CanadaPublic support for trans and gender-diverse people is declining, and that decline is being driven by political and media discourse.
Yes, agree. It's a wedge issue because of how many complicated emotions it stirs up for certain groups. There is a ideological moral conflict attached to it, and certain powers understand that aggrevating this issue will help them move toward their goals. So it gets used as a distraction and is highly publicized.
The truth is, this is an issue that should not really be so significant of a problem as it is. We should not concern ourselves with how somoene else chooses to be and live in their life if it causes us no quantifiable harm. Some people believe the fear or disgust they feel is a harm and they might rationalize their beliefs about the work force or about kids safety in an effort to substantiate their feelings, but they are wrong.
I think about some of the narrative around the Tumbler Ridge shooter, Jessie Van Rootselaar, that vehemently blames transgenderism for the atrocity. But the real story is, there was a neglected and ostracized kid that came from a broken home and was surround by unhealthy role models and no supports. He also had access to guns and a blind eye was turned to many of the warning signs that predicated the tragedy. The trans thing is such a footnote in the overall picture yet it becomes a common headline for certain readers.
One of the questions:
"1. People should be able to express their gender however they choose."
Is pretty open ended. That can mean something different to many people.
Yes, that is precisely the point
If the question means different things to different people, it's a bad survey question.
According to whom?
Not if the thing under discussion fundamentally means many different things to many different people, again that is the entire point.
There are a few really loud people. Most of us don't care
It's not the only issue moving right.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/fewer-canadians-believe-humans-are-causing-climate-change-poll-finds--even-as-ontario-wildfires-burn/article_a376e459-59e7-4f53-8548-23aa3782830b.html
I really wish this three sentence article at least linked to the study.....
https://angusreid.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/2026.07.17_Wildfires_Climate.pdf
I think part of the issue is there's a lot of misinformation. Someone told me today that they heard about someone claiming their baby was transgender. I highly highly doubt that happened. Transgender advocates believe people should say for themselves what gender they identify with, no sane person would presume to speak for a baby. I could see someone maybe trying to avoid thinking of their baby as one gender or the other until they're old enough to self-identify. But there are a lot of weird stories out there about transgender people acting like lunatics and, although most of them probably aren't true, people believe these stories and use them as reasons to be transphobic. And there's the persistent lie that transgender people are lopping penises off of six-year-olds and other things like that.
Ok, so can we put an end to labelling people as 'eggs' without their input?
Age is the only difference between the two. And yet, one seems to get a free pass in the community.
It’s the satanic panic all over again, once again being pushed by Christian extremists.
Well look how that ended for them D&D is huge, BG3 and fantasy adjacent media is beloved, paganism and the like are growing, and gender roles are melting.
the Internet is flourishing with femboys and fursonas
once the moral panic around trans people fade (hopefully I'll be alive to see it), what will be left behind in peace will hopefully be a bunch of institutions that were able to thrive on that pride despite all the pushback
Don’t forget the heavy metal, which was also a target and now more popular than ever
But yeah fuck those assholes. Real patriots believe all their countryfolk have the right to live as they choose.
Personally I think treating babies as babies is the sane option, it’s bizarre to me we dress literal babies in extremely gender identifying ways… they’re a baby! Me choosing greens and yellows, purples and grays isn’t saying my baby is trans it’s saying my baby is a baby and if you want to know more about them you should talk to me about them… it’s really not complicated.
The hyper fixation on gender for babies and kids is bonkers
The Alberta racists are being emboldened by Marlaina/Trump.
Now explain every other province.
E: It was rhetorical; this isn't a province-by-province kind of problem, nor it it an Alberta issue.
Jordan Peterson, Pat King, Tamara Lich, Timbit Trump etc etc etc.
20% of any population is not very smart and susceptible to emotional manipulation, schools don’t teach critical thinking very well, and 10% of a population is dark triad (‘evil’) or adjacent.
It should be pointed out that the last provincial election in BC came down to just a handful of voters in a couple of ridings. A few butterfly wingflaps and we could have had that mouth-breather Rustad as premier.
The rabid right feeds off of fear. Stop that shit when you see it.
Conservatives and American/Rowling propaganda
In BC it's the same shit honestly. The official opposition party just chose an extremely racist and transphobic leader. It's just people who are emboldened by the same shit happening down south and falling for disinformation/scapegoatism.
By blaming this all on Alberta you're making the situation worse rather than better. For one, many Albertans who would otherwise be your allies are now offended. For two, it gives a pass to all the other hateful people throughout the rest of Canada.
For one, many Albertans who would otherwise be your allies are now offended.
Meh, I kind of agree that the parent comment is needlessly antagonistic but I doubt that this would be the thing that tips someone over, someone this easily swayed would have found other reason to not be an ally already.
So agree on "making the situation worse rather than better" because it degrades the discussion, but it's not like being offended by this will meaningfully change someone's view on the matter.
Not only is he not blaming everything on Alberta... The only albertans oblivious enough to be offended by what he's saying are the bigots we're talking about.
The classic "if you're offended then you must deserve to be offended." Kind of ironic in the context of an article about bigotry.
The article is discussing a Canada-wide problem and he jumped straight to "it's about Alberta." The article actually calls out Saskatchewan as having the steepest decline in acceptance of gender diversity.
Sorry are you just unaware of the separatist movement galvanizing maple maga across the country? Or do you just lack reading comprehension?
Stop misunderstanding people. Or stop putting words in their mouth. Pick one and do it.
I can literally look out my window right this moment and see the yard sign I've got up opposing separatism. I've canvassed for anti-separatist movements, I phone banked for the NDP in the most recent provincial election, I went door to door in support of them. I live in one of the ridings that sent an NDP member to parliament, I voted for them too.
But yeah, clearly I'm the bigot here. It annoys me that Alberta is considered a big blob of traitors and racists and therefore I must be a racist myself.
Do you not see how this kind of attitude is harmful?
You're right. Sad that you're getting downvotes.
IMO the upvote/downvote system is the Fediverse's biggest mistake, and eliminating it its biggest missed opportunity. There simply isn't enough of a userbase for it to be meaningful, most threads end up with just a few dozen comments so sorting them by vote ratio doesn't really accomplish much. Meanwhile it helps drive communities into ever tighter social bubbles by giving such an easy mechanism to express "go away" vibes to anyone with a view that isn't perfectly in line with the existing consensus.
I agree with that too.
I've seen upvote-only communities work elsewhere. I'd be happy to see the downvote button dropped.
And you can really feel it.
"Do you support gender diversity?" "Well, our government says if I don't, it's potentially a hate crime/hate speech -- sorta like calling out the genocide in Israel gets termed as such, or questioning the narrative around first nations -- so, uh, yes, I support it, sure whatever, so long as there's no financial commitment involved or followup questions. Let me get back to my life".
As the commenter below demonstrated, there is a growing number of Canadians falling for misinformation.
Bill C-9 was about stopping hateful people from using religion to justify the crimes they had already committed. But the propogandists told them it classified the bible as hate speech.
Clearly they are misappropriating Pro-Palestine censorship in the UK to validate their entitlement to baselessly espouse residential denialism.
Most of my community is Christian/conservative and while I see more people espousing anti-trans views, it's all chronically online people who I know personally stopped forming their own opinions in 2016.
The context behind poll numbers like this is that MAGA is scraping the bottom the barrel. Same total support, but more MAGAs signing up to answer surveys.
If it helps, I had previously tagged that poster as "Islamophobic cunt" so they've been on the wrong side of history.
But the propogandists told them it classified the bible as hate speech.
The optimists you mean.
This probably won't be popular but it is true nonetheless.
What has happened is that people, on the both the right and the left, bring up legitimate concerns with regards to gender diversity issues. They're concerned that we might be going overboard with preferential hiring, they have concerns about men and women's showers and the like, and while there are often answers and discussions to be had around these issues even if you don't agree with them they are legitimate
But instead of treating them like legitimate issues and engaging with people that have these concerns unfortunately the transgender advocate community and many on the left have lashed out and basically called anybody who has questions about any of this transphobic scum who need to be locked up and should be disposed of and silence and any other nasty names they can think of.
This tends to polarize these positions and people start feeling attacked and they tend to move into the anti-transgender camp. A child is banned from a school just for saying he believes there's two genders 100 parents out there start thinking the things have gone too far and if they see a chance they'll oppose this
Then you wind up with two sides. And there's never any discussion between two sides, it's just us versus them and them versus us.
And once that takes hold it's really hard to beat. Unfortunately transgender rights issues got handled very poorly in the last six or seven years and now there's growing opposition that's not being driven by rational concerns but rather tribalism
Have you had actual experience of this or is it something you read about?
It's true that that is your opinion. It reflects on you and your subjective experiences, perceptions, and interpretations; not on reality. Introducing an opinion as "it's true" can come across pretty closed-minded.
It’s true.
Extremists always demand things go their way or they threaten harm of one kind or another. The left has tyrannical extremists who do not compromise or converse and the left adamantly refuses to acknowledge they exist nevermind disavow them, possibly partly due to that harm being threatened upon them if they do. The right extremists are called out and vilified constantly and right refuses to disavow them too.
Power is power, however it is formed, if it is used to compel compliance, it is tyranny. Extremists being accepted in both sides are pulling in opposite directions and tearing the center. The center needs to form a cohesive leadership and pull support from both sides to starve these extremists of the audience they need to exist. Disavow them and kick them out. If the left can't even admit their extremists exist, the right has no reason to disavow their crazies.
We have to. Everybody fucked off from all the major platforms and this issue went from something that was defendable to not
TBF the owners of said major platforms are siding with the bigots and selectively enforcing their own TOS with extreme prejudice.
They side with them only because thats who is in charge now. They still answer to money. The algorithms are not just "feed people racist content" it is still controlled by engagent and eyeballs. Yet the left convinced each other to removed ourselves from that equation and then are stunned the algorithms now favor right wing content.
I don't fucking understand how people on the left say "they have billions" and then don't realize that the billions are going to convince the left to leave platforms so they don't need to spend as much to spread their ideas.
Because said platforms are increasingly hateful and harmful
So you say fuck it and abandon everybody else? So you give the hate and harm a better chance to grow and propagated and lie and cheat without resistance?
I'm fine if you're not a leftist and you don't care about MAGA or politics and you just use the internet to look at memes about beans and moths. But if you care about the country, the current state of things, if you hate authoritarians and racists and that women cannot get abortions and you left these platforms then I struggle to form the words to describe how much i despise you. Because MAGA are what they are. Filled with hate and want to watch the world burn. But I expect more from people on the left and to see anyone say this means you know how important it is to stop them and you choose to fuck off.
It's like hearing someone who complains about the state of things only to find out they don't vote.
I'm still personally on socials unfortunately because it's the only way to get any reach as an artist, but I'm merely explaining why so many vulnerable people hop off of it. That said, your comment is straight up victim blaming.
The other half of the equation is that the platforms are actively deplatforming leftists. You can't even bring up genocide without risking a shadowban or just straight up losing your account.
Hell, a personal example, I got permabanned from Reddit a few years ago for saying that riot police should quit their jobs in shame following Roe v Wade. I still stand by that statement fwiw
Idk, I see these kinds of headlines and I can't help but think about how skewed/messed up government studies/statscan data seems to be. Like there was a study released this year about how women working as TFW's in the interior/north of BC are mistreated. CBC, I think, went up to talk to people in the region, and they were all like "Women? Everyone, what's this women only thing? We're all facing potentially precarious work conditions / abuse from our bosses". So the data, as presented by our ideologically motivated/biased government, does not reflect the reality on the ground.
I'd argue that acceptance of the rather far-left gender-diversity crowds multitude of genders was always generally low, and largely based on opinions of convenience for people asked. "Do you support gender diversity?" "Well, our government says if I don't, it's potentially a hate crime/hate speech -- sorta like calling out the genocide in Israel gets termed as such, or questioning the narrative around first nations -- so, uh, yes, I support it, sure whatever, so long as there's no financial commitment involved or followup questions. Let me get back to my life".
Most older folks are likely 'fine' with male/female, gay/lesbian/bi. The two survey questions the article highlights, are specifically if you'd support a family member who came out as trans, and whether people should be free to express their gender however they want. Back in the earlier survey, they didn't ask the same trans question, so the inferred decrease in support there is totally misleading. As for people expressing themselves, back before the gender folks got pushing and it was mainly viewed as 'just' male/female gay/lesbian/bi, you hadn't had cases like that shop teacher in Ontario dressing up as a garish trans-woman (I believe it was, months and months later, out'd as a fraud he was committing for some benefits etc). You also didn't have as aggressive a push to educate young children about the fringe cases of sexuality / expose them to that stuff with clearly political/ideological intentions, I mean, no real surprise in my book that people are less inclined to say "Yeah, sure, express away!" and are leaning more towards there being limits when it comes to social spaces.
Idk, I see these kinds of headlines and I can’t help but think about how skewed/messed up government studies/statscan data seems to be. Like there was a study released this year about how women working as TFW’s in the interior/north of BC are mistreated. CBC, I think, went up to talk to people in the region, and they were all like “Women? Everyone, what’s this women only thing? We’re all facing potentially precarious work conditions / abuse from our bosses”. So the data, as presented by our ideologically motivated/biased government, does not reflect the reality on the ground.
I mean, both can be true. Reminds me of an "All lives matter" type argument.
I’d argue that acceptance of the rather far-left gender-diversity crowds multitude of genders was always generally low, and largely based on opinions of convenience for people asked. “Do you support gender diversity?” “Well, our government says if I don’t, it’s potentially a hate crime/hate speech – sorta like calling out the genocide in Israel gets termed as such, or questioning the narrative around first nations – so, uh, yes, I support it, sure whatever, so long as there’s no financial commitment involved or followup questions. Let me get back to my life”.
This is a weird take. Many polls are anonymous and/or online, so why would people not answer truthfully? The linked article also gives some reasoning for why it's decreased:
Between 2023 and 2025, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan and Alberta passed legislation restricting the rights of trans and gender-diverse individuals to access a safe school environment. Alberta also implemented restrictions to gender-affirming healthcare for youth and participation in sport for trans women and girls.
During this timeframe, anti-trans sentiment and discourse became louder and more visible. This includes discourse by political leaders as well as online dehumanization and mis- and disinformation.
You also didn’t have as aggressive a push to educate young children about the fringe cases of sexuality / expose them to that stuff with clearly political/ideological intentions
No, this simply isn't true. Most schools just teach acceptance, nothing to do with politics or ideologies.
I mean, both can be true. Reminds me of an “All lives matter” type argument.
Yes, both can be true. However, the government studies / funding / attention is focused on genderised issues and promoting certain narratives -- ex. "We need to fund programs for women because they're in precarious work situations up north". Such programs shift the focus from "workers in precarious positions need help" to virtue signaling nothingness. It inflates the impression that there's a huge gap in how the two genders are treated, even though talking to people 'on the ground', they readily/openly say it impacts everyone, and everyone needs assistance, not just one gender. One of the likely reasons 'men' are veering hard to the right, is that the left is viewed as following this genderised approach, funding initiatives / programs based on gender or racial lenses, none of which tend to benefit 'men'. And our acceptance of our government being so heavily entrenched along gender/racial lines, is so complete that even when a study is shown to be blatantly biased towards highlighting just women's issues, ignoring the larger issue, the default response from folks is "both can be true", an inference towards anyone noting the discrepancy being a bigot, and a shrug.
Many polls are anonymous and/or online
True, but this one was online and by phone with interviewer, as per the article. Still, the broader point is that people will answer survey questions based on what they "think" the right answer "should" be, based on things like gov / social media site influences, rather than what they actually think/how they actually would act. If you have no "skin in the game", certain questions don't matter to you, so you'll provide whatever answer is the least likely to get you in trouble at the time. In prior years, saying anything negative about certain topics would get you reprimanded. Not so much these days, in some areas.
Noting Alberta's gov actions in the article, I wouldn't say is/was a 'cause' of the sentiment changing, though it'd prolly be correlated. You could just as reasonably say that the Schools in BC where they've cancelled things like track competitions, eliminated boys/girls races, as a response to the inability to square the gender circle, could also be prompting parents/kids to say "enoughs enough already, we can't change/turf every aspect of social life to accommodate a tiny minority, there need to be limits".
No, this simply isn’t true. Most schools just teach acceptance, nothing to do with politics or ideologies.
Seems fitting to point this out, seeing as we're Canadian and it's a Canadian heritage moment: the medium is the message. Having things like drag story time's become widely discussed news items, you could argue that the news media was complicit in fanning the flames -- but the act of specifically having people from marginalised, adult life-styles with sexual connotations, interact with kids in an effort to normalize those sorts of lifestyles is a message that's not lost on more conservative folks.
And our acceptance of our government being so heavily entrenched along gender/racial lines, is so complete that even when a study is shown to be blatantly biased towards highlighting just women’s issues, ignoring the larger issue, the default response from folks is “both can be true”, an inference towards anyone noting the discrepancy being a bigot, and a shrug.
I mean, the reason why there is more focus on women's issues, and racialized issues, etc, is that women have been under-represented in the past, so that's why there's more of a focus on them. That's not to say that men don't have issue either, but groups who have been under-represented are now getting their representation, etc. Does that mean men don't have issues too? No, of course not.
True, but this one was online and by phone with interviewer, as per the article. Still, the broader point is that people will answer survey questions based on what they “think” the right answer “should” be, based on things like gov / social media site influences, rather than what they actually think/how they actually would act. If you have no “skin in the game”, certain questions don’t matter to you, so you’ll provide whatever answer is the least likely to get you in trouble at the time. In prior years, saying anything negative about certain topics would get you reprimanded. Not so much these days, in some areas.
So you are saying, with most online and phone interviews, that the results will essentially be wrong because most people will just answer with that they believe is the "right" answer, rather than what they actually think?
Having things like drag story time’s become widely discussed news items, you could argue that the news media was complicit in fanning the flames
The only reason those events were in the news (at least to my knowledge), was that people were protesting them.
but the act of specifically having people from marginalised, adult life-styles with sexual connotations, interact with kids in an effort to normalize those sorts of lifestyles is a message that’s not lost on more conservative folks.
Again, as far as I know, those events didn't happen at schools, and if they did, they were optional. Most that I am aware of happened in public libraries, etc, and if you didn't want your kids to go, you didn't take them.
adult life-styles with sexual connotations
There's sexual connotations with drag?
