The Canadian Gender-Rights Movement Enters Its Hentai Phase
An Ontario public-school teacher shows where unmitigated ‘self-identification’ leads
By now, many readers will have seen pictures of a certain Manufacturing Technology instructor at Trafalgar High School in Oakville, Ontario, a well-to-do town that lies near the western edge of the Toronto metropolitan area.
The teacher, a biological man who now claims to be a woman named Kayla Lemieux, is seen instructing students in the use of carpentry tools, all the while wearing absurdly oversized fake breasts—the sort of ridiculous costume that our great-grandparents once might have seen in R-rated vaudeville shows, but which now are primarily associated with computer-generated pornography (in particular, what the Japanese call Bakunyū (爆乳)—literally, “exploding milk/breasts”). I am told that Lemieux has been dressing in this fashion for a while. But only recently have students within the school gone public with this fact.
This is one of those stories that have spread like wildfire on social media and in niche publications such as Reduxx (which broke the story), but which the mainstream media are terrified to touch for fear of being labelled transphobic. To my knowledge, the only legacy media outlet that has run anything on the story is the Toronto Sun, a conservative tabloid. And even in that case, the editors hedged their bets with a headline—“School board prepares for backlash over trans high school teacher”—that suggests the real story is all the noisy transphobes who are up in arms.
Actually, I don’t know a single reasonable person who has a problem with school boards employing a “trans high school teacher” (to quote the headline) per se. Gender dysphoria is a real condition that employers are required by law to accommodate. And to the extent that the word “transphobia” retains any real meaning (after years of activists abusing it in their defamation campaigns against the likes of J.K. Rowling and Dave Chappelle), I would say it fairly applies to anyone who thinks that a trans person shouldn’t be allowed to work as an educator. Around the world, there are untold thousands of transgender teachers who exhibit the same standards of care and professionalism as their non-trans peers. And I’d guess that many of these professionals are horrified to see Lemieux disgrace the gender-rights cause in this way.
I say “disgrace” because the whole premise of the trans-women-are-women mantra is that there is never any real difference between trans and non-trans women, except unimportant details arising from physiology. But Lemieux is a walking, talking refutation of that conceit.
Men and women alike wear all sorts of things in their private lives, as a means toward erotic fulfillment and otherwise. It’s no one’s business but their own. But when it comes to the public professional sphere, the rules are, of course, very different. The sexualized clown outfit Lemieux is wearing isn’t something any actual (psychologically healthy) woman would wear to an ordinary workplace—let alone when working with children.
Indeed, the only person who could imagine that wearing an outfit like this makes you resemble a real woman is, of course, a man. Specifically, a man whose thinking is so addled by narcissism and sexual fetish (autogynephilia or otherwise) as to imagine that others—including children—should be required to stand around and pretend that this is acceptable workplace demeanour.
It’s important to emphasize that there is absolutely no allegation whatsoever that Lemieux is any kind of criminal, or that Lemieux has engaged in inappropriate behaviour with students (aside from subjecting them daily to the unsettling spectacle of presenting as a grotesquely fetishized caricature of a woman). This is important to mention, because the conservative backlash to this kind of thing often features casual usage of terms such as “grooming” and “predator”—terms that should be reserved for people who actually prey upon, or seek to prey upon, children.
As anyone who’s followed this issue might have expected, school-board chair Margo Shuttleworth said that what’s really at issue here are Lemieux’ “gender rights.” And in an email to parents, Oakville Trafalgar High School stood by Lemieux, on the basis that
we strive to promote a positive learning environment in schools consistent with the values of the [Halton District School Board] and to ensure a safe and inclusive environment for all students, staff and the community, regardless of race, age, ability, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, cultural observance, socioeconomic circumstances, or body type/size.
In the bureaucratically sanctioned world of school-board press releases and Trudeauvian gender jingoism, this is the by-the-book line: Nothing to see here, folks—just a perfectly normal and very real woman with fake boobs from out of a CGI porn site, acting in that perfectly normal and healthy way that very real women do. Indeed, from reading the school’s gender duckspeak, one might imagine that Hentai-Boobed Individuals (HBI) were just another beleaguered shade of the LGBTIQA-HBI+ community.
But of course, in the real world—a place that doesn’t answer to hashtags, acronyms, press releases, and other such artifices—not one human being actually looks at these photos and authentically reacts in the officially prescribed way. And that includes Shuttleworth herself. This is why so many people, myself included, are interested in the case. Not because (as noted above) we think the students are in any danger, but because it shows up the excesses of the wider, ideologically constructed gender farce in which we’re all now required to participate.
It’s hard not to feel a certain degree of pity for both Lemieux and Shuttleworth. Putting the issue of gender to one side, the former obviously has some serious psychological issues going on. The latter, on the other hand, inhabits a stultifying professional subculture that has become so deeply vested in the idea of unmitigated “self-identification” that she sees herself as powerless to identify any costume, pretense, performance, fetish, or charade as beyond the pale, and instead feels required to mumble gibberish about “body type/size.”
Both of these people are actors—each performing tragicomic acts that no one finds convincing. And as with a cross-dressing burlesque that keeps going on long after the initial premise wears thin, the audience just wants them to get off the stage.
I disagree that the students are not technically being harmed. I don’t want to be hysterical or to overstate my concern, but the students boundaries around what is acceptable are eroded by a school board that tells them “if you are uncomfortable with this, you are the one who has a problem.” Some of the children in the shop class may laugh, others may feel embarrassed, others may try to ignore it. But they undoubtedly all have the same gut reaction. That the sexualized over the top display put on by their teacher is offensive. The teacher is wearing fetish gear that very likely was purchased form a sex shop. The students surely know, instinctively, that it is not ok for their teacher to be dressed like that. But the school board, the people who are supposed to be looking out for them, are telling the students - “your gut feeling is wrong, your instincts are wrong”
I can’t help but think it is very sinister to tell teenagers they should not trust their instincts about their sexual boundaries.
A teacher's sexual fetish does not belong in the classroom and while we can roll our eyes and pretend nobody's getting hurt, there is a level of profound disrespect to the female form (and, therefore, girls and women) that is being broadcast at this school in the form of pretending to care about avoiding body shaming and being inclusive. It's exclusive of common sense and certainly does not consider the students nor female staff.