GIESBRECHT: Simple, phoney narratives fool no one, but no one calls them out

As a boy in the 1950s, I loved watching cowboy shows on early television. Horse Opera and Lone Ranger were my favourites. There were the good guys and the bad guys. No nuance there. Good guys usually dressed in white and the bad guys dressed in black. The bad guys would do something bad, and after a fight, the good guys would win.This simplistic cartoon sounds rather silly now — a world where one is either a good guy or a bad guy, with no shades of grey. But it actually comes quite close to describing modern woke politics — the politics of the Trudeau Liberals. The good guys are the oppressed or colonized. The bad guys are the oppressors (settler-colonizers.) They will tell us what category we are in. This is the modern cartoon of woke politics.Never mind woke policies make absolutely no sense, defy science or put women in danger, as long as the oppressed triumphs over the oppressor it becomes government policy and is echoed by other institutions down the line. The prime minister leads the most ideological government in Canadian history. His is the ideology of wokeness. Like those television cowboys, in his woke world one is either a good guy or a bad guy — oppressed or oppressor — and he will decide which is which. Trudeau might be described as the leader of the Woke Cowboys. He and his woke colleagues will ride herd on the rest of us by forcibly imposing their rules of wokeness on the entire population.Take that famous Trudeau tweet as an example — “A trans woman is a woman.” It is a scientifically illiterate statement. A man can’t become a woman. It is just as scientifically accurate to say Sasquatches are real as to say a man who identifies as a woman becomes one.Just as accurate to say that a 50-year-old man who says he is a 13-year-old girl becomes a 13-year-old girl, for that matter. But that claim was accepted in Toronto, when a 50-year-old man was allowed to compete against 13-year-old girls in a swimming competition, just because he “identified” as one.It remains to be seen exactly what the Woke Cowboys will say about a 50-year-old man pretending to be a 13-year-old girl. It seems his claim to be a girl will be accepted with no problem, but whether or not his claim to be 13 is accepted is not clear.We do know a white woman who identified as black was not accepted as a black person. Rachel Dolezal lived her life as a black person and claimed black identity. However, her attempt at self-identification was vigorously rebuffed. Her life and career as a black person came to an abrupt end.And the increasing number of 'Pretendians' who are being outed — people who claim to be indigenous, but aren’t, such as Buffy St. Marie — are finding out their self-identification claims as indigenous are definitely not being accepted. So how the 50-year-old man who identifies as a 13-year-old girl will do on his age identification claim is not clear. By some process, not understood by the rest of us, some shadowy woke figure will make a decision on our behalf. Why Rachel Dolezal isn’t allowed to self-identify as a black woman, while a 50-year-old man who imagines himself to be a 13-year-old girl can get away with it, is apparently not for us to decide. Perhaps the prime minister will tweet out a decree with the answer — sort of the modern equivalent of Moses descending the mountain with his tablets of stone.That remains to be seen. But we do know with certainty that the 50-year-old man’s claim to be a woman will be accepted without question. So, I think this man will be entitled to dress and undress in the same changing room where our teenage daughters and granddaughters must also fearfully and uncomfortably change. Or perhaps they will make him undress with women his own age and not with children. Time will tell.As an example of how confused woke ideology is, consider a recent Greta Thunberg protest. At the protest, Greta led her supporters in a chant of “No climate justice in occupied land.” While this chant obviously had something to do with climate and the Palestine issue, I defy anyone to make sense of it. It is just virtue-signalling noise. That is what wokeness is, in its essence. But getting back to the famous Trudeau tweet that “a trans woman is a woman,” all of this energy put into self-identification could be disregarded as the fatuous nonsense it is, except that it is having very real consequences. A recent Quebec case is an example. A female boxer found out an hour before a scheduled boxing match her opponent was actually a 'he' — a very strong man who identified as a woman. Fortunately, this woman had the good sense — and courage — to withdraw from the competition. She knew that men have vastly superior punching power. A woman is at risk of serious injury from the punch of a biological male. The fact the male dresses as a woman or has had surgery or drug therapy to make him appear more like a woman, makes absolutely no difference. That man has the punching power to kill a woman in the ring.And girls have already been injured in the ring by men pretending to be women.It is not only in the martial arts where it is dangerous for a girl or woman to play against men. In North Carolina a female high school volleyball player was seriously and permanently injured by a vicious spike delivered by a biological man who identified as a womanAnother place where self-identification wokeness has become extremely dangerous for women is in our federal penitentiaries. Exactly how many biological males are in Canada’s penitentiaries is not completely clear, but one study found 44% of those men had previously been convicted of sex crimes. We simply don’t know how many women have been sexually or physically assaulted by these men, because the federal government insists on calling those men 'women.' As a result there have been absurd results, such as the report in a Scottish jail a woman “raped two females with her penis.” This would be funny if it were not for the fact that real women were being raped as a direct consequence of this dangerous wokeness policy that completely defies common sense. Women are being put at serious risk to satisfy the ideological needs of virtue signalling politicians. This is where tweets, such as “A trans woman is a woman” become deadly.These are a few examples only of the ludicrous — and dangerous — woke ideology the Trudeau Woke Cowboys have imposed on this country. But when Trudeau utters some oppressor/oppressed woke idiocy we should also understand he doesn’t really mean it. His goal is performance art virtue signalling. So, when he accuses Israel of killing Palestinian babies, this should be seen for what it is — a recitation of this simple oppressor/oppressed 'good guy/bad guy' cartoon for his woke base.He leaves it to his Defence Minister, Bill Blair, to announce Canada’s real Israel policy — namely the completely obvious one that Hamas must be eliminated.So, Trudeau will make sure his teenage daughter will never have to compete in sports against 50-year-old men — or undress in a room with those strange men watching. Or get punched in the face by a trained male pugilist, or share a jail cell with a dangerous man. He leaves that fate to his lessers.And when an absolutely sacred woke policy — such as the central Trudeau policy of carbon taxes, with absolutely no exceptions allowed — conflicts with falling Liberal polls in the Maritimes, suddenly exceptions are allowed. Those absolutely sacred policies are sacrificed in a heartbeat. Because ultimately, wokeness is hollow and hypocritical virtue signalling. Even the woke people issuing the woke platitudes don’t take it seriously. And neither should we.A woman will die in the fighting ring, or other sports forum, from the testosterone-fuelled blows of some man who pretends to be a woman. A woman prisoner will be killed by the man she is forced to share her cell with. It is only a matter of time. When that happens — and it will — Trudeau’s tweet should come to mind. He and his Woke Cowboys will be responsible.And so will we. For letting these Woke Cowboys herd us like cattle.