Sex, Gender, and the Institute for “Canadian Values”

I haven’t bitched about shit for a couple of weeks now, so I’m due.

Issue Numero Uno: It has been brought to my attention recently that there is lobbyist group in Canada known as the “Institute for Canadian Values”.  They are in the habit of putting up posters like this one in schools around the province of Ontario.  Go look at it.  I’ll wait.

You’re back?  Good.  Are you as pissed off as I am?  Hope so, because if you’re not you’re probably not going to enjoy this next part.  These people are being absolutely ridiculous.  Educating children at an early age to accept the differences in sexual orientation or gender selection is probably the BEST IDEA EVER, and these people want to stop it before it catches on.  Kids are notoriously bad when it comes to accepting differences; there are stories of children committing suicide because of severe bullying almost daily, and one of the main reasons some kids are bullied is because they don’t conform to a given society’s gender stereotypes.  If you’re gay, transexual, mix-gendered or even just a little manly (for girls) or effeminate (for guys), you can expect to be ridiculed on a daily basis.  The reasoning for most of this hatred is because of ignorance and mis-information.  The curriculum for sexual education in public schools is at least making an attempt to inform children of all the possibilities for sexual orientation and gender in the world, and thus are trying to negate this ignorance at a young age, and the ICV wants to STOP THIS?

Listen, the government can’t tell you what to teach your children at home, so if you want your children to be as ignorant as you are, so be it.  But please, try to realize that there are other people in the world too.  You can’t possibly imagine what a gay child/teenager has to go through on a daily basis.  I really wish there was a machine that could allow people to trade places for a week, so that people could understand what it’s really like to be someone who doesn’t conform to the binary system of gender.  Or maybe every ignorant prick who thinks being gay is a choice could have the blessing of a son or daughter who is gay.  But seeing as these things aren’t going to happen anytime soon, why don’t we allow for a little education so that gay and mix-gendered people don’t have to kill themselves to escape the ridicule.

The worst part of this poster campaign is that its under the banner of the Institute for CANADIAN VALUES.  What kind of picture is this painting for the rest of the world when it comes to Canadian values?  I know I’m pretty damn Canadian, and these beliefs certainly don’t represent MY values, but someone on the outside looking in is just going to get the message that all Canadians don’t accept gender ambiguity or atypical sexual orientations.  Great message for our country.  Fucking assholes.

There is more that saddens me.  Recently, I read an article for my Feminist Philosophy class (Don’t laugh, it’s actually pretty good, and eye-opening for a heterosexual male.  Everyone should take it, especially guys.  I mean it.) that talked about people born with dual sets of genitalia and other genetic differences.  The medical community has been terrible in their dealings with these people.  Often, infants with both types of genitals are operated on immediately to “fix” the “problem”, sometimes against the wishes of the parents.  For example, Helena Harmon-Smith’s son was born with both an ovary and testes.  She expressed to the doctor that surgery was unnecessary; she planned to go along with the child’s wishes when he could express himself.  However, the surgeon removed the testes against her wishes.  The kicker is that this happened IN THE 1990s!!!  You know, when we were all supposed to be more enlightened about issues such as this.  What. The. Fuck.  There is a lot of research that has been done that shows that infant surgery in these cases actually does a lot more harm than good, causing extensive scarring and often resulting in multiple surgeries being needed throughout childhood/adolescence and even into adulthood.  But the absolute WORST part of all this is that often medical records of the initial surgery are withheld from the patient, even when expressly requested.  Sometimes children are even told that they are having a normal surgery, such as having their appendix removed, only to find out later that the surgery was anything but normal.

One of the theories this article (by Anne Fausto-Sterling) spoke of was Martine Rothblatt’s “343 shades of gender”.  She suggests that each individual can be categorized into one of 7 different levels of aggression, nurturance, and eroticism (7x7x7=343).  This makes much more sense to me than our society’s binary system.  I would even go further.  There are MILLIONS of different shades of gender, unique to each individual.  I am my own gender, and I call it Drew Johnson.  Simple.  Fuck this binary bullshit!

Insert Title Here [ Agtheism ]

Hey guys/girls/hermaphrodites.  I don’t really have a topic today (hence the title, though I may actually insert one once I finish this), so I’m just gonna talk about my day and see where I end up.  Should be good times.

Alright.  Day started with Ancient Philosophy.  Knee-slappin’ topic eh?  We talked about Socrates and some of his beliefs, including his thesis that human beings can do nothing bad (harm) willingly.  At first this seems counter-intuitive; everyone has willingly done something they believed is wrong before, right?  We’ve all hit that bong one extra time, or had one too many drinks, or punched that asshole in the face (yes, I know he deserved it, but it’s still harming someone).  Socrates would argue something along the lines of “if you committed the action, you obviously didn’t think it was legitimately wrong, for your rationality would prevent you from doing the action if you TRULY believed it was wrong”.  Fun stuff eh?  I’ll end the Socrates talk here.

Anyway, this class was tough for me this morning for a variety of reasons, which can be boiled down to one cause: I am quitting smoking.  By smoking I mean weed and cigarettes.  This is causing me to be kind of fidgety.  It is also causing me to lose lots of sleep and be unable to eat properly, especially in the morning.  Seeing as this class was at 10am (I know I know, not THAT early, but when you can’t fall asleep till 3am and wake up every hour until 7am, at which point its impossible to fall back asleep, it sucks) I was kind of out of it.  So much so that I was actually having dizzy spells.  Good times.  I forced some food into me, finished the class, and moved on to write an essay outline, which was due Wednesday of this week.  Whoops.  I do kind of have an excuse though; quitting this shit isn’t exactly easy, and I’m not really all the motivated to do stuff at the moment.  I don’t think I’ve half-assed an assignment as bad as I did this one, at least this year.  Oh well, it’s only an outline; I’ll get feedback and then make the essay better.

After that I came home for some food and watched a bit of Enemy at the Gates with my roommate.  Good movie that one, but I had to cut it short to hit the gym.  Fuck does the gym suck when you haven’t been going consistently for months.  It’s just pain.  Pain which ends up feeling good later on (you know, like when you look in the mirror), but pain nonetheless.  After that I went to see a guest speaker at the lecture hall: Christopher DiCarlo.  He is a philosopher who recently published a book call “How to Become a Really Good Pain in the Ass”.  This was put on by the Atheist society at Trent (oh shit, I said the A word).  Before we go any further, I should probably tell you that I am, to quote Christopher, an “agtheist”.  This means that I don’t believe that any religion in the world has gotten it right, but I leave room for there to be a creator (like an agnostic), for clearly we haven’t been able to determine BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT how the universe came into existence.

Anyway, he talked about how the world is getting more and more fucked up (I’m paraphrasing a tad) because we are no longer having rational discussions about our beliefs.  It is considered taboo to discuss things like religion, politics, etc. with friends and family.  This is out of fear of offending someone, and trust me when I say that, as an “agtheist”, I offend a lot of people when I talk about my beliefs.  So I often bite my tongue when I’m in a situation where there are people with strong religious beliefs surrounding me.  I kind of feel like my beliefs are constantly under attack by literally EVERYONE who does not share them.  Whether you’re Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or whatever else, you can all agree on one thing: we atheists are fucked.  If only we could see “the truth” they say, we would understand.  Listen, I see the truth all around me.  It’s called the physical world.  And in the physical world there are some rules which govern how things work, known as laws of physics.  How these laws came into being?  I don’t know.  But I see no evidence supporting there being a God who created these.  I also see a LOT of evidence which points to the fact that the world is NOT 6000 years old, that humans evolved from a species of ape, and that being gay is not a choice.  So I take this evidence and use it to my advantage.  That is not to say that I ABSOLUTELY, 100% believe that this is the way things are.  Can you really ever be 100% about anything?  There’s always got to be a little room for doubt.  Thus I love to have conversations with religious people.  I am NOT out to prove you wrong; I’m just trying to make you think a little more about what it is you believe.  For if you don’t question your beliefs, how can you be sure that they are correct?  I am just looking for the answers, like religious individuals, but unlike them, I don’t place my faith all in one place.  I guess the only real faith I have is in myself and my ability to think rationally (most of the time) about the happenings around me.

Wow, my argumentation is terrible this evening.  I’m really glad this is just me rambling and not an essay, as this would be a FAIL.  Whatever, let me know what you think of all this crap.  I could always use more information and more perspective.

Can’t Sleep

A friend of mine reminded me that blogging can be a great stress reliever.  Not that I’m really that stressed right now.  I’m just in the midst of cutting every bad, unhealthy habit out of my life.  No big deal.  48 hours without it all is good right?  I feel like it’s good.  I can’t fucking sleep though.  My body needs THC to properly shut itself down at the end of the day, and without that it appears that I shall be awake all damn night.  No matter, I’m actually somewhat enjoying it to be honest.  I won’t tomorrow at my 9am class, but sometimes (to quote a great old Tom Cruise movie) you just gotta say, “what the fuck”.

People say that you shouldn’t try to quit all of your habits at once.  ”You’re setting yourself up to fail” and all that shit.  But “what the fuck”, it’s all gotta happen sometime.  Mind you I have tried this technique before, and it has Failed (yes, that’s right, with a capital).  But there has been some significant change in my life since we last spoke: I was diagnosed with Bi-polar disorder.  Surprised?  I wasn’t either.  However, this means I now take medication, which seems to help me out of this endless spiral of depression and mania.  I feel a lot more normal (gasp), and also like I have the willpower to succeed this time.  I guess I’ll find out, one way or another.

I was kind of hesitant about revealing my condition to the world, and I may end up regretting it, but tonight a friend of a friend revealed that he was diagnosed with depression, and immediately all I wanted to do was to talk with him.  I wanted to explain as much as I could about the situation he is now in and help him on his way to gaining more control over his life, as I have over these past few months.  So I figure that maybe someone else with a similar condition may someday stumble across my incredibly small corner of the internet and take some comfort in the knowledge that he/she is not alone in his/her battle with a mental disorder.

Don’t really know what else to talk about, so I’m probably just gonna ramble on about my day for the next paragraph.  I feel like today was productive.  I hit the gym (gasp), completed two assignments (one was overdue), went to dinner with a good friend, though the conversation was a little intense at points (you know who you are), and finally had a random 3-hour chat with my roommate.  I like our chats a lot.  We have a solid one about once a week, and there is nothing I would rather be doing during that time.  She’s like the sister I never had.

Hmmmm, anything else to talk about?  Maybe tomorrow.  I’m sure I’ll have a craving at some point that blogging will help me get through.

Canucks Series: 1-0 for the Nucks. Mood = “Oh God…”

Wow.  Two posts in a week.  You know playoffs are on when….

Last night was the first Canucks/Hawks game.  I was pumped.  If I had a Nucks flag, I would’ve been waving it all over the house.  I managed to miss the first 45 seconds of the game (stupid hunger) and a buddy decided to tell me it was 1 zip Hawks.  Fuck you buddy.  Don’t ever do that.  I wouldn’t do that if your Leafs were in the playoffs.  Bitch.  I digress.

The Nucks flew out of the gate.  I have never seen a more one sided period in a playoff series in my entire life.  They were everywhere: laying big hits; moving the puck quickly; peppering Corey Crawford.  A sense of peace came over me.  These are the President’s Trophy winners, and they were sending an early message; “you don’t scare us anymore.”  The building was going crazy as they watched their heroes sit in the Hawks end and blast shot after shot.  Bieksa gets the puck at the point and wires one that’s tipped by Higgins.  One nothing.  Couple of plays later, the Nucks steal the puck and Hansen gets in alone.  Two zip.  Fist pump.  This is going to be easy.

The Hawks coach calls a timeout to calm his team.  It works.  They finally start to get some shots on Luongo, but he’s on form.  With about a minute left in the first, Lu makes a spectacular toe save and once again I go a little nuts, even texting a buddy the ensuing “LUUUUU” call that comes every time he makes a save.  Then I see the replay.  It was a LOT closer than I thought.  Reality sets in.  The game isn’t over.

The second period starts and it looks more even.  The Hawks hit the post about fifteen-hundred times (ok…4, but still).  I wasn’t really pleased with what I was seeing.  They weren’t going away.  Don’t get me wrong, the Nucks still had their share of chances, and they were playing excellent defense, but it was a much more even game.  I don’t like even games when I’m emotionally invested in one of the teams; I like one-sided massacres.  The second ended with the score still 2-0.  I thanked the Hockey Gods.

It was at about this moment that the commentators reminded me that Vancouver was 38-0-3 when leading going into the third period.  I breathed a little easier.  The third came and went without incident.  The Nucks played fantastic defense and closed the game well.  Luongo gets another playoff shut-out.  I thanked the Hockey Gods once again, and sacrificed a bug in their honour.  On to game 2.  I want that massacre.

Canucks Playoff Predictions

It’s official: the NHL playoffs are set, and Wednesday of this week all hell is going to break loose.  I can’t wait.  Except for one problem: exams.  What the fuck school?  Do you people realize we live in Canada?  Playoffs trump every other activity life throws at you.  In fact, the playoffs haven’t even started and already I have skipped studying to watch hockey games.  Tonight for instance, I watched the Stars vs. Wild game.  For those of you who don’t follow every single story of every single hockey team in the NHL, this game was important because if the Stars won, the Blackhawks would be eliminated.  Pretty sad for the defending champs.

I was watching the game and I really couldn’t decide what I wanted to have happen.  If the Stars won, my Canucks (who, by the way, won the league this year) would play them in the first round instead of the Hawks.  This is good for two reasons: the Stars don’t have as much talent as the Hawks, and the Stars didn’t eliminate the Canucks from the playoffs for the past two seasons.  A rational person would be cheering for the Stars.  On paper, the match-up looks a hundred times better.  Yet for some reason, I couldn’t do it.  I found myself fist-pumping when the Wild scored an empty netter to ensure that the Stars were eliminated.  Clearly I am insane.  Except I’m not.  I want my Canucks to live up to the hype and win the cup this year.  I really think they can do it, and that’s why I finally admitted that I WANTED the Hawks first round.  I want my Canucks to have to face their nemesis, and I want them to do it early.  It will be a good test of the team’s character.  To be honest with you, I don’t think it’s going to be much of a series.  Canucks in 5, and that’s being generous in my opinion.

Getting their rivals out of the way will get the team in the right state of mind to make a strong push to the finals.  The second round might be a little tougher than the first round if Anaheim is the lowest seed.  People are going to get sunburnt by the goal lights in that series.  Should be fun to watch at least (and nerve-racking).  I’m predicting the Canucks in 6, but I could see a game 7 being needed to decide that one.

Which brings us to the Western Conference finals, where I’m anticipating meeting Detroit.  Fucking Detroit.  God I hate them.  Every year they are always a contender, and I’m sick of it.  Sometimes I find myself wishing I had gotten on the bandwagon back in the Yzerman days like every Wings fan I know (ok, I only know one….shut up).  That series is going to 7, and I am going to have a mental breakdown at some point during it.  Canucks in 7, but honestly, I think it’s a coin-flip (I fucking hate those).

So then all the Canucks have to do is beat a Bruins or Flyers team that has way more size and strength.  Awesome.  I felt confident at the beginning of this.  Now I don’t.  This blog totally backfired.  Oh well.  Canucks in 7.  Please hockey gods, be nice to me this year.