You may agree with MLA Jennifer Johnson that a school system which encourages little girls to think they're really little boys, and doesn't share what's going on with mum and dad, is a really bad thing. Or you may not. That's called public discourse.You may also be quite content to just let adults go and live their lives the way they want to, even to have sex-change surgery. Live and let live is not a bad way to be.However, if you think there was anything good, decent or even just plain fair about a trans individual trying to bully Johnson into saying something that she obviously doesn't believe, that the biological male was actually a woman, keep reading.In Alberta at least, Johnson has become something of a test case on this matter. She is the Independent MLA, who having run as a UCP candidate, was shunned by the party after comments came to light during the campaign that were deemed offensive by trans activists and which thereby turned her into an electoral liability for the UCP.First, for an admittedly ill-conceived analogy that didn’t entirely work, she has suffered enough. (And ill-conceived it certainly was.)As important however, is that when she was berated on X by the above-mentioned trans activist — an incident that attracted to her defence no less a crusader for the science of biology than JK Rowling — it became clear that she has unintentionally become a symbol of where all sane people find themselves today, when confronted by the insanity of the radical left.That is, if you do not agree to assert as truth what you absolutely know to be untruth, your life can suddenly get very difficult. And this goes way beyond awkward analogies..Here’s the story.Farmer and former nurse Jennifer Johnson won the UCP Lacombe-Ponoka nomination in 2023. While it lasted, it was a hot contest between Johnson, flight paramedic Dusty Myshrall and Lacombe city councillor Chris Ross. But when the dust settled, Johnson ended up with 75% of the ballots cast.However between the nomination and the election, a recording surfaced of comments that Johnson made to a community group the previous year.Speaking to a community group, Johnson had praised Alberta’s education system but added “that such accomplishments meant little when set against the issue of transgender students in schools…..” Girls are saying they’re not girls anymore, when they’re seven years old and transitioning at 14 years old and getting mastectomies, double mastectomies and getting chemically sterilized when they can’t even go to a liquor store and buy a beer.”True enough sadly, and sufficiently alarming that even the famously libertarian premier, Danielle Smith, would later declare it a provincial policy that children wishing for sex-change surgery would not get it in Alberta until they were 18. (Legislation to give that policy effect is coming in the fall sitting of the Legislature.)It was however, a pity that Johnson then compared these educational deficiencies to otherwise excellent cookies contaminated by feces.No, she did not say trans kids were like feces. She meant regrettable policy outcomes that failed children, not the children themselves.But to those on the other side of the argument, that is a distinction without a difference. Understandably, Smith got rid of a potential problem by promptly dropping Johnson from the UCP ticket.In the election, Johnson won handily anyway, with two thirds of the votes cast. But when she took her seat, it was as an Independent.Time went by. Perhaps as a condition of re-admission to the party, she has been on an apology tour. Build relationships, get to know trans people.That it seems, led to the disgraceful scene in the video above, in which as Rowling said, a biological male dressed as a woman attempted to bully a woman into admitting that he was actually a woman.She said she had never been asked that before and would need to think about it.No kidding! And things went downhill from there.He, by the way, has a right to say what he believes as well. The difference here is that is trying to deny that same right to Johnson and by extension, anybody else who believes as she does.But this is the insanity of today’s alt-left, that you must believe what they believe and that having no opinion is not allowed. Under critical theory, it is actually defined as hostility.... 'if you're not with us you define yourself as against us.' Or, ‘silence is violence,’ as the Black Lives Matter activists liked to say. The fact that BLM has been largely discredited by the avarice of its leaders does not remove their argument from the left’s arsenal.And as academia, government and even corporations now embrace DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) more and more people find themselves first required to take some kind of sensitivity training and then sign that they agree it's midnight even when they can see it's mid-day. Unfortunately, we can't all be Jordan Peterson. (The people who are set to deliver him sensitivity training are a lot more anxious about how things will go than he is, you may depend.) Sadly however, we can all be Jennifer Johnson, artlessly saying what we believe to be true and attacked by agenda-driven people whose goal is not to get along, to live and let live, but to redefine what is truth.Good for Rowling, for adding her moral authority to the position that Johnson has taken. Good for Johnson for not agreeing to something she didn't believe..WATCH: JK Rowling calls out Calgary trans activist as a ‘bullying man’ not a ‘woman’.And good, by the way, for her opponent in the nomination race Dusty Myshrall, for throwing his s classy posting to X, in which he urged all UCP MLAs to support admitting her to the caucus..Conservatives are indeed in a fight for basic freedoms to speak, to think and now it seems to even believe. Nothing good comes from enduring spite and Johnson having endlessly apologised and admitted for a year that she was wrong, it is indeed time for Alberta’s United Conservative Party to end the shunning and welcome her to sit with them in the Legislature. .This is what the Western Standard is up againstThe Trudeau government is funding lies and propaganda by directly subsidizing the mainstream media. They do this to entrench the powerful Eastern, woke and corrupt interests that dominate the political, social and economic institutions in Canada. Federal authorities are constantly trying to censor us and stop us from publishing the stories that they don’t want you to read. Ottawa may weaponize our taxes and police against us, but we’ve got a powerful ally on our side.You. Free men, and free women. We need you to stand with us and become a member of the Western Standard. Here’s what you will get for your membership:Unlimited access to all articles from the Western Standard, Alberta Report, West Coast Standard, and Saskatchewan Standard, with no paywall. Our daily newsletter delivered to your inbox. .Access to exclusive Member-only WS events.Keep the West’s leading independent media voice strong and free.If you can, please support us with a monthly or annual membership. It takes just a moment to set up, and you will be making a big impact on keeping one the last independent media outlets in Canada free from Ottawa’s corrupting influence.
You may agree with MLA Jennifer Johnson that a school system which encourages little girls to think they're really little boys, and doesn't share what's going on with mum and dad, is a really bad thing. Or you may not. That's called public discourse.You may also be quite content to just let adults go and live their lives the way they want to, even to have sex-change surgery. Live and let live is not a bad way to be.However, if you think there was anything good, decent or even just plain fair about a trans individual trying to bully Johnson into saying something that she obviously doesn't believe, that the biological male was actually a woman, keep reading.In Alberta at least, Johnson has become something of a test case on this matter. She is the Independent MLA, who having run as a UCP candidate, was shunned by the party after comments came to light during the campaign that were deemed offensive by trans activists and which thereby turned her into an electoral liability for the UCP.First, for an admittedly ill-conceived analogy that didn’t entirely work, she has suffered enough. (And ill-conceived it certainly was.)As important however, is that when she was berated on X by the above-mentioned trans activist — an incident that attracted to her defence no less a crusader for the science of biology than JK Rowling — it became clear that she has unintentionally become a symbol of where all sane people find themselves today, when confronted by the insanity of the radical left.That is, if you do not agree to assert as truth what you absolutely know to be untruth, your life can suddenly get very difficult. And this goes way beyond awkward analogies..Here’s the story.Farmer and former nurse Jennifer Johnson won the UCP Lacombe-Ponoka nomination in 2023. While it lasted, it was a hot contest between Johnson, flight paramedic Dusty Myshrall and Lacombe city councillor Chris Ross. But when the dust settled, Johnson ended up with 75% of the ballots cast.However between the nomination and the election, a recording surfaced of comments that Johnson made to a community group the previous year.Speaking to a community group, Johnson had praised Alberta’s education system but added “that such accomplishments meant little when set against the issue of transgender students in schools…..” Girls are saying they’re not girls anymore, when they’re seven years old and transitioning at 14 years old and getting mastectomies, double mastectomies and getting chemically sterilized when they can’t even go to a liquor store and buy a beer.”True enough sadly, and sufficiently alarming that even the famously libertarian premier, Danielle Smith, would later declare it a provincial policy that children wishing for sex-change surgery would not get it in Alberta until they were 18. (Legislation to give that policy effect is coming in the fall sitting of the Legislature.)It was however, a pity that Johnson then compared these educational deficiencies to otherwise excellent cookies contaminated by feces.No, she did not say trans kids were like feces. She meant regrettable policy outcomes that failed children, not the children themselves.But to those on the other side of the argument, that is a distinction without a difference. Understandably, Smith got rid of a potential problem by promptly dropping Johnson from the UCP ticket.In the election, Johnson won handily anyway, with two thirds of the votes cast. But when she took her seat, it was as an Independent.Time went by. Perhaps as a condition of re-admission to the party, she has been on an apology tour. Build relationships, get to know trans people.That it seems, led to the disgraceful scene in the video above, in which as Rowling said, a biological male dressed as a woman attempted to bully a woman into admitting that he was actually a woman.She said she had never been asked that before and would need to think about it.No kidding! And things went downhill from there.He, by the way, has a right to say what he believes as well. The difference here is that is trying to deny that same right to Johnson and by extension, anybody else who believes as she does.But this is the insanity of today’s alt-left, that you must believe what they believe and that having no opinion is not allowed. Under critical theory, it is actually defined as hostility.... 'if you're not with us you define yourself as against us.' Or, ‘silence is violence,’ as the Black Lives Matter activists liked to say. The fact that BLM has been largely discredited by the avarice of its leaders does not remove their argument from the left’s arsenal.And as academia, government and even corporations now embrace DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) more and more people find themselves first required to take some kind of sensitivity training and then sign that they agree it's midnight even when they can see it's mid-day. Unfortunately, we can't all be Jordan Peterson. (The people who are set to deliver him sensitivity training are a lot more anxious about how things will go than he is, you may depend.) Sadly however, we can all be Jennifer Johnson, artlessly saying what we believe to be true and attacked by agenda-driven people whose goal is not to get along, to live and let live, but to redefine what is truth.Good for Rowling, for adding her moral authority to the position that Johnson has taken. Good for Johnson for not agreeing to something she didn't believe..WATCH: JK Rowling calls out Calgary trans activist as a ‘bullying man’ not a ‘woman’.And good, by the way, for her opponent in the nomination race Dusty Myshrall, for throwing his s classy posting to X, in which he urged all UCP MLAs to support admitting her to the caucus..Conservatives are indeed in a fight for basic freedoms to speak, to think and now it seems to even believe. Nothing good comes from enduring spite and Johnson having endlessly apologised and admitted for a year that she was wrong, it is indeed time for Alberta’s United Conservative Party to end the shunning and welcome her to sit with them in the Legislature. .This is what the Western Standard is up againstThe Trudeau government is funding lies and propaganda by directly subsidizing the mainstream media. They do this to entrench the powerful Eastern, woke and corrupt interests that dominate the political, social and economic institutions in Canada. Federal authorities are constantly trying to censor us and stop us from publishing the stories that they don’t want you to read. Ottawa may weaponize our taxes and police against us, but we’ve got a powerful ally on our side.You. Free men, and free women. We need you to stand with us and become a member of the Western Standard. Here’s what you will get for your membership:Unlimited access to all articles from the Western Standard, Alberta Report, West Coast Standard, and Saskatchewan Standard, with no paywall. Our daily newsletter delivered to your inbox. .Access to exclusive Member-only WS events.Keep the West’s leading independent media voice strong and free.If you can, please support us with a monthly or annual membership. It takes just a moment to set up, and you will be making a big impact on keeping one the last independent media outlets in Canada free from Ottawa’s corrupting influence.
