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Yesterday, a young man barged into a Gender Studies class at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. After ascertaining that the class was indeed a Gender Studies class, he pulled a couple of knives out of his backpack, broke into what one witness called a “disgusting mischievous smile,” then stabbed the professor and two students before being arrested as he tried to slip away.
The police later confirmed what anyone could have guessed from the knife attacker’s choice of target, declaring his attack a “hate-motivated incident related to gender expression and gender identity.” In other words, an anti-trans terrorist attack.
The only good news in all of this is that all of the victims are expected to recover; had the attacker been carrying an assault rifle instead of knives he likely would have killed those he only succeeded in wounding.
The bad news is that the next attacker–and given the rampant, vicious anti-trans rhetoric we’ve seen over the past several years it’s virtually certain that there will be one–could be carrying guns instead of knives. We don’t know enough about the attacker to know specifically whose anti-trans propaganda pushed him over the edge, but it seems pretty clear he was influenced by somebody (or a bunch of somebodies) from this crowd. That’s why people call this sort of propaganda “stochastic terrorism.”
Of course the transphobes have a different explanation for the attack, essentially arguing that attacks like these are inevitable so long as trans people insist on … living as trans people.
You can see this on Twitter.
Dive into the comments underneath news stories on the stabbings and you will see endless variations on this theme. I paged through several hundred comments on this National Post article, finding little empathy and a lot of victim-blaming.
Consider this comment from one Jerry Lambert:
If I was a woke elitist I’d be a little concerned that this may just be the beginning. When the government destroys the social contract violence is a likely response. Quit force-feeding values
Added Scott William:
It’s literally 100 percent likely these kind of events will happen in the kind of climate the woke left has created , that’s what happens when you try to oppress people with communist ideas
It’s happened many times in the past
Whatever the motives of this person are
It’s Trudeaus fault
Zify100 contended:
There will be more of these types of stories. This is absolutely caused by the Liberal governments constant and aggressive policies in regards to the alphabet group. People have had enough.
Ivan Myers warned:
Long time coming. It will get worse now, but the majority of us have no sympathy left for these leftists that push these agendas.
Jerry Lambert (again) said:
Gender Studies is a fake academic discipline constructed out of wokeism. Dumping it would prevent the crazies from these type of actions.
Rae Capri claimed to be:
more disgusted about the fact such a ridicuIous lecture even occurred. Fuel the DeIusion, is what it should be called.
Someone called Mme Popova felt sorry for the attacker, imagining mistreatment by the class:
I can just imagine how that “gender studies” teacher and the others treated him. I briefly took such a class and was verbally attacked, booed, and literally hissed at for saying something considered unpopular to the weirds in the class. That was 30 years ago. How much worse it must be now!
Some tried to argue that the knife-wielding attacker was himself trans. According to one Howard Kirshenbaum:
Look at him. If he identifies as a him. There is a very good chance he is very gender conflicted and he struck out in anger, or gender panic, because of self hate and his own sickness, which is a very different thing than the narrative ie propaganda we are being sold
According to Peter M, meanwhile, “the guy looks non-binary.”
Phil Hartman had a prediction:
Watch, a few more details will ooze out and the entire story will be memory holed. He’ll be one of the alphabet group, a former boyfriend, or screwed over by the administration on something because of his secs.
Others mocked the targets of the attack. Brian Bancroft put it in the form of a riddle:
What’s the most common question asked by a gender studies graduate?
“Would you like fries with that?”
David DENNISON dismissed the whole discipline:
Imagine saving for 20 years so that your little darling can get an education at a good university and they choose Gender Studies.
And then there was the old “false flag” accusation.
According to Will Knott
This incident REEKS of a Rainbow false flag event to bolster sympathy for the special attention seekers community. The “attacker” looks like a real killer…of chocolate bars and bags of chip
There’s no tragedy that can’t be made uglier by people like these.
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Fuck them all. Sideways. With rusted rebar.
“Woke elitist” is a contradiction in terms.
Seething. Also sick of the usual format from these fuckwits, along the lines of: “I don’t hate trans people but if they make themselves visible in public then whatever happens to them is their fault.”
If you react with anger to being reminded that trans people exist, then yes you do hate trans people. Stop covering your ass with lies.
The same people that are indoctrinating their kids with hate and intolerance of trans people, with religious fixed gender role beliefs, and with other Qanon conspiracies. The same people that promote and indoctrifnate their male children with ‘fertile 12 year olds’ and that women should be stripped of all rights. The same people that are the groomers are accusing the left of grooming.
I’m surprised no one has yet made the connection to Ecole Polytechnique.
ah, yes, this is the climate that people concerned about the relation between gender and power created, not people who have power. so sorry for my part in… just trying to exist
@Crip Dyke: Several people over on Tumblr did. And yeah, that’s the first thing I thought of. At least this guy didn’t have a gun.
UWaterloo was my alma mater, so this one hits pretty personally. Though I was only in the building where this happened a couple of times, as I was in a completely different program. (Hagey Hall was affectionately known as the ‘rat maze’, both because its shape resulted in some rather odd hallway layouts, and the fact that it was the building housing the Psychology department.)
As for comments like that being on the National Post article… honestly I don’t think many people up here are all that surprised at people like that being regulars in the Post commenting section. While it tends not to be as over-the-edge right wing as the more openly ‘populist’ Sun Media papers (Postmedia bought Sun Media years ago, so it’s the same company now, but the National Post still tries to project a more classic economic conservative air), the Wikipedia page lists Jordan Peterson as a current columnist.
I was in university when the École polytechnique massacre happened… and like with that case, Waterloo is best known for its engineering program, and sadly there are generally at least a few ‘STEM-bro’ types there pretty regularly. (I haven’t yet found any indication of what the accused was studying there, only that he was an international student.) Back in 1990 or so, when both the president and vice-president of the Engineering Society were women, I found somebody had used a publicity photo of the two of them and put up a poster with ‘for a good time call…’ on it and a faked approval stamp. (I pulled it down and turned it in; I got asked where I had found it because they had been pulling those things down all morning and I found what was probably the last one in a back hallway in E3.)
i was expecting a hell of a lot more people crying false flag. the fact they’ve moved on to just straight up justifying them is so grim
Canada is rapidly diversifying. 140,000 new Canadians have arrived just this year bringing the total to 500,000 in just two years. One out of every 4 Canadians were born outside the country. Jerry Lambert is butthurt because he is now competing with hundreds of Sikhs for the same business. In addition there have been many landmark sexual harassment cases settled in favour of the female victims whose jobs have been lost due to discrimination. There are too many Incels here that want the “good old days back” meaning the white male’s point of view and rule is undisputed. It’s not happening. These twitter troll accounts are vastly in the minority. Don’t listen to the sewer system that is twitter. Or the National Post. Only assholes read that rag.
@Astorix: Obviously anyone with brains would prefer the Sikhs for any kind of business rather than someone who whines in the comments in the shittiest national papers.
Jer. Get hold of your own bootstraps, eh?
To me, post-Mulvaney, this shows that there is no fig leaf to hide behind any more. They want to destroy, hurt, police and eliminate trans people for being trans people.
Well I’m going to hold my plans on cutting my hair back to a pixie cut now.