Hon. Paula Simons: When cold and calculating Republican strategists began using anti-trans rhetoric as a wedge issue in American politics, whipping up imaginary fears about trans women lurking in bathrooms, or fears about library books turning straight kids gender-queer, I rejoiced that we lived in Canada, where, I naively believed, such craven and cowardly politics would never take hold.

When I looked to Britain and saw trans-exclusionary feminists, including the once-beloved children’s writer J. K. Rowling, of all people, attacking trans rights, I felt grateful to live in Canada — a country of inclusion and compromise, where gender identity and expression are protected by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

But, as I look out now upon Canadian streets, where protesters are tearing down and stomping on rainbow flags, when I look at Canadian social media, where people are equating LGBQT activists to Nazis, my heart sinks.

The furor being whipped up around this question is shocking and scary. The angry, hateful protests in our streets are bad enough. The paranoid and despicable actions of certain provincial premiers who are willing to run roughshod over Charter and privacy rights, the better to posture as “family values warriors,” are, in their way, even more frightening.

Can you imagine the anger and disgust that the late Peter Lougheed would feel to learn that his notwithstanding clause is being used — not to protect provincial rights, but as a pre-emptive threat to bully and intimidate literal schoolchildren?

In Canada, no school board is taking away parental rights. No caring teacher, or librarian or school counsellor is forcing, or luring or seducing Canadian children into being trans. Gangs of queer activists are not roaming the country lopping off teenagers’ breasts or genitalia.

In Canada, with its public, not-for-profit health care system, no one is making money by tricking kids and parents into getting hormone therapy or top surgery. Canada’s physicians tend to be conservative — in the best and most honourable sense of the word — and in this country, no families with underage children are being rushed or pushed into gender-affirming care. No dramatic medical steps are taken without lots of psychiatric and medical assessments and lots of therapy and conversations.

The “save the children” rhetoric being weaponized so recklessly by anti-trans protesters and their allies, on both the left and the right, is the rhetoric of the moral panic — of the witch hunt. It’s the same language that was everywhere in the public discourse during the “satanic panic” child abuse scare in the 1980s.

It’s the same language used at Salem, or when medieval peasants worried that their children were going to be stolen by the Roma or the “fair folk.” And it’s language that anyone of Jewish descent should recognize with a shudder — because it is the precise vocabulary of the anti-semitic blood libel, the thousand-year-old canard that Jews kidnap Gentile children to use their blood in religious rituals. In no week more than this week should that shock and horrify us.

No wonder the Anti-Defamation League in the United States has documented evidence of anti-trans hate campaigns that explicitly link the trans movement as part of a giant Jewish conspiracy. Telling people that their children are in danger, that some menacing, mysterious group of outsiders wants to steal or mutilate, or somehow convert their kids — my friends, that is propaganda with a pedigree: a dark and bloody pedigree. For thousands of years, across cultures and continents, it has been the go-to tactic to incite a mob.

And it works, because it plays on every parent’s darkest terrors. Of course we love our children. Of course we want to protect them. Of course we want to ensure that they share our values, that they conform to our hopes and dreams for them.

But we cannot let hatemongers turn our love for our children, and our fears for their happiness, into a political weapon to divide our country. And we cannot let partisan operatives, who don’t even truly care about the issue but who see it as a handy political tool, exploit vulnerable children and their families as a way to win votes.

I have not always been comfortable with the ambivalences of this issue. I owe a lot to my daughter’s friends and to my friends’ children who identify as non-binary, gender queer, gender fluid, two-spirited and trans. I’ve come on a journey with them, watching them fight for their rights, their identities and their mental health. And I’ve watched their parents, my friends, wrestle with their own confusion, doubt and discomfort.

The gender binary is so engrained in our popular culture. It’s the first thing we ask about any baby: Is it a boy or a girl? The idea that someone could be either, or neither, or both confounds us because most of us were brought up in a binary world. I’ve watched and seen some kids playing with identity, experimenting with their pronouns, names and presentation, exploring the limits of gender norms and then deciding that they’re not trans or gender queer at all.

You know what? That’s okay, too. Adolescence should be a time to experiment, push limits and ask hard questions about who you are.

For some people, this is probably just a phase, or a fad, or a way to challenge their parents. And you know what? That’s also perfectly fine. However, for many, gender transition has been a literal life saver — something that has given them peace in their own bodies, has made them know themselves for who they truly are and saved them from depression, despair and self-harm. Who are we to begrudge individuals that right to individual choice?

Now, I am a fairly ordinary and boring middle-aged “cishet” woman with she/her pronouns. Perhaps I’m not exactly conventionally attractive and perhaps, because I dare to do conventionally masculine things like, say, give speeches, write newspaper stories, have opinions of my own, or — gasp — be a senator, I have been bombarded for years and years with transphobic hate on social media and in my email inbox, a truly never-ending stream of people who think it clever social commentary to compare me to a drag queen or a trans woman. It is hateful. It is hurtful. It never stops. And I am, as I said, a “cishet” senator, with all the privilege and social protection in the world. I can scarcely imagine how much more frightening and hurtful such attacks are if you are queer or trans, and when they come not from mean strangers on the internet but from real people in your real life, especially if those people are members of your own family.

When we talk about not “outing” gender-queer teens by revealing their pronouns to their parents, that’s what we’re talking about here. We’re not just protecting kids who aren’t quite ready to talk to their families, who are sorting through their own confusion and trying on different identities. We’re protecting youth who might legitimately fear physical abuse or even homelessness.

My friends, these are not easy questions. They are complicated and emotional, and they speak to the core of human identity: what it means to be human; what it means to be a parent; what it means to be a family.

In a multicultural, pluralist country, where freedom of religion is also a protected Charter right, we need to have careful, thoughtful, heartfelt conversations around these issues. That is precisely why partisan tactics, designed to foment fears and anxieties around trans identity and parental rights, particularly targeted at immigrant and religious communities, are so corrosive and so dangerous.

We won’t be able to negotiate these difficult moral and ethical questions if we’re caught up in a moral panic, blinded by our fears or manipulated by those who want to play us off against each other to serve their own dank ambitions.

Thank you. Hiy hiy.