It’s a fairly standard press release: some feigned excitement, the giving out of more money—in short, government being government. But something in the headline grabbed me to ponder a bit more, and not for the reasons you may think.
I could have chosen to note that Pride Winnipeg, a not-for-profit, is essentially becoming an extension of the government with the allocation of $250,000 permanent annual funding. But these are Pride years we are living through now — an erstwhile day of celebration has become a month and then a season, such that now all things Pride are part of the air we breathe. Flags of differing stripes flying hither and yon are more common throughout the year than snow ploughs in a Canadian February.
Rather, having gotten used to government support for all things sexually diverse, how could this possibly be the “first” grant from Gender Equity Manitoba? It’s because Gender Equity Manitoba itself is new, or better put, rebranded.
Manitoba Status of Women just morphed into Gender Equity Manitoba and Manitoba Women’s Advisory Council is now the Gender Equity Council. Manitoba’s premier explains: “With an expanded mandate and broader gender equity focus, GEM will be better positioned to respond effectively to issues involving gender and sexual diversity, and will align with an emerging trend in other federal, provincial and territorial jurisdictions which have changed their mandates from a ‘women’s equity’ focus to a broader ‘gender equity’ focus.”
This is not an “emerging trend,” but rather an emerged one, past tense. It was back in 2018 that the federal ministry formerly called Status of Women became Women and Gender Equality Canada. Women’s Studies departments long ago switched to Gender Studies. A national foundation dedicated to the equal representation of women in politics now likewise supports “women and gender diverse candidates at all levels of government.”
Back to Manitoba, on May 28, that provincial government issued another press release — this time about Menstrual Hygiene Day—all without once mentioning girls or women. “People who give birth” is now government’s standard operating language.
Once upon a time, the federal agency called Status of Women Canada began on the theory that women faced systemic discrimination and thus needed systemic support. Now many of the very agencies that were supposed to support women fail to mention women. What then, or who, are these particular feminists for?
By way of confession, I should state I have long feared the very answer that has now been laid bare. The nagging sense that some feminists don’t actually defend women led me to more digging only to read time and again that much of modern feminist theory draws water from a Marxist well. Class warfare became sex warfare. Certain feminists support women as much as Communists support workers, which is to say in practice, not at all.
Having had success in pushing men to the sidelines it seems some feminists have now taken to pushing out women. In a sense, Manitoba’s newly inaugurated Minister of Families, under which gender equity now falls, neither represents women nor men, but an amorphous mass of sexual diversities housed in neutral bodies.
It seems a strange journey from women not being able to participate in various aspects of public life to their removal. Even as a Status of Women sceptic, never did I think I’d see the end of that entity in my lifetime, done with their own approval: women in government who lack, apparently, the fortitude to define or defend biological women.
This article started with a new agency in Manitoba with their first funding going to Pride Winnipeg. Pride is a launching pad for the idea that sex is irrelevant in romantic relationships and thus in family life. The success of that movement paved the way for the growth of the transgender movement, where sex and gender are further irrelevant because they are merely constructs.
Why and how so many feminists have succumbed to this would be baffling except for my glimpses into an academic feminism that never supported all aspects of womanhood in the first place, instead choosing to fixate on the fall of marriage and family as patriarchal institutions unworthy of support.
And here we are. Gender equity instead of the Status of Women. Progress?
(Mrozek is Senior Fellow at Cardus Family.)