels just can’t help themselves. Whether the root cause of their transgender fixation is opportunism or bigotry (or both), they’re not dropping the subject anytime soon. The so-called culture war has arrived in Canada. We were never better than the Americans. We’re just late to trends."