Trans Activists’ Reactions to Charlie Kirk’s Murder
"a Canadian academic named Florence Ashley became infamous for declaring that Charlie Kirk was a “Nazi,” and for suggesting that Kirk’s murder was a welcome act of “magic.” If the name is familiar, it might be because the same scholar—a biological male who self-describes as a “transfeminine activist, academic, and slut”—was widely ridiculed after instructing pet owners to stop “gendering” their dogs and cats, lest they “normalise bioessentialist conceptions of gender.” Ashley has also exhorted social-media followers to “be gay and do crimes,” and has written about how “glamorous and provocative” it feels to have one’s genitals “bulging through a tight dress.”
Other public comments that have alarmed Ashley’s students include: “I just don’t get why anyone would consider ‘Jesus clearly gave mind-blowing blowjobs’ to be blasphemous”; “I love hummus… It tastes like pussy”; and “If Mother Nature wants to make me cum, she should use her hands.” Under the rubric of “Gender/Fucking,” Ashley (who once wrote a poem to refute the idea that “I get boners from wearing lace”) interprets his autoerotic adventures as profoundly illuminating “sites of knowledge.”
Well, so what? you may say. For years now, academics have been insisting that “autoethnography” (basically, diary entries larded up with academic jargon) comprises a valid means “to identify and interrogate the intersections between the self and social life.” It was only a matter of time before flamboyant autogynephiles took this trend to its logical conclusion by seeking course credit for their late-night porntube sessions.
Except that Ashley isn’t some random postgrad, but rather a well-known professor (and former Supreme Court of Canada clerk) who’s received a long list of academic honours.
According to the University of Alberta Faculty of Law, where Ashley teaches a mandatory first-year criminal-law course, his work “has been cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, the United Nations Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health standards of care, and in position statements, reviews, and guidelines by Australian, New Zealander, Canadian, Polish, German, Swiss, and American professional and state organizations.” Mainstream Canadian news outlets treat Ashley as an authority on the transition of minors (which, naturally, he is eager to encourage). Until a British newspaper published details about Ashley’s bizarre public pronouncements, the World Health Organization even had Ashley on a committee tasked with setting treatment guidelines for gender dysphoria. (Ashley was dumped by the WHO several days after the article appeared, on the face-saving pretext that “a conflict of schedules” had emerged.)...
Ashley wasn’t the only well-known Canadian trans activist who made repellent comments about Kirk’s death. Another was trans “trailblazer” Morgane Oger, a member of the Vancouver Pride Society (and former Pride Parade Grand Marshall) who was recently awarded the Governor General of Canada’s Meritorious Service Medal.
Oger responded to Kirk’s murder by taunting his widow with an obscene expression of mock sympathy: “Nobody deserves to lose their breadwinner. And nobody deserves to be married to someone whose death is ironic karma embodied. There’s a lesson here [for Kirk’s widow]: Never fuck hatemongering bigots.”...
The remarks were scandalous, but not nearly so scandalous as the fact that Oger still gets treated as a respectable member of the rainbow community by journalists, politicians, and fellow activists—despite having spent years striking similarly grotesque postures in the public sphere. For years, he lobbied to cut funding to Vancouver’s rape crisis centre, on the grounds that it wouldn’t admit men. This was part of a larger campaign by local trans activists, one of whom nailed a dead rat to the door of the facility, and wrote “Kill TERFs” (i.e. women who oppose male access to protected female spaces) and “Trans power.” In another creepy stunt, Oger posed geo-tracking information for the yacht of J.K. Rowling (who is widely denounced by trans activists as a “TERF”), a move that came off as stalker behaviour; or possibly even an invitation to violence...
Like Ashley, Oger received scathing criticism for his posts about Kirk. But the tenor of his comments was actually just business as usual: As numerous Quillette writers have highlighted, rhetoric that promotes the abuse, beating, and even murder of ideological enemies has been a common part of the trans-activist idiom for years—even if that rhetoric is usually targeted at (ideologically non-compliant) women instead of murdered men. The underlying conceit here is that trans people will be driven to self-harm, or even suicide, by any comment or gesture deemed to be transphobic. And so the call to “punch a TERF” (or worse) is cast as a morally legitimate mode of self-defence; just as the pornographic co-option of female identity and protected spaces by men with “glamorous” bulges is presented as a psychologically essential act of self-care.
When British philosopher Kathleen Stock first began publishing essays questioning gender ideology, a trans philosopher wrote, “I am totally sure some trans women have in response to the Stock article talked about how precisely they would like to violently kill and dismember Stock. This is just something that happens in conversations about TERFs.” Her fellow Brit, J.K. Rowling, has received more death threats from trans-identified men than she can count. Many other examples of this sadistic streak among activists are documented on the web site Terf Is a Slur...
In 2022, a trans horror writer named Gretchen Felker-Martin wrote a novel in which trans characters fantasise about Rowling being burned alive. (In real life, Felker-Martin says, she actually wants to slit Rowling’s throat.) The same writer has also fantasised about slaughtering journalists such as Helen Joyce and Jesse Singal (“If they all had one throat, man”) because they ask “questions” regarding gender-affirming dogmas.
Surprise, surprise—last week, the same author had an equally unhinged reaction to Kirk’s death, posting, “Thoughts and prayers you Nazi b-tch… Hope the bullet’s okay after touching Charlie.”
Examples abound. Even if I confine my focus to Canada, it’s hard to properly catalogue all of the trans-identified men who’ve risen to prominence within the trans activist sphere while heaping misogynistic abuse on women. This includes “Veronica Ivy” (formerly “Rachel McKinnon”), a hulking male academic who’s made a career of crashing women’s sporting events. He’s told women to go “die in a grease fire,” and “eat a buffet of rotten shit-covered dicks” (“I won’t cry if you choke on one, too”). When one of those women, Magdalen Berns, lay dying of brain cancer (at age 36), McKinnon said that it made him “happy.” Three months after Berns’s death, The New York Times gave him space to brag about winning a (woman’s) cycling race...
Then there’s Fae Johnstone—another biologically male trans activist, this one based in Ottawa, whose expressed view on women who don’t want him in their locker rooms is: “literally just shut them down… I actually do want a political environment in which TERFs are so vilified they don’t dare speak their views publicly, let alone act on them. Shut. Them. Down.”
Just in case women didn’t get the message, Johnstone has taken to wearing a shirt decorated with a knife and the slogan “protect trans kids” (which he has integrated into his own casual take on the “glamorous and provocative” ensembles favoured by Ashley)...
I need scarcely note that none of this ghoulish behaviour has prevented Johnstone from receiving federal subsidies for his activist group; nor from being named Grand Marshal of Ottawa’s 2023 Pride Parade; nor from continuing to get bylines and interview requests from media outlets seeking sound bites about the evils of transphobia. But of course, the whole arc of Johnstone’s career suggests the problem of transphobia isn’t quite so acute as we’ve been taught to believe: Were it not for his gender dysphoria, Johnstone would (very properly) be regarded as just another deeply disturbed male misogynist screaming at (actual) women on the internet.
I see no indication that any of these people are representative of transgender people in general. But it should be concerning that the political self-selection mechanisms within trans subcultures consistently serve to elevate the profiles of men who (1) heap abuse on women; (2) regard their own claims to womanhood as matters of overarching sexual and political urgency; and (3) employ rhetoric that encourages coercive, violent, and even deadly suppression of ideological opponents.
An archetype, recently in the news for all the wrong reasons, is Chelsea Wolfe, a male cyclist who competes in women’s events. He recently told a female protester to “go suck a sawn-off shotgun.” Not surprisingly, Wolfe was also very pleased to hear that Charlie Kirk was assassinated, triumphantly declaring “We did it” alongside a story about the horrific murder, and flashing a thumbs-up sign...
Thanks to their attention-seeking behaviour and (stereotypically “toxic”) male aggression, their extremist rhetoric has suffused the whole movement. Attendees at trans events in Toronto, for instance, now casually don “Transphobe Extermination” shirts, festooned with a noose. To trans people who’ve come to imagine that this sort of apocalyptic language is a normal part of everyday political discourse, it must come as a great shock when ordinary people react with revulsion at their equally abhorrent celebrations of Charlie Kirk’s death...
Things might be changing, though. DC Comics cancelled its comic-book contract with Felker-Martin following her celebration of Kirk’s death. And Ashley’s comments about Kirk were deemed so over-the-top that the University of Alberta put him on leave—so as “to allow a thorough review while supporting community safety.” While I have no doubt that Ashley will soon be back at work (regaling everyone with fascinating details of his “gender/fucking” adventures during his time off), the mere fact that his bosses felt compelled to (effectively) censure him is significant.
This is a Canadian campus, remember—and therefore one of the most dogmatically trans-positive places on the planet. Just a few months back, the University of Alberta named Ashley one of its “spotlight” academic stars. Maybe school officials should have thought harder about what sordid details that “spotlight” would pick up."
